Manager Impact on Report Performance
Have you ever seen someone sort of flounder under a given boss, but as soon as they started reporting to a different leader their performance improved? Or, worse, someone who was doing great and then after starting to report to a new boss while doing the same job saw their performance tank?
I’ve been thinking for a while now that the impact of a particular leader and their leadership style on a given report will roughly fall into a spectrum between “working for this leader makes this report worse at performing their job” and “working for this leader makes this report better at performing their job.” It’s — much like a lot of other things I think about — a spectrum:
The yellow in the middle is important — because a leader can either play a negative impact on a report’s performance or a positive one, or they can have no meaningful impact on the report’s performance.
Critical to Note
It may be tempting to say that a leader who is ‘red’ with respects to a report is a ‘bad leader’, and a leader who is ‘green’ with respects to their report is a ‘good leader’. But this is not an absolute assessment of the leader’s ability, it’s how that leader specifically affects a given report. That means a great/green leader for one report could easily be a bad/red leader for another report. That doesn’t make them “a bad leader,” just “a bad leader for that person.” Getting judgmental or absolutist about this will set you on the wrong path.
OK, Cool, Why Should I Care?
Most employees out there report to someone. Some of us also have someone(s) reporting to us. This can be relevant on both sides
As a Report
The more insight and understanding I have of what kind of leaders boost my performance, are value-neutral, or detrimental to my performance, the better I can choose my leaders. While we don’t really get to choose our leaders all the time, we still can use this information as an input when we pursue new job opportunities.
Separately from this, and if we change how we think of the spectrum above as representing the population of leaders who I might report to and their impact on me, if I understand how that spectrum looks for me, I can start asking myself: Is this the spectrum I want for myself? Would I like to change it? How? For example, roughly speaking this is what that spectrum looks like for me:
Relatively few leaders out there will be beneficial to my performance. Very few leaders out there will be detrimental to my performance. Most leaders really end up being value-neutral for me.
So imagine you can choose between the spectrum above and this spectrum:
This spectrum belongs to someone who can be negatively impacted by far more leaders than the first spectrum.
Which spectrum of leaders would you like to be relevant for you as a report? I prefer the former, because it represents a much greater resilience to leadership styles that aren’t beneficial to me.
(You’ll notice in a moment that I’m not in any way addressing how one may work to change this spectrum for themselves. How would you go about doing that? Do you have any guesses? Let me know)
As a Leader
I think that at minimum, it’s good to have the understanding of what kind of people I may be ‘red leaders’ or ‘yellow leaders’ to.
Then it’s up to me to figure out whether I try to not be a leader for these sorts of people, or change my approach to leadership with them so I can at minimum not be detrimental to their performance.
As a concrete example, I left Netflix in 2018 with a pretty decent reputation for leading people — both ICs and managers — well. But, um, these were all very very senior people with tons of experience in their field. So then I went to Slack where I led three much more inexperienced people leaders. At my first performance review there, my boss basically said “you give your people leaders very high-level guidance and then get out of their way, expecting them to ask questions and for help if they need it, but they don’t even know that they need help sometimes and they certainly don’t really know how to ask for it.” I was a red leader for them — I had to lean in and spend more time getting to understand their space and offering more concrete help in dealing with the challenges they were dealing with.
(That experience, by the way, taught me enough valuable lessons that by the time I came back to Netflix and was working with a relatively inexperienced engineering manager I now had the tools to be … well, I’d like to think ‘green’, but at least ‘yellow’ in terms of my impact on him).
Another aspect of this for us as leaders is thinking about it when we assess performance issues of others. Is it possible that they’re under-performing because they’ve got the wrong boss (for them)? What can or should be done about that? This is particularly important when we’re looking at situations where:
A. Someone is suddenly reporting to you, and came to you with baggage. “Oh, they’re an under-performer. You’ll need to fire them or significantly turn them around.” Consider starting with an assumption that they had the wrong leader for them, and attempting to disprove that assumption first, before concluding the issue is this person’s performance;
B. Someone was performing great under someone else, but now they’re reporting to you. They came to you with such a great reputation, but … they’re not doing so well. Oh my. One possibility of course is that this person’s previous boss was too easy on them, had too low standards. Consider the possibility that in this case we (well, you) are the baddies.
There are also diversity-related aspects to this. I’ve known some leaders who were absolutely great for men reporting to them, but quite harmful to women reporting to them, not in any way because they treated these women differently from how they treated the men, but because the men were impacted far less by the leader’s leadership style than the women reporting to that leader (the standard approach to this is to coach women to be better at dealing with bad leaders. For hopefully-obvious reasons, I think that’s about as wrong as you can be).
tl;but I read until the end
As reports, it’s worth understanding what kind of leaders impact us well/poorly, and over time build up more resilience to leaders who might otherwise be bad for our performance.
As leaders, it’s worth having an understanding of what our ‘target population’ of reports are, and thinking about how we’d like to expand that target population, if at all.
