Michael A. Roberto, who teaches management studies at Bryant University, says the so-called “silo” — rigidly compartmentalized — style of management will disappear.

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

To learn about the boss of tomorrow, we visited professor Michael A. Roberto, who specializes in management studies at Bryant University. Roberto does not have visionary powers, but he does have insight –– and young students, some likely destined to be chief executive officers and middle managers.

These students enroll already possessing skills they will need to lead, Roberto says. They are adept with Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and blogs. They will easily embrace emerging technologies. They will be open and accessible: transparent, to use the buzzword.

“The way people are communicating is totally changing,” Roberto says.

That company memo, tacked onto the bulletin board or left in the (snail) mailbox –– will diminish, the professor predicts. So, too, the old-fashioned meeting.

“The old way of working was a very traditional staff meeting on a Monday morning,” Roberto says. “You sort of got your update as a boss, and you also got your direction as a subordinate, basically by going to that Monday-morning meeting.”

A boss of tomorrow will be readily accessible –– electronically, via networking sites and technologies yet to surface. He or she (increasingly she) will be “transparent,” sharing with employees the process by which key decisions are made. “It also means being open about financials, so that employees know precisely how an organization is doing,” says the management professor.

Having removed barriers to the top, the new boss will remove barriers between departments. The so-called “silo” style of management, in which sales people talk to sales people but rarely to the folks in marketing or R&D, will disappear.

“Increasingly, we find that the way that work gets done and innovation happens is through collaboration,” Roberto says.

THE FUTURE does not always arrive unheralded, of course, and Roberto looks to Paul F. Levy, president and CEO of a major Boston hospital, for a glimpse of the boss of tomorrow.

We reached Levy on Facebook –– one of the ways, along with a blog and Twitter, that he communicates with employees at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center. We messaged: Why use new means to reach out to employees? “Too hard to answer in writing,” he messaged back. “Call office.” We did.

Levy says the inspiration for his blog came in 2006, when he read a story about CEOs steering clear of the then-new form. “Being somewhat contrary in nature,” he says, he began publishing Running a Hospital (runningahospital.blogspot.com/). Readership exploded, both from inside and outside the medical center.

When Levy began posting internal data about his hospital’s infection rates, hand hygiene and other issues –– information most employees, never mind outsiders, had never seen –– a curious thing happened. Two things, actually:

Employees, the CEO says, “were proud that I was proud of them.” And his blog motivated them to do even better. “It became a gentle prod in the organization,” Levy says.

He had, he says, discovered the concept of transparency –– which he soon strengthened by joining Twitter (he has 1,421 followers) and Facebook (2,595 friends). Younger employees, he found, prefer Facebook contact over some other means of communication.

“This is generational,” he says. “They send me comments, criticisms and suggestions that they wouldn’t on e-mail. If part of your job as CEO is to stay in touch with your organization –– to find out what’s going on and what their concerns are –– why wouldn’t you use the tool they use for communication?”

ROBERTO HIMSELF has a blog and he uses weekly podcasts, downloadable onto iPods and other platforms, to keep in touch with his students. From these young people, and from those enrolled at other colleges and elsewhere, will come the bosses of tomorrow.

More will be women. More will be socially responsible. And they will take charge sooner rather than later, predicts Roberto, who holds degrees from Harvard College and the Harvard Business School and is the author of two books, including Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen, published in February.

“If you look at our graduates,” Roberto says, “a lot of them, frankly, are getting jobs from companies that are at the same time laying off people in the sort of 40-to-60 age range. That means if you look forward 5 or 10 years, you’re going to see a sort of younger cohort of people who are going to be managing just by definition. Because as the economy, we hope, grows again, who’s going to fill the leadership positions? They’ll be younger. They’ll be millennials out there.”

Roberto is not yet 40 and his job is secure, but he is not content.

“You cannot be a 50-year-old boss who says, ‘Well, I’m just not up to speed on that kind of stuff.’ I fear it every day with my students, frankly. I fear that I’m going to be caught where I’m not up to speed with how they communicate. I am chasing them every day, I’ll be honest.”

Roberto’s Bryant web site is bryant2.bryant.edu/~mroberto/

Roberto’s blog is michael-roberto.blogspot.com/

Levy’s blog is runningahospital.blogspot.com

Levy on Twitter: twitter.com/Paulflevy

Levy on Facebook: www.facebook.com/people/Paul-Levy/624801450

G. Wayne Miller welcomes suggestions for future What’s Next stories.

gwmiller@projo.com