Being good at a job doesn't tell you how to manage the people doing it. An engineer can design a system and struggle to coach another engineer. A good analyst can become the bottleneck for an entire team by checking every decision.
The work changes when you become a manager. You choose priorities, help people improve, and take responsibility for what the team delivers. Much of that depends on expertise you don't have. These sections draw on management research and a few useful books, with a development guide at the end.
Four terms used here
Professional (knowledge worker)
Someone whose work depends on specialized knowledge and judgment: an engineer, analyst, designer, or customer success manager. Peter Drucker called them knowledge workers.
Engagement
How involved someone feels in their work and how much they care about doing it well.
Discretionary effort
The extra attention and initiative someone chooses to put into a job beyond its requirements.
All in
A person who wants the work to succeed and takes responsibility for helping it succeed.
The man with the stopwatch
A useful method for a task with a known answer.
At Bethlehem Steel, Frederick Taylor studied how laborers loaded pig iron. He prescribed when to lift and when to rest, selected workers suited to the task, and paid more for meeting the target. His account reported a large increase in output.
That approach fits work whose steps can be observed and repeated. It also gives the manager a particular role: work out the method, then make sure people follow it. The trouble starts when you carry that role into a job where finding the method is part of the work.
The worker who owns the factory
Expertise changes what a manager needs to provide.
An experienced engineer may understand a technical problem better than their manager. The manager still needs to set expectations and judge the result, but prescribing each step can waste the expertise they hired. Drucker described the difference this way:
Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears, and it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset.Peter Drucker
Give people the outcome, the constraints, and the information they need to make decisions. Keep fixed procedures where consistency matters, such as lockout rules, hazardous-material handling, and critical handoffs. People can follow those rules and still have room to diagnose a problem or improve a process.
What you expect from people
Your assumptions shape the work you give them.
Douglas McGregor described two views of workers in The Human Side of Enterprise. Theory X assumes people avoid work and need close control. Theory Y assumes people can direct their own effort toward goals they accept.
These assumptions affect how you manage. If you make every decision and give someone only routine tasks, you leave them little opportunity to show initiative. Their dependence on you may be a result of the arrangement.
The gap
Meeting the requirements leaves plenty of judgment unaccounted for.
An engineer can complete the assigned fix or also investigate why the problem keeps returning. A customer success manager can answer the ticket or notice that several customers are struggling with the same setup. That extra attention is discretionary effort.
The bars illustrate a distinction, not measured amounts. Job requirements cover part of the work; people choose how much additional attention and initiative to give.
A committed team can still work on the wrong priorities or deliver poor results. Engagement helps people do the work; the manager also has to choose the work, set a quality standard, and address misses.
Pay and the work itself
Fixing a bad working condition may leave the job just as dull.
Frederick Herzberg's account of motivation separates the things people complained about from the things they found satisfying. Pay, policies, and working conditions appeared in one group. Achievement, responsibility, and growth appeared in the other.
Hygiene factors
- Salary and benefits
- Company policy
- Working conditions
- Job security
- A reasonable boss
Motivators
- Achievement
- The work itself
- Responsibility
- Recognition
- Growth and advancement
Herzberg called the first group hygiene factors and the second motivators. This is a useful distinction to consider when improving a job, not a rule that pay can never motivate.
In an AT&T example Herzberg described, shareholder-correspondence clerks gained authority to sign their own letters and handle more of each inquiry. Pay stayed the same. The reported service index rose from the 20s to the 90s. The change gave them more responsibility for a complete piece of work.
I can charge a man's battery, and recharge it, and recharge it again. But it is only when he has his own generator that we can talk about motivation.Frederick Herzberg
Autonomy, mastery, purpose
A reward can change how someone approaches a problem.
In Sam Glucksberg's 1962 experiment, a cash incentive slowed people solving a puzzle that required them to rethink an object's use. When the setup made the solution more obvious, the incentive helped. A later review of 128 studies found that some expected, tangible rewards reduced intrinsic motivation, the desire to do an activity for its own sake.
Daniel Pink organized his account around autonomy, control over how you work; mastery, getting better at the work; and purpose, understanding why it matters. These are useful questions about a job. The research doesn't establish that every bonus harms creative work.
Toggle the bonus to compare the two conditions. The bar lengths are illustrative.
Small wins
People notice whether their effort leads anywhere.
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer examined nearly 12,000 workday diary entries. Progress on meaningful work was closely associated with better days. A small step forward could matter; blocked progress and setbacks could spoil the day.
An experiment by Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica, and Dražen Prelec tested something more basic: whether anyone acknowledged the work.
Match the support to the task
An expert can be a beginner on a new assignment.
Andy Grove called this task-relevant maturity: how much experience and confidence someone has with the particular work in front of them. A senior engineer may need little direction on a design and close support when managing people for the first time.
Too much direction limits an experienced person. Too little can leave a beginner stuck. Treat these stages as a guide to the conversation.
The one-on-one gives you a place to find out what support is needed. Let the person bring their agenda. Ask about decisions, obstacles, and work you would otherwise miss. Grove made the case for the time this takes:
Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate's work for two weeks, or for some eighty-plus hours.Andy Grove, High Output Management
Ask before giving advice
Find out how the person understands the problem.
In Google's original Project Oxygen findings, coaching ranked first among the behaviors of its best managers; technical expertise ranked last. Google reported that median manager-favorability scores rose from 83% to 88% between 2010 and 2012 as it put the findings to use.
Michael Bungay Stanier calls the urge to supply an answer the "advice monster." His questions, "What's on your mind?" and "And what else?", give the other person time to explain. Ask what they have tried and where they want help. Offer an answer when it is useful, especially when they lack information you have.
Coaching is no longer a specialty. You cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.The leadership handbook of Bill Campbell
Care personally, challenge directly
Useful feedback names something the person can change.
Kim Scott's Radical Candor puts care for the person alongside direct feedback about their work. Her term ruinous empathy describes a familiar failure: avoiding a clear message because it might hurt. The person then keeps making a mistake you could have helped them correct.
Make praise specific too. Tell someone what they did and why it helped. Buckingham and Goodall's case for noticing strengths is useful here. It doesn't remove the need to correct errors or enforce standards.
Leave room for other people to think
Helping can become taking over.
Liz Wiseman calls leaders Multipliers when they make use of other people's capabilities, and Diminishers when their own interventions limit them. A manager can do the latter while trying to help: answer every question, rescue every project, or propose more ideas than the team can pursue.
It isn't how much you know that matters. What matters is how much access you have to what other people know.Liz Wiseman
Make it safe to report a problem
Reported errors depend on whether people feel able to report them.
In her hospital research, Amy Edmondson found that teams judged to work well together sometimes reported more medication errors. Better reporting could explain the apparent contradiction: people felt able to admit mistakes. A low reported error rate can also mean problems stay hidden.
Psychological safety is the shared belief that speaking up won't bring punishment or humiliation. Google's team study also identified it as an important factor. It matters when someone has to question a plan, flag a risk, or ask for help.
Give people the context to decide
Delegation needs a named owner and enough information.
Netflix's culture memo calls this context, not control. Explain the strategy, the constraints, and the risks so the person closest to the work can make an informed decision.
Then say who owns the decision and when it needs to be escalated. Removing an approval step helps only if the person has authority to act. Keep review where the risk requires it, and explain why it is there.
If you dummy-proof the system, only dummies will want to work there.Reed Hastings, Netflix
Specific goals
Agree on what a good result looks like.
In Gary Latham and James Baldes's logging study, trucks were loaded to about 60% of the legal weight limit. The company replaced "do your best" with a goal of 94%, agreed with drivers and their union. Loads rose to around 90%. The company estimated savings of $250,000 in trucks it no longer needed to buy.
Locke and Latham's review of goal-setting research describes why specific, challenging goals often help: they direct attention and make progress easier to assess. People also need the skills, feedback, and commitment to pursue them.
Choose the measure carefully. A speed target can sacrifice quality. For unfamiliar work, a learning goal may be more useful: test the plausible approaches and explain which one should proceed. Agree on what must be learned before setting an output quota.
Company examples
These practices exist outside research studies.
The figures are historical accounts and company reports. They do not establish that the management practices caused the results.
Company histories cannot isolate the effects of culture from products, markets, or other decisions. They do show different ways to give employees authority. Before copying one, identify the decision you would actually let someone make.
When someone is falling short
Address the problem while there is still time to improve.
A missed standard needs a conversation. Describe the gap and ask what is causing it. The answer might be skill, workload, unclear expectations, or a poor fit for the role. You need to know which before choosing a remedy.
Working conditions can change performance substantially. Toyota rehired about 85% of the former workforce when it reopened GM's troubled Fremont plant as NUMMI. The same people worked differently in a different system. Check the system you have given someone before concluding they cannot do the job.
Use the answers to choose between support, a change of role, and ending the arrangement. Set a review date when you choose an improvement plan.
If improvement is possible, agree on the required change, the support you will provide, and a date to review it. If the role is a poor fit, address that directly. Waiting without a plan leaves the person uncertain and the team carrying unfinished work.
Judge the effect on the team as well as individual output. Housman and Minor's study of toxic workers found substantial costs from serious misconduct, even among productive employees. A sales total or delivery count can miss the damage someone does to colleagues.
This calls for a decision about the person and the job. A forced ranking that requires dismissing a fixed share of the team cannot tell you whether any particular person has failed a reasonable standard.
Managing through other managers
Several teams need decisions that one team cannot make alone.
A director cannot inspect every decision or coach every person. Doing so creates a queue and leaves the team's managers unsure of their authority. The job includes choosing priorities across teams and helping their managers lead.
Watch whether the managers you lead can make good decisions without waiting for you.
Agree with each manager on the outcomes, resources, and decisions they own. Review how their team is doing and how they are developing people. Use skip-level conversations to understand the work; avoid giving instructions that create a second chain of command.
A broad goal such as "improve retention" needs choices. Which customers need attention? What work will stop? Where will quality take precedence over speed? Put people and budget behind those choices. Warn executives about risks early and explain changes to the teams affected.
Cross-team disagreements need a shared outcome and someone responsible for resolving the decision. Bring the evidence and explain the tradeoff. Escalate when the people involved cannot resolve it, with the disagreement clear enough for someone else to decide.
Check who can cover critical roles. If one person's week away stops decisions, give someone else practice making those decisions while there is still help available.