September 2026: who's protected, who's paid, who's watching, and who's lonely

Most of what caught my eye this month is, one way or another, about people reading each other: colleagues across a room, teams watching their managers, and employees taking the measure of a deal. Nine entries, in three movements.

The people in the room

How work became joyless, Josh Kirby, The Telegraph, Sep 21

A June poll of 2,000 UK office workers found that about half regularly message colleagues sitting in the same room. Roughly one in six can get through a whole working day without speaking to anyone face to face. Four in ten feel lonely at work, and nearly a third felt lonelier in the office than they did at home during lockdown.

And I wonder: how are you keeping, dear reader?

Workplace connection has a strong ROI, Bruce Daisley, Make Work Better, Sep 23
with Friends at Work 2026, KPMG

Daisley argues that investing in connection at work pays measurable returns. KPMG's 2025 survey supports him: most people would take a job paying 10% below market with close friends over one paying 10% above without them.
But KPMG's follow-up in May complicates the picture.

Employees with close friends at work are the most engaged and also the most stressed, and 42% of them plan to look for another job within a year, nearly three times the rate of other groups. Daisley acknowledges the same thing: close friendships amplify everything, stress included.

The people carrying the culture are carrying the most weight. That's worth knowing before you count on them to keep carrying it.

The Workforce Is Shrinking. Automation Alone Isn't the Answer, Jerry Rubin and Steven L. Dawson, The MIT Press Reader, Sep 7

An excerpt from their book Help Wanted. With demographic decline and reduced immigration, they argue, the U.S. faces a "forever-tight labor market." Employers who want to keep good people will have to earn it through better hiring, better conditions, and supportive policy, not automation alone.

Read it next to KPMG: the people most likely to walk out are the ones you can least afford to lose, and there are fewer people to replace them.

What people see

The people who absorb the most pressure also watch most closely: who gets protected, who gets paid, and how the people at the top spend their time.

When a Team Member Underperforms—but Has Organizational Capital, Kathryn Landis, Harvard Business Review, Sep 18

Some performance problems, Landis writes, are "about members of your team you're not allowed to remove." She offers tactics for when simply letting someone go isn't an option, such as testing how committed senior leadership really is to its own standards and moving critical work elsewhere.

I know a lot of you will identify with this predicament. And your team is watching how you handle it.

CEO pay surged in 2025, Elise Gould and Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute, Sep 17

CEO pay at the 350 largest U.S. firms rose 14% last year to an average of $27.9 million, 325 times what the typical worker earns.

I'm not questioning anyone's right to get the best deal they can for themselves. But it's a reminder that your deal is perceived, interpreted, and judged by other people in the organization, and that the judgment is part of the price.

United CEO caps meetings to 4 hours a day, Preston Fore, Fortune, Sep 14
with Myth 1: Lofty leadership tops mere management, Henry Mintzberg, Sep 14

Scott Kirby, who earned more than $30 million last year, limits meetings to four hours a day, won't sit through slides read aloud, and reads about three hours a day, from the Journal and the Times to biographies and science fiction. His summary of the job: "your job is not to work hard; it's to think hard." Time spent on yesterday's detailed metrics, he says, is time misspent. The Telegraph piece makes a related point from the other side: people now signal how busy they are, and busyness has little to do with productivity.

The same day, Mintzberg posted an excerpt from the first chapter of his forthcoming book, Bust Those Management Myths, taking aim at the idea that leadership sits above management. His example is a bank CEO who, on his way to the airport, called in a single broken ATM. Micromanaging, or leading by managing? Leadership, as Jim March put it, "involves plumbing as well as poetry."

Think hard, yes. But the thinking has to be fed by knowing what's going on. Mintzberg's post is the first in a series worth following.

A little AI, deliberately

Kirby chooses his reading diet. Most of you don't get to choose how much AI commentary lands in your inbox, and I know you're already swimming in it. I'd be remiss, though, not to pass along the few pieces where the manager, not the technology, is the variable that matters. So, three.

Middle Managers Will Make or Break AI Adoption, Gleb Tsipursky, Harvard Business Review, Sep 1

Tsipursky's point is that teams don't learn what AI means from the executive announcement. They learn it from what their manager does next: whether workloads, reviews, and decision rights actually change. These are Mintzberg's managers who lead by managing. Tsipursky sketches five mindsets: skeptics, wait-and-see traditionalists, cautious implementers, enthusiastic experimenters, and catalysts.

The Kahoot poll adds a sobering footnote: 38% of managers have never had formal management training, and a third of workers get less than an hour a week one-to-one with their manager. Those are the people this argument depends on. Which mindset are you, and which one does your team think you are?

AI governance gap survey, EY, Sep 15

98% of organizations have formal AI governance policies, yet nearly half admit to bypassing them for urgent deployments. A quarter of those using agentic AI can't detect unauthorized agents running internally, and half haven't updated governance for agentic use at all.

Organizations are applying yesterday's governance rules to today's interactions with AI. And every bypass teaches people what the rules are really worth, much like the protected underperformer does.

Writing with AI, Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Radar, Aug 27

O'Reilly takes a contrarian view, or says he does: "AI is a medium," like painting or photography or language itself. His actual practice is more prosaic. He uses AI as a research assistant and copy editor, and he expects it to make him a better writer.
Becoming a better writer means learning, and feedback from AI as a copy editor can surface tics and habits you aren't aware of. That matters when you write a lot, which is not only a writer's business. It is certainly the business of the managers I work with.

It's worth setting against a marketer in the Telegraph piece whose manager routinely replaces her writing with AI-generated text. She no longer takes pride in her work and is thinking of leaving her profession. Same tool, opposite uses, and in both cases it's the manager's choice.

So I'll ask again, because I mean it: how are you keeping?

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