Your experience got you here. Will it get you any further?

You have become very good at your job. You understand your business, know how to get things done, have earned the confidence of senior management and can usually anticipate problems before they become serious. Your team depends on your experience, your colleagues respect your expertise, and your performance reviews suggest that you are doing most things right.

Yet you may have begun to notice something uncomfortable. The qualities that made you successful as a manager are not necessarily the qualities that will make you successful in your next role. You are increasingly expected to contribute beyond your function, think about the wider business, influence decisions you do not control and lead through changes whose consequences nobody fully understands.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is beginning to perform some of the work on which your professional value and credibility have been built. Analysis, reporting, planning, research and even recommendations that once required considerable experience can now be produced much more quickly.

You are still accountable for delivering results, managing your people and keeping the operation running. But the expectations of what you should contribute are changing, often without anybody being particularly clear about what those new expectations are.

This creates an interesting question for the experienced middle manager. How do you prepare for responsibilities that your present job may not be giving you sufficient opportunity to practise?

Download the materials for my workshop Your experience got you here. What will get you there? at The University of Manchester SEA Centre on 11th November 2026.

When experience becomes a constraint

Experience is an extraordinary professional asset. Over time, we develop pattern recognition, practical judgement, confidence, credibility, relationships and tacit knowledge. We learn what works, what usually fails, who needs to be consulted and how decisions really get made. Much of this cannot be acquired from a textbook or a training programme.

The difficulty is that experience also teaches us what to repeat.

Consider a manager who has built a successful career by being technically excellent, solving problems quickly and maintaining close control over delivery. These behaviours are valuable, and the organisation may have repeatedly rewarded them. When a problem arises, colleagues turn to this manager because they know the answer will be found and the necessary action taken.

As responsibilities expand, however, the same manager may struggle to delegate, spend too much time solving problems that others should learn to solve, or find it difficult to contribute to decisions outside their specialist expertise. Their effectiveness at managing today's work begins to limit their capacity to lead tomorrow's.

There is a psychological dimension to this. Our professional competence becomes part of our identity. Being the person who knows, decides, fixes or delivers provides reassurance, status and a sense of usefulness. Moving into unfamiliar territory means temporarily giving up some of that certainty.

An experienced finance manager may need to become more comfortable discussing customers and operations. A technology manager may need to understand commercial strategy and organisational politics. A regional operations manager may need to influence colleagues who neither report to them nor share their priorities.

In each case, the challenge involves more than acquiring knowledge. It requires becoming comfortable being less expert, asking questions that might expose gaps in understanding and developing ways of contributing that are less dependent on having the right answer.

Success is a particularly unreliable signal of when this adaptation is necessary. An organisation may continue rewarding behaviours that have become insufficient for the manager's longer-term development. The manager can remain highly effective in the present role while becoming progressively less prepared for the next one.

AI is changing what expertise is worth

Artificial intelligence makes this tension harder to ignore. For much of their careers, managers have gained credibility partly through their ability to assemble information, analyse a situation, develop recommendations and coordinate execution. These activities have not disappeared, but the economics of producing them are changing.

When information, research, analysis, drafting and routine expertise become more readily available, the relative value of knowing what to investigate, how to interpret the results and what to do with them may increase.

Imagine a management meeting in which AI has produced an excellent market analysis, identified competitors, modelled several strategic options and drafted implementation plans.

The material may be impressive. It may also be substantially correct. Yet the organisation still has to decide which opportunity matters most, how much risk to accept, which interests to prioritise and what it is prepared to stop doing.

These decisions involve incomplete information, competing values, organisational politics and consequences for real people. They cannot be reduced to the quality of the analysis.

The manager's contribution increasingly lies in framing the problem, questioning assumptions, integrating different perspectives, exercising judgement and building sufficient commitment for decisions to become effective action.

AI can assist with these activities too. It would be a mistake to construct a comforting argument that machines do the analysis while humans retain an exclusive claim to creativity, empathy or judgement. The boundary is unlikely to remain that convenient.

What remains important is that organisations must determine where responsibility sits, who has authority to make or challenge decisions and how the consequences will be managed.

For middle managers, this presents an additional complication. AI may gradually assume parts of the coordinating work that have traditionally justified their positions: allocating tasks, monitoring progress, generating reports, recommending priorities and identifying exceptions.

Some of these changes could create welcome capacity for more valuable work. Others could leave managers with responsibility for outcomes but diminishing authority over the processes that produce them.

Consider a manager expected to implement an AI-generated resource allocation plan. The system recommends a decision that appears efficient, but the manager knows something about a customer relationship, team capability or operational constraint that the model has not adequately considered.

Can the manager override the recommendation? Is there enough time and information to exercise that judgement? Will challenging the system be recognised as responsible management, or interpreted as resistance to change?

Simply declaring that a human remains accountable does not resolve these questions. Responsibility requires workable authority, and meaningful judgement requires conditions in which it can actually be exercised.

The emerging challenge is therefore partly technological, but also profoundly organisational. We have to redesign work, authority, expectations and accountability as the capabilities available to us change.

The middle manager's uncomfortable position

Middle managers occupy a particularly demanding position in organisational transformation. They are expected to translate strategic ambitions into operational reality while protecting current performance, supporting their teams and maintaining confidence upwards.

When AI is introduced, senior management may focus on productivity, speed, cost and competitive advantage. Employees may be more concerned about the reliability of the technology, the future of their jobs, the value of their expertise and whether they will retain meaningful control over their work.

The middle manager has to work with both perspectives, often without having much influence over the original decision to introduce the technology.

The familiar managerial response is to concentrate on implementation. Establish milestones, track adoption, monitor productivity, resolve resistance and demonstrate progress. These activities are necessary, particularly when senior management expects visible results. But they may not be sufficient.

The manager also needs to understand how the technology is changing relationships, decision rights and the conditions under which people are expected to perform. A process that becomes faster may also become less understandable. An automated recommendation may be technically defensible but difficult to challenge. A team may appear to adopt a new system while quietly continuing to rely on informal workarounds.

Resistance, in these circumstances, may contain useful information about the design of the work rather than simply indicate unwillingness to change. Equally, some resistance will reflect understandable anxiety about losing established competence, influence or status. The manager needs sufficient judgement to distinguish these possibilities rather than assuming that enthusiasm means commitment and scepticism means obstruction.

This requires a broader interpretation of leadership responsibility. Managers need to champion improvements that are genuinely worthwhile, rather than technology adoption for its own sake. They need to participate in redesigning how work gets done, clarifying the respective contributions and authority of people and technology. And they need to protect the conditions that allow employees to question decisions, identify errors, learn and remain accountable for their contributions.

Recent conceptual work by Tafvelin, Forsgren and Stenling¹ on redesigning leadership roles in the age of AI draws attention to precisely these questions of work design and managerial resources. The argument is significant because it directs attention beyond the individual manager's capabilities to the organisational conditions that enable or constrain effective leadership. ¹Tafvelin, S., Forsgren, M., & Stenling, A. (2026). Redesigning the leader role for the age of artificial intelligence: A work design challenge. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

A manager asked to absorb additional complexity, sustain performance, support anxious employees and implement unfamiliar technology without adequate discretion or resources may have less capacity for the constructive leadership the organisation increasingly needs.

Under those conditions, it is hardly surprising if managers become more controlling, avoid difficult conversations or retreat into the familiar activities through which they have previously demonstrated competence.

The answer cannot simply be to tell managers to become more adaptable. Organisations must provide opportunities, authority and support for that adaptability to become possible. Managers, in turn, need to recognise which constraints they can influence, which require negotiation and which should be made visible to more senior decision-makers.

Preparing for a role you do not yet have

All of this brings us back to the question of career development.

For an experienced middle manager, preparation for the next stage cannot consist entirely of becoming better at the present job. At some point, development must involve deliberately expanding the range of situations in which you can contribute effectively.

This is where many capable professionals encounter a practical problem. Their current role keeps them busy, rewards familiar expertise and provides relatively limited opportunities to practise the broader responsibilities they aspire to assume.

A manager who wants to progress towards general management may need a stronger understanding of finance, strategy, markets, technology, operations, people and organisational change. Yet the demands of managing their existing function may leave little time to develop those perspectives, let alone integrate them.

The distinction between knowledge and integration matters. Understanding financial statements, for example, is useful. Being able to recognise how a financial decision affects customers, operational capacity, employee behaviour and long-term competitiveness is a different capability.

Similarly, knowing established leadership theories is not the same as exercising judgement in a situation where the evidence is incomplete, stakeholders disagree and no option is without consequences.

The development task is therefore to broaden experience while also learning to connect different perspectives. This may involve cross-functional assignments, exposure to unfamiliar markets, involvement in enterprise-level decisions, serious study, working with people whose expertise differs from your own or taking on responsibilities where established answers are less useful.

These experiences need to be accompanied by reflection. Otherwise, we risk collecting additional experience without learning to interpret it differently.

There is also an important social dimension. The people around us can reinforce the professional identity we have already established. Colleagues know what we are good at and repeatedly invite us to contribute in those ways. Our networks may be rich in people who share our professional background and assumptions but relatively poor in those who challenge them.

Preparing for broader leadership consequently involves exposing ourselves to unfamiliar people, disciplines and ways of thinking. It also requires enough confidence to be challenged without interpreting every disagreement as a threat to our competence.

For some managers, a structured management education programme provides that breadth, challenge and opportunity to integrate learning while continuing to work. For others, the most productive development may come from a carefully chosen assignment, a broader organisational responsibility or a deliberate change in how they use their existing position.

What matters is whether the development activity changes what the manager is capable of noticing, understanding, deciding and doing. Additional qualifications and experiences are only valuable to the extent that they enlarge that repertoire.

What will get you there?

There is a tempting assumption in career development that continued success will eventually produce readiness for greater responsibility. Work hard, deliver results, accumulate experience and the next opportunity will follow.

Sometimes it does. But organisations do not necessarily prepare people for the responsibilities they will need next merely by rewarding them for performing their current responsibilities well.

Nor does moving upwards always mean doing the same work on a larger scale. A bigger team, a broader regional role or an enterprise leadership position may require fundamentally different ways of exercising authority, working through others, making decisions and understanding the business.

This is why it is worth periodically examining not only how well you are performing, but also what your present work is preparing you to become.

Where do you want your career to take you over the next three to five years? Which capabilities have brought you this far, and which will your next stage require that you have not yet demonstrated consistently? Perhaps most importantly, where are you currently getting the opportunity to develop and practise those capabilities?

The answers need not involve an immediate change of job or a dramatic career reinvention. They may reveal something quite modest but consequential: a different responsibility to seek, a conversation to initiate, a relationship to develop or an unfamiliar decision in which you need to become involved.

Return to the capable manager with whom we began. Their experience remains valuable, their expertise still matters and their organisation still needs the results they deliver. But they may have reached a point where continuing to prove what they already know is taking time and attention away from developing what they will need next.

The risk is not that their experience has become irrelevant. It is that they have allowed it to become the boundary of their development.

Your experience got you here. The question is whether you are continuing to add enough range to that experience to make yourself ready for wherever you want to go next.