How to spot a great manager

Parachuting in

It’s a great term, and a leadership challenge I’ve dropped into many times (see what I did there?), because it is one of my favorite things to do. You’re dropped into the middle of a firefight and you recognize that it’s a chess puzzle with very high stakes. If you do it right, you attack obstacles and orchestrate a group or a company to keep motoring toward success. It’s a chance to make a major impact, to set right many issues.

I’m going to examine a specific instance of my parachuting experience because it is useful for thinking about the characteristics of great management, and not just because I didn’t make a muddle of it this time.

A long time ago and in a company far away, the desperate situation clarified into a paratrooping operation my first day. 

“You can fire the whole lot of them if that’s what you think is best,” my new boss said. “Go figure it out and tell me if you want to start over with a new staff.” 

I got the impression that would be her recommendation.

But I had to see for myself. I set up a group meet-and-greet as well as 1:1s with each of my reports. The group Zoom call had all the makings of a funeral service: no engagement, no one spoke without prompting, no one told the truth, and no one had a spark of life to display. 

“Excellent,” I thought. “There’s a good chance they’re all worth saving.” 

A Learning Opportunity

I brought the situation to my students. I love teaching and mentoring. Apart from the obvious opportunity to help people, mentoring encourages me to go deep, analyze things down to the microscopic, and really get my head around the problems I face as a manager. Therefore, in my view, they are mandatory behaviors for a leader. I described the situation and told the students my conclusion. They were surprised and their disagreement was vociferous. Mostly they advocated that I should fire these workers and start over.

“Really?” I replied. “Is that what a great manager would do?”

They asserted that a great manager would indeed clear the board so she could get down to the managing part.

“So with all that is invested in their knowledge and work practices, and the enormous time and effort it would take to replace them with trained staff, and with all the synapses this group keeps synchronized to other groups and ways of working, a great manager would cut them? I think not. Let’s start from the basic question. How do you spot a great manager?” I asked. “What signals should you watch for?”

Their answers were sadly predictable:

• She’s the one out front, telling everyone what to do.
• He makes the decisions. He enforces the decisions.
• He presents his team’s accomplishments to leadership.
• They’re confident and charismatic.
• She inspires people. 
• He creates the plan.
• They’re articulate and help everyone grasp the vision.
• Everyone likes and admires her.

I often hear these sorts of characteristics ascribed to great managers. But they are false positives. 

“All of those factors would make a great manager easy to spot,” I said to my students, “but none of them is the actual answer. A person could do any and all of those things and still be a terrible manager. Haven’t any of you witnessed that?” 

With some thought they admitted that they had. We all had. 

Getting to core value

“Let’s set aside the false leads. The actual answers take some work to grasp. The way to spot a great manager boils down to two things:

1. Her team succeeds and even outperforms its goals, nearly every time.
2. The team members are happy. They’re not leaving the company. They’re not complaining or fighting with each other. Even if they don’t like what they’re doing, they stay… and they thrive.

“The solution to the situation resides with understanding what a manager can do to achieve those outcomes. Ask yourself this: Aside from pay, what does any employee want from a job?”

This got their gears turning. Their responses were gratifying.

• To be appreciated.
• To have variety and challenge in their work.
• To be valued.
• To be understood.
• To be heard.
• To be part of something bigger than oneself.
• To understand the next steps in their career.

“Exactly,” I replied. “And now think about the group you want me to fire. Are they getting any of those things? No. Their behavior is perfectly consistent with how humans and dogs react when they’re stuffed in a cage and forgotten. I am their fourth manager in 18 months. Their project is a death march – dull, repetitive, and hopeless, and no one else wants to do it. So they behave as if they’re caged. I don’t blame them. But the key point is this: If they had some of the employment factors you just mentioned, how many of them would be stellar employees? How do you figure out if they’re actually worth keeping?”

Cottoning on, the students stated that you have to start by providing those things that they’re missing.

Beyond the obvious

What the students had done was to grasp the first lesson in great management: Look beyond the obvious, with empathy and free from assumptions. If a person or team is struggling, what are they receiving or lacking that results in their struggles? What part of their underlying motivations is getting starved or overfed?

Back to paratrooping. In 1:1 meetings, I began probing into these motivational factors, making commitments to work with them on their careers, following up, valuing their efforts and struggles. Listening. And listening again. Empathizing. And listening some more. Telling stories of my own experiences in cages. It took time but I began seeing improvements in productivity, responsiveness, and morale. Personalities began emerging. I stuck by my commitments to them. I gave them each side projects and learning challenges alongside their death march. Smiles became common. Laughter and spontaneous interactions became normal. 

After three months, my boss brought up the team in our regular check-in.

“I just had meetings with your team over the past week. The wild thing is, they’re really happy. They’re getting twice as much done as before, and they love it here. I don’t know what the hell you did, but they’re totally redeemed.” 

I was glad that it had become obvious to everyone else, and even more glad that the team received the credit for their performance, not me. My students were as pleased with this outcome as I. But there was a hard question to address.

“This is just one case,” a student asked. “None of us are likely to come across one just like this. What do we do when we face different problems?”

“Yes,” I agreed, “if it were easy it wouldn’t be very interesting, would it? Just remember this: Those cages we put people in come in many shapes and colors. It’s your job as a manager to open those cage doors and invite them to walk through it. The ones who do are the ones worth investing in. The good news is that understanding the correct key to the cage always boils down to this: empathy. Put yourself in their shoes and ask without judgment – if it were me, what would I want from my manager?”

Ken Furie is a seasoned leader in the technology industry with 35 years dedicated to managing people. Much of his time has been in startups where small movements can have a big impact, and with the diversity of challenges in that arena he has enjoyed making extraordinary teams a lifelong passion and study. In the course of his career, and through empathic leadership techniques, he has won the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) "Project of the Year" award, Inc. Magazine's "500 Fastest Growing Companies" award, and helped save two companies from bankruptcy. When his busy work/life balance permits he loves teaching and mentoring, giving him opportunities to pass along his career learnings.