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Visibility gets the job, then we act surprised when the job doesn’t get done.
How Companies Select for Blind Spots
Nobody can audit the quality of a manager’s decisions in real time because outcomes arrive late and are tangled up with luck and other people’s work.
Behavior, however, IS easy to audit.
Who agrees in the meeting? Who is seen late at night in the right Slack channel?
Promotion committees reward what they can observe. So the organization selects, year after year, for people who share its blind spots, then wonders why the blind spots never get fixed.
What Managers Do When the Numbers Slip
Watch the same manager under pressure.
A new director wants a quick win, so the essential staff, the people who actually know how to keep things running, get cut because they are expensive and their value is invisible.
Maybe a new platform is bought mid-project, too, because it demos beautifully.
Every transition has a dip, as people relearn, yet the manager expects improved numbers within a quarter. When the numbers wobble, their fix is another system. AI mania, anyone?
What Good Management Takes
For management to actually work, you have to set 3 conditions:
- clear expectations
- support
- consequences.
For people who do not want to change, it takes both the carrot and the stick applied consistently by someone willing to be disliked for a while. That is exactly the skill the visibility-promoted folk lack.
What bothers me most is that we can spend hours discussing tools and talent shortages, yet fall silent when the question of the team leader’s competence comes up. As if that were rude.
Management quality sets whether your raise happens, whether your good idea survives a meeting.
How people are managed explains a surprising amount of the gap between firms that thrive and firms that limp. So say it plainly, when a manager is excellent and when one isn’t.
An organization that cannot look honestly at its managers will keep paying them, promoting them and handing them everyone else’s best years.
Save the next person the search. Forward this issue 📬
Things on my Desk
This listing tracks the most popular Halloween candy, year by year. Scroll to yours and see what was filling the bowls when you showed up. 🐣 🎃
Your Desk Upgrade
Go for a walk with a relative who survived a bad boss. Ask for the one sentence they wish they had said in year one. Your next manager conversation starts from it. Happy networking!
From the Same Desk
- You are often encouraged to think of growth as a search for something new. But more often than not, the most valuable discovery is retrospective.
- A technology can be powerful without being universally useful. The rhetoric surrounding AI deserves more suspicion than the technology itself.
- Reading the data gives you access to information. Understanding it gives you agency over it.