Ask a VP what they’d miss the most about their job and most will say the same thing: the work. Not the strategy decks or the headcount planning. The actual work. The architecture decisions. The hard problems. The thing that made them good enough to get promoted in the first place.
It's one of management's quiet ironies. The people who rise to lead technical or commercial teams usually do so because they're exceptional at the craft. Then the job slowly replaces the craft with coordination — and the organisation loses the thing it most wanted to keep.
"A lot of your time as a manager is spent as a post box," says Huw Slater, founder of readywhen, which captures to-dos from meetings, messages and comments, then brings the work back done and ready for approval. "You get a query from an employee and you've got to go to another team to find out the answer. At least a third of the tasks a manager does can be done by AI. If anyone's job changes by a third, the whole job changes."
What the job actually requires
The best VPs operate across three distinct modes. They stay close enough to the craft to make good decisions and earn the respect of their teams. They coach and develop the people around them. They drive execution and make sure what gets decided actually gets done.
Most are only doing one of those well. Not because they're not capable. Because the other two thirds of their week is gone before they get to it.
What's changing is how much time managers actually have to use them.
Commitments made in meetings go untracked. Ownership gets assumed rather than assigned. Things that should have closed resurface weeks later, slightly reworded, in the next review. The coordination layer expands to fill whatever time is available — and the craft, the coaching, the execution all get squeezed.
"It's a case of learning to let go of that coordination layer, which can sometimes feel like a comfort blanket," says Slater. "Managers should spend most of their time doing what they're uniquely good at."
Leah Sutton, chief portfolio talent officer at Balderton Capital, sees the same pattern across the companies she works with. "The skills that matter in management haven't changed — curiosity, communication, the ability to build trust," she says. "What's changing is how much time managers actually have to use them."
The new failure mode
There's a wrong way to do this, and it shows up early.
That's going to create environments where employees are much more likely to burn out and be less productive over time.
"My fear would be if work becomes just sitting at your computer going back and forth between agents," says Lenke Taylor, chief people officer at Personio. "That's going to create environments where employees are much more likely to burn out and be less productive over time."
The companies that get this right treat the freed-up time as a discipline, not a side effect. The VPs who get back to the architecture decisions that determine what the company can ship or the customer conversation that decides the renewal. The ones who don't drift into being a different kind of post box — between agents this time, rather than between teams.
Where the divide is opening
Across her portfolio, Sutton can already see the gap forming. "Not every company is moving at the same pace," she says. "Most companies in the world are not AI-native and there's still a learning curve."
It's that the people who are genuinely great at their jobs should be spending their time on the things only they can do.
For the VPs who figure it out, the shift is less about technology than about reclaiming something they thought the job had taken from them for good.
"The point isn't efficiency," says Slater. "It's that the people who are genuinely great at their jobs should be spending their time on the things only they can do."
readywhen catches everything you say you’ll do in meetings, messages, and comments—then brings it back done and ready to approve. C-level & VPs get 7 days to try readywhen for free here.
