Evaluating Managers is hard. With Engineers you have a tangible, direct, visible basis for evaluation (output, code quality, product impact, informed peer reviews etc), but with Managers it can be a nebulous, indirect, less visible basis (managerial outcomes, leadership impact etc). Even with peer review thrown in, it is very easy for a team to love a highly supportive but ultimately ineffective manager.
Your whole model of evaluation needs to shift, including:
- How you measure and define impact
- How you expect that impact to be achieved
- What your expectations are and what good looks like
This can be hard without a model to follow. Below I’ve tried to outline my own model, one that has so far worked to create highly effective leaders and teams.
- How I measure and define impact
- How should this impact be achieved?
- What are my expectations and what does good look like?
- Common anti-patterns
How I measure and define impact
I follow two simple principles:
- A manager’s primary output is their team’s effectiveness
- A manager’s impact is measured as change in team effectiveness
This second point is key. In my mind a manager is not there to run or operate a team, they are there to continually optimise team effectiveness. I like to visualise the potential impact as follows:
- With no manager, a talented and motivated team can remain perfectly effective, at least for a while. Over time effectiveness will drop gradually as resource efficiency, alignment/awareness, performance or morale slowly degrade without an engaged leader.
- An ‘Operator’ manager is what I call a manager who simply operates the team, with an almost pastoral mindset. They handle day-to-day BAU tasks, update stakeholders, write tickets etc, and broadly keep team members supported and happy. Their impact is simply measured as the time they save engineers by taking on all these administrative activities (as well as their contribution towards retention). Though noble, this neglects higher impact levers at their disposal, limiting their impact.
- An ‘Optimiser/Leader’ manager is what I consider an established manager enacting their role in its entirety. They have a notable, continuous impact on team productivity, pull all managerial levers (covered in the next section).
- A bad manager (included for completeness) has the potential to lower team effectiveness. Poor decisions, inter-personal conflicts, badly handled performance issues or poor hires, can all ultimately lower the effectiveness of a team.
The difference in impact between managers can be stark. They can appear extremely busy whilst having a marginal impact, most often the case for the ‘Operator’ above. This creates a common pitfall during review, where managers are rated highly for their level of input/effort, without considering lost output/impact potential.
How should this impact be achieved?
Broadly, I expect to see two modes of leadership employed by all managers, summarised as follows:
Enable where possible, Drive when necessary
This speaks to a ‘Yin Yang’ model for leadership, where a manager must demonstrate and balance support/enablement behaviours and drive/accountability behaviours. This can be broken out into a form of ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy’ for the team:
- Operating - Here we find the basic needs for a team to function. People feel safe and supported, there are clear roles and responsibilities with fair-but-firm accountability, operating cadences are in place and projects are structured and managed. When fulfilled, the team will operate at a ~steady state.
- Optimised - Beyond basic operation, here a manager is continuously and proactively pushing for greater team efficiency and effectiveness. Individuals are challenged and developed, decision cycles are optimised (through autonomy / empowerment), skillset utilisation is maximised, skill gaps are identified and actioned, over/under-engineering is actively managed, business cases for forward investment are advocated and progressed etc.
- Motivated - A step above we have the more emotional levers. On the ‘enabling’ side the team is aligned, engaged and connected. There is a resting confidence in leadership, team members enjoy their work and look forward to meeting up with colleagues. On the active ‘driven’ side, the team has a strong sense of purpose and ambition, striving to hit goals and celebrate wins during crunch times.
For each of the 6 areas, I would typically populate more detail on explicit expectations in those areas. This varies by company, but the overarching principle and structure remains.
What are my expectations and what does good look like?
At a high level, my expectations are two fold:
- Managers need to demonstrate both enablement and drive
- Managers need to continually strive upwards on the hierarchy
The nuance and challenge here is that circumstances will continuously impact what a manager is able to focus on or achieve.
- Maybe they’re a new manager, still developing into the role
- Maybe they’re establishing with a new team
- Company circumstances might cause disruption, breaking the team operating model or capacity to focus on optimisation+
- Perhaps all hands were needed in the code to hit a deadline
- A recent round of layoffs might drop the starting point on morale to a negative position
The challenge as a Director/Senior Manager comes in:
- Evaluating the state of the Manager’s team against the hierarchy
- Determining when a Manager had the scope/capacity to shift upwards, but didn’t
These for me are the key to managerial evaluation. This can primarily be achieved through skip level meetings, observation of team/stakeholder interactions and an understanding of the Manager’s activities.
What does good look like?
With this framing, ‘good’ looks like a manager who continually strives to optimise and motivate their team, creating the space and lifting themselves out of administrative tasks as much as possible to perform leveraged activities:
- They are able to quickly establish a functional operating model that frees up focus
- With an established and mature team, a high % of their time goes into optimisation and leadership
- They have a highly connected, engaged and driven team who push towards goals with a sustainable rhythm
Common anti-patterns
With the above framing for managerial expectations, here are the most common profiles I’ve come across who need prompting in the right direction.
The Operator
Mentioned a few times already, this is a manager who fills time operating the team. They often create systems and processes that seat them as a ‘central nervous system’ or ‘messaging bus’ for the team. They rarely challenge individuals and won’t be found motivating or lifting morale. Instead, they’ll be back in the code or they’ll have created a full-time role’s worth of administrative responsibility.
The Pastor
Perhaps the most common profile I’ve come across, often mistaken as servant leadership. They place all emphasis on enablement > drive, focussing on supporting / growing / aligning and inspiring team members. Though this offers half the package, they tend to lack firm accountability for responsibilities, steer clear of directive actions and struggle to drive commitment to outcomes when required. They need to recognise that their role includes the right-hand side of the equation, which can equally be enacted in the servant leader style.
The Hero
Where the “Pastor” lacks all driving behaviours, this manager lacks all enabling behaviours. All momentum and drive stems from this manager, who takes a leading role in any project. Though productive at first, their push for direct ownership limits individual growth and scales poorly. When they go on holiday, the pace drops off a cliff. They know how to drive individual accountability but lack supportive follow up, creating a low trust/safety environment and subsequent retention challenges.
The Tech-Lead-Turned-Manager
This is more an outcome of circumstance. The Tech Lead role naturally sits in the optimisation band, they already mentor engineers, challenge decisions and strive for efficiency in a project sense. Left unsupported, this can become a comfort area, with the bottom and top portions of the hierarchy given a token amount of focus.
