Anh Hai, the Deputy Manager: The Translation Layer of the Organization

Today I'll tell you about a man I'll call Hai.

Hai is a deputy manager at the head office of a bank. Not the manager — the deputy. Which means he carries enough responsibility to lose sleep, but not enough authority to decide anything that would let him stop losing sleep.

Hai isn't real. But if you've ever been a middle manager at any large organization, you'll recognize him instantly. Some days, he might even be you. Stay calm — keep reading.

On the org chart, Hai sits in the middle. And in life, sitting in the middle means being squeezed from both sides. Above him is the boss. Below him are the troops. He is the spring compressed between two forces. His whole day, really, is the art of staying alive.

Let me walk you through one of his days.

8:00 a.m. Hai walks in, hasn't even warmed his chair, when a message arrives from the department manager:

"Hai, the big boss just said we need to accelerate the digitalization of the approval process. You take care of this. Urgent."

Hai reads it, and for a few seconds his mind goes blank. Because the sentence means nothing. "Accelerate the digitalization of the approval process" — digitalize what, accelerate toward where, urgent to what degree, what's the budget, who collaborates? None of it. Just a cloud of words drifting down from above, and Hai's job is to turn that cloud into concrete rain.

This is the core skill of the middle manager that no school teaches: translating vagueness from the floor above into clear work for the floor below. The big boss utters something cloudy in some meeting. The department manager hears it, half-understands it, and pushes it down to Hai with the word "urgent" attached so he looks decisive. And Hai is the last person who has to turn that fog into a plan with a beginning, a middle, an end, a deadline, and a name attached to each task.

If it succeeds, the credit belongs to the big boss — the man "with the vision." If it fails, the fault belongs to Hai — the man who "executed poorly."

Hai knows this. He takes it anyway. Because refusing would be worse.

8:30 a.m. Hai gathers his three team members.

He can't tell them the truth — that he doesn't really understand what the boss wants either. Say that and he loses face, and losing face with your troops is losing everything. So he has to play the part of the man-who-has-it-all-figured-out. He stands at the whiteboard, draws a few arrows, says things that sound strategic: "We'll review the entire current process, identify the pain points, then propose a digitalization solution along a roadmap."

The three nod. One asks: "Boss, which step do we digitalize first, specifically?"

A fair question. A question Hai can't answer. Because the big boss doesn't know either. But Hai can't say that. So he answers with a line that middle managers worldwide have honed over centuries: "Just draft something first, and we'll review it together."

The magic of this line is that it kicks the cloud of vagueness down one more level. Now the team member has to guess what the big boss wants, through two layers of translation. It's a game of telephone — the office version, with a salary attached.

10:00 a.m. The division stand-up meeting.

Hai goes to the meeting in place of the department manager, who is "busy." Busy with what, nobody knows, but the manager is always busy precisely during the meetings where you're likely to get chewed out.

Going in someone's place sounds prestigious — you get a seat at the table with the senior bosses. In reality, Hai has been sent in as the human shield. Because in this meeting, someone is going to be grilled about the progress of a project that's running late. And whoever's sitting there will catch it. The manager is sharp enough to know today is a day for catching bullets, so he sends Hai.

Sure enough, mid-meeting, a senior boss turns: "Where's your department's project at? Why so slow?"

Hai, in three seconds, must run a complex political calculation: don't blame the manager (you'll be marked), don't blame the troops (you'll lose your army), don't take it all on yourself (you'll die). He chooses the path every middle manager chooses: blame an invisible entity that can't talk back.

"Well, we've run into some friction at the cross-departmental coordination stage, and the current approval process has a lot of layers, so it's taking a bit longer."

Brilliant. "Cross-departmental coordination" has no face. "A process with many layers" can't argue back. Hai has just given his account without a single concrete human being getting accused. The senior boss nods along. The meeting moves on. Hai survives another day.

12:00 p.m. Hai eats his packed lunch at his desk.

Not because he likes to. But because above him is a manager nagging for a report, below him are three drafts from his troops waiting to be reviewed, and to the side are emails from other departments needing his "input." Hai is the traffic intersection for every stream of work in the department. Everything passes through him. If he jams, the whole department jams.

Spooning rice with one hand, he opens the three drafts. All three are off-course — of course they are, because he assigned a task he himself didn't understand. He sits and fixes each one. As he fixes, he thinks quietly, "It'd be faster to just do it myself." And this is the eternal tragedy of the middle manager: he's better at the work than his troops, but if he does it all himself he's no longer a manager, and if he doesn't, the work comes out wrong. He's stuck between doing and delegating, with neither one ever fully working.

The manager, at this hour, is out at lunch with a client in an air-conditioned restaurant. The troops, at this hour, have slipped out for a bowl of noodles. Only Hai is left, with a box of cold rice.

3:00 p.m. The drama of the day.

A team member accidentally sends an internal file out to an external partner. The file isn't very serious, but it's enough to become a thing. The manager finds out, calls Hai up, face cold: "What kind of leadership is this? Now that this has happened, how am I supposed to explain it to the big boss?"

Notice that line — "how am I supposed to explain it to the big boss." The manager's real fear isn't the file. It's having to account for it to his own superior. This whole burst of anger isn't about the mistake. It's about face, flowing upward.

Hai nods, accepts the blame, promises to tighten things up. He doesn't argue, even though he knows in his gut that this loose file-sending process existed long before he ever joined the department.

Then he goes down to see the team member who made the mistake. This is the most beautiful, and the most painful, moment of the middle manager's trade.

He has two choices. One: dump the entire scolding he just received onto the team member's head — to vent, to be fair, to make the troops afraid. Two: stand up and absorb part of it, take onto himself a share of blame that was never his to begin with, then gently remind the team member to be careful next time.

Hai chooses option two. He says: "Next time, double-check the recipient before you hit send. I covered this one — don't worry about it."

That line, "I covered this one" — no one on the upper floors knows he said it. It's not in any KPI. It doesn't make it into any report. But it's precisely those quiet little "I covered this one" lines that keep the whole department from falling apart, that keep a few young people still wanting to show up to work tomorrow morning. Hai absorbs the pressure from above, filters out some of the toxin, and only then passes down a dose just strong enough to make his troops grow without breaking them.

Hai is the filter of the organization. And a filter is always the dirtiest thing, the fastest to wear out, and the first to get replaced.

6:00 p.m. The boss leaves. The troops leave. Hai stays.

He sits there, stitching the three revised drafts into one decent report, so that tomorrow the manager can carry it off to present to the big boss. The manager's name will be on that slide. In that meeting, the manager will say "my team did this" — the word "my team" includes Hai, but it will not name Hai. And if the big boss offers praise, the praise will stop at the manager and not trickle down one more floor.

Hai knows all of this. He sits and does it anyway. Until 7:30 p.m. The office is empty. Only the hum of the air conditioner and the glow of a monitor lighting up the tired face of a man doing the most important work in the department — work that no one will ever know he did.

Now I want to stop laughing for a moment.

Because Hai is not weak. The opposite — he is probably the person doing the most real work in that entire department. He's the only one who understands both the boss's work and the troops' work. He's the only one who knows exactly what is actually happening down on the ground. Take Hai out, and the big boss and the rank-and-file staff would be speaking two completely different languages, and the whole machine would freeze.

Hai is the translation software running in the background of the organization. So important that no one notices — the way people only remember the wifi when it drops.

But here's the irony. Precisely because Hai is so good at being the connector, the system never wants him to leave that position. Promote him, and who plays the connector? So Hai stays right there, year after year, carrying the most, credited the least, jammed tight between two floors. The reward for playing the role of endurance well is being handed more to endure.

Oh, lately AI has moved into the bank.

The things Hai does all day — compiling reports, fixing drafts, drafting slides, translating vague directives into tasks, writing diplomatic justification emails — AI can do a fair amount of it. Faster. No complaints. Doesn't need a packed lunch.

The first time he heard that, Hai's stomach dropped a little.

But then he thought it through, and discovered a strangely comforting thing.

What AI can do is the paperwork. The word-to-word translation. The part that truly drains Hai — that "I covered this one" line to the team member, the three-second political calculation in the meeting room, the knowing of when to shield his troops and when to let them carry their own weight, the ability to swallow the boss's anger and pass it down only after diluting the dose — that part, AI cannot do yet.

The problem is: that part is also exactly the part that was never paid for. There is no line in the employment contract that says "knows how to take bullets for subordinates." There is no KPI box named "absorbs organizational pressure."

So Hai falls into a strange position: the part of the work a machine can do is the part that gets counted, and the part only a human can do is invisible. AI will take the part that gets credited, and leave him precisely the part that grinds him down without anyone seeing.

Hai shuts off his computer. 7:30 p.m. He picks up his bag and walks out. Elevator. Lobby. The security guard nods goodnight.

On the way home, his phone buzzes. A message from the manager:

"Hai, tomorrow the big boss wants to hear more about applying AI to our department. Help me prepare it. Urgent."

Hai looks at the screen. Sighs. Types back the same two words he's typed a thousand times over his career:

"Got it."

Then he puts the phone away, gets on his bike, and rides home. Tomorrow is another day of being the connector.