This page is a work in progress, part of a multi-year effort to capture and share learnings, frameworks, tools, and processes to run organizations. See Running Organizations for more.

Managers are the frontline and middle managers needed to serve an organization that has outgrown a "hub and spoke" CEO/Leadership Team model.

This page is not about when to hire a CFO or whether you should have a marketer in the C-Suite (CMO) or an operator/COO. Those questions are highly context-dependent. Assuming you have a Leadership Team that forms a solid foundation, what I’m talking about here is the managers you need to staff within departments.

Functional leaders should be hired first, whenever possible. Functional leaders are the Directors and VPs who are experts in their functions. These leaders have the expertise to effectively hire, train and mentor people, including middle managers. Due to their expertise, they'll handle the job responsibilities more effectively than a CEO or COO.

Are frontline team members slipping through the cracks or feeling isolated? How are your employee retention rate and Glassdoor Reviews? When people in a growing organization get lost in the reporting structure, what breaks out is dysfunction. People feel isolated, they perceive unfairness or struggle to cope with the chaos, and they find others in the organization who feel the same way, ultimately creating toxicity.

Before you get here, promote internally or hire from the outside to staff managers who can mentor, train, coach, and connect frontline team members.

A team of 15 can be managed by an energetic CEO. People can mostly self-manage, or the CEO can dictate a lot of the day-to-day activity. Most organizations at this size will have other Leadership help - whether it's a COO/President, or a functional Director or two. As functions are built out, Directors begin to feel stretched and struggle to take on new initiatives without the help of additional Managers. This is the time to start to build out middle management.

One key issue at < 50 employees is that it's not possible (or a good idea) to staff an entire management team. Instead of frontline staff "wearing many hats" as it goes in early-stage companies, when you get to a few dozen employees it's often Managers who are managing a ton of people and running around putting fires out.

After 50 employees, and certainly before 100, organizations can afford to build out a complete management team. This is the stage where the first sensible org chart is complete.

Managers are there to support the work and the people doing it. Managers don't "control" the work. Managers serve the business as the "internal suppliers" of the organization.

Managers bring clarity and guidance where it's lacking. They keep employees engaged and motivated and growing as people.

Management succeeds when it brings energy, operational discipline, and accountability to organizations. While mission, vision, and strategy need to be made accessible to everyone in the organization, how those components translate into action is the job of management.

The action itself, though, is the arena of the people who report to Managers, and that's why Management should be focused on creating enthusiasm and focus on the front lines.

Enthusiasm and focus come down to leadership. Management is not about monitoring or “supervising” people, or controlling people, but inspiring people to want to achieve.

In a constantly changing world, our organizations need to be constantly changing. How they change is ultimately decided by Leadership Teams, but the specifics of change are always an interplay between Management and staff.

The specifics can't or shouldn't be dictated by the top team, as the leaders at the top cannot stay on top of the details of every function. Functional managers have the strongest sense of what needs to be done, and how to get it done through their Direct Reports.

Change initiatives are a large part of the "implementation" work that managers take on. If you want to improve culture, improve the system, or change key processes, you need management to move the mass of individuals to change, often one by one.

If you want to create change at scale, and you don't have a management team that can work with individuals one by one, it won't happen.

If you do have a fully-staffed management team, but they're not committed to the vision, it won't happen. Having a management group that is fully staffed and committed to change is how you create organizational and cultural change.

Making managers "change leaders," according to the ADKAR process, means that management must understand the situation "on the ground," move individuals and hold people accountable:

If managers fight change, the change will fail. Any change you attempt to pass down must have buy-in, if not excitement, from management. According to ADKAR, the reasons why managers fight change are:

Managers have to know their people to be able to do a good job. A good test of any manager is if they can describe their direct reports in detail - their strengths and weaknesses, learning edges, their personality, and what they've accomplished.

Knowing people requires working with them, communicating with them, and spending time with them. For managers, it might also mean talking to others to triangulate information and generate more well-rounded perspectives.

Some highly-perceptive and emotionally intelligent managers just "get people." For others, it simply takes time and relationship-building. For that reason, frequently switching out managers and changing manager relationships (i.e. reorganizing) is highly disruptive.

Good Managers are clear with their Direct Reports about the vision of the organization and the mission of the Function. They create and communicate clear team and function Objectives and the KPIs that predict performance. If managers are not clear on these fundamental areas, their direct reports are unlikely to know how to be productive in their roles.

Managers should be heavily involved in the creation of Rocks/OKRs and their follow-through (accountability to completion). They should also define and help their teams define appropriate KPIs to understand whether performance is on track or not.

Managers don't "do the work" and don't bail people out of doing the work by doing it for them. Good managers push their direct reports to grow. They know how to design "stretch assignments" that facilitate the growth of their people.

Good managers have a sense of what kind of tasks and projects are appropriate for their direct reports, and what kind of work they should do themselves. They allow their direct reports to fail in small ways and provide a safety net for mission-critical tasks they've delegated.

For more on Delegation, see Deciding & Delegating.

Managers train inexperienced talent and help onboard new talent into the organization. They train on processes, procedures, and the basics of succeeding in a given job function. They don't necessarily do all of an employee's training, but they are accountable for ensuring that their people are trained.

Managers also train on newly-created processes and procedures, which include socializing change. They make sure everyone is capable of performing the new way when processes are changed.

Training done by managers is often more effective than training done from the outside for two reasons. One reason is that Managers can impart implicit knowledge, color, and cultural understanding by providing commentary as they train. The second reason is that the act of Managers spending time on training shows the talent that the organization backs the training and is committed to them being effective in their role.

Managers who focus on Mentoring and Coaching their Direct Reports to improve their performance are, in my experience, some of the best Managers most people have ever had at work.

Mentorship is giving Direct Reports answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Managers mentor talent by providing "in my experience" advice and help.

While training gives people the explicit knowledge and understanding to be able to solve simple and straightforward problems, we all run into complex and chaotic problems that are dependent on context. In those situations, Managers who have "been there" can guide their direct reports toward the best solutions.

Coaching is a process of using questions to teach people to think for themselves and solve their own problems. Coaching builds responsibility and autonomy in the organization. Coaching builds respectful and meaningful relationships between people and should be a default tool for managers.

While mentorship gives answers and approaches when a direct report is lacking direction, coaching is about building a direct report's ability to help themself. Good managers know that they can't change people and they can't force people to grow.

Sir John Whitmore's GROW Model is the simplest tool for coaching because it follows an easy formula and can be done by nearly anyone, not just managers. It’s as simple as “What do you want?” (Goal), “Where are you now?” (Reality), “What could you do?” (Options), and “What will you do?” (Will).

Feedback serves as a mirror that helps people become more self-aware. The purpose of feedback is to help the person receiving the feedback improve. If feedback doesn't help people grow, it's a waste of time. Part of judging whether feedback might help a person grow is whether they're willing to hear it, and that has a lot to do with whether the manager-direct report relationship is strong enough. This is where "knowing their people" is extremely important.

Managers must be able and willing to deliver both positive feedback and critical feedback.

Positive Feedback is praise, recognition and appreciation. Positive feedback builds motivation and good vibes. Managers shouldn't need a special reason to give positive feedback as long as they're paying attention to the Direct Reports' work.

The best kind of positive feedback resonates with us and teaches us something about the way we are viewed at work or shows us that we’re capable of more.

Critical Feedback helps people grow more than positive feedback because it tells them how to improve. Unlike positive feedback, which can be sourced from all over your organization, only certain cultures enable meaningful critical feedback from people other than managers. If managers don't give critical feedback to direct reports, the organization doesn't get improved performance.

One issue with withholding critical feedback when it needs to be delivered is that over time, managers start to resent their direct reports.

Situation, Behavior, Impact is the most simple feedback model I've come across. It can be used for positive and critical feedback.

Another model for feedback is Start, Stop, Continue. You can use this in team settings and meetings of all kinds. It ensures that you can give specific positive AND critical feedback without delivering the infamous "shit sandwich."

Feedback is personal. There's no way around that. It's not "just business." Our work is a representation of who we are. Good managers take both positive and critical feedback seriously.

1:1s build the relationship between the Manager and Direct Report and help the Direct Report get unblocked. They are NOT the Manager's meeting, and the agenda is not the Manager's. The 1:1 is a shared meeting, with a shared agenda.

1:1s must be held weekly. Two weeks is too long - too much happens in two weeks. Keep them on the calendar. Don't try to "find a time" every week - it won't happen. Thirty minutes is plenty. If you need more time to work on something, create a separate meeting.

It's OK to miss a 1:1 every once in a while, but only at the direct report’s discretion. Keeping 1:1s is the best tool the Manager has for building and growing the relationship. When a manager cancels a 1:1, they send the message that direct report isn’t worth their time.

Managers hold hierarchical power over their direct reports, so 1:1 is not the appropriate arena for the manager to exercise power. If the Manager steamrolls a 1:1, the 1:1 becomes a "manager meeting" instead of a relationship-building meeting.

Managers should take notes in 1:1s. Managers can't assume they'll remember one month from now what all seven of their direct reports said this week. Notetaking shows the Direct Report that what they say and think, matters.

Some 1:1s will be highly impactful and some will feel unproductive for both parties - that's OK. Keeping the discipline is important. A strong relationship will create more productive 1:1s over time.

The simplest 1:1 agenda is to divide the meeting into 15 minutes of the Direct Report's agenda items and 15 minutes of the Manager's items.

Great managers don't just influence their direct reports and empower their people to perform. Great managers think globally, working across teams and functions to drive results for the organization.

Google's Project Oxygen initially identified (2008) the eight behaviors of their best Managers. As they scaled, they updated that list to 10 behaviors, as employees made clear they wanted Managers to exhibit more "cross-organization collaboration" and "stronger decision making". Those behaviors are the subject of this section.

Part of understanding the broader organization is building and maintaining dialogue across functions, with other managers and individual contributors.

"Managing by Walking Around" is about seeing and sensing what's happening in an organization. The more we can see with our own eyes, and the more we can avoid assumptions, the better decisions we can make.

Sam Walton's practice of walking around and taking notes on index cards can be applied in a remote work environment (i.e. through an "Issues List"), and at any level of management.

Managers have a valuable perspective on how work actually gets done because they see it and hear about it firsthand, and from other managers around them. When they see how their direct reports and teams contribute to the larger organization, they can begin to effectively manage Business Processes.

New managers often overreact to issues they hear from their direct reports. They often try to "fix the people,” rather than assess the system at work. Once a manager can understand patterns in performance and see how business processes serve or inhibit their people, they begin to differentiate whether a given issue is a personnel issue or a process issue.

Ray Dalio explains what Managers do when they reach this point:

New managers are brought a slew of problems and one-off issues. It's easy to see one issue twice and conclude that things just aren't working around here. Managers need to treat issues seriously but also understand whether the issue is one of simple variance and whether it's an issue worth solving at all.

Drawing up process-flow diagrams and seeing the "machine," is helpful, but it doesn't account for variance in performance. Variance cannot be stamped out, as the organization is NOT a machine, but a collection of people who will make mistakes.

The Manager who try to over-correct for variance become process enthusiasts who:

In a given function, there are multiple systems at work. Processes are the things people do within a system. A system has multiple processes running within it. Improving results is not always about improving single processes. Sometimes, systems need overhauling.

In a Marketing team, the "Social Media" system might have a single process for "Publishing on TikTok," which includes multiple stakeholders, contributors, and procedures. Most managers can improve a process by streamlining it, adding failsafe steps, or improving communication at different steps. Great managers can see how the "Publishing on TikTok" process interacts with other processes and fits into the overall Social Media system.

They're able to see strategy incoherence, limiting beliefs or assumptions behind the system. They see that optimizing the "Publishing" process for local maxima, beyond a certain point, doesn't improve organizational performance.

The great manager who can see at this layer of abstraction is a candidate to lead a function.

Whether you decide to hire Managers mostly from the outside or develop them all internally, every organization with the intent to grow should have a plan for developing people into Managers. If you don't have a plan, your only succession plan is to recruit from the outside.

Training new managers on coaching and mentoring, feedback and 1:1s will help you avoid the common problems of micro-management and ensure that employees have the best employee-manager experience they've ever had.

Management can be a difficult change for superstar individual contributors. It's a job of emotional labor, it's less connected to visible, measurable impact, and it's often not as creative as individual contributor roles. New managers who lack emotional intelligence can struggle the most.

Emotionally intelligent people have Self Awareness, Social Awareness, and the ability to Self-Regulate. They can build and manage effective relationships with others. There's an argument to be made that this is the most important ability to staff in your organization:

These areas can be developed:

Unfortunately, we can’t train self-awareness, and developing it takes time. Of all of the abilities that go into Management, we're least equipped to "develop" emotional intelligence in the business world.

To find your managers, you need to identify people who exhibit high emotional intelligence.

Instead of trying to shoehorn every expert IC into a management role, identify your people who already exhibit leadership abilities. Leadership is not always loud. Look for people who feel rewarded for helping others, even in small ways, like mentoring a new hire or including others in team events, or calling on quiet people in meetings.

Look for people who lead themselves, who don't wait for direction, and who get a lot done. If they can't manage themselves, they'll be unlikely to handle a less straightforward management role, and they'll be less likely capable of helping others.

Holding managers accountable is a key problem in many organizations. It’s easy to extend autonomy to managers and directors and then allow them to take it away from their direct reports. I believe that equation needs to be flipped. Control needs to be distributed to direct reports, while managers need complete clarity about what they should be doing and how they should be doing it.

Without clarity on what outcomes managers are accountable for, you can't hold them accountable. I want my managers to develop people, create and implement positive change in line with our vision and keep people engaged and performing. How you hold them to account is about measuring them against the criteria you choose.

If they don't have accountability, you'll likely end up with departmental silos, where managers work to defend their turf, instead of optimizing for global maxima - the organization's performance. Peter Scholtes outlines this problem in The Leader's Handbook:

Measuring the performance of managers tends to be even more difficult than your average IC. New managers don't get to choose the system they work within or the people who report to them, and they don't do "the work" themselves. Over time, their inputs lead to good outputs, but in the short term, you need to know that they're putting in the right kinds of effort.

Like with any role, performance measurement should not be reduced to a single number. A composite of several areas, namely team performance and survey results tends to be the best way to assess the performance of a given manager. Here are a few categories to think through.