What makes a great manager?
We’ll distill the essence of what separates a bad manager from a good manager from a great manager.
How many times has this happened to you: You start a new job at a great company and you have a manager who seems to really like you. The two of you speak often and, over time, even start to grow close enough to where you feel like you might even be friends. You have weekly one-on-ones where you receive the kind of feedback that makes you feel confident that you’re doing your job well — nods of approval, quick words of affirmation. You explain what you’ve been working on or describe your approach to a project and you get a smile, a thumbs up or even a “great!” By the time you’ve been there several months, you’re convinced you’re killing it.
Then comes your first performance review. You go in feeling confident, only to find out from your manager that you haven’t been delivering the way they had hoped. “I’d really like to see more from you,” he says. He awkwardly delivers the negative feedback, though he tries to soften its impact by wedging it between complimentary platitudes. Still, you stagger out of your review wondering, “what just happened, here? Why didn’t I know he felt this way six months ago?”
You’ve just been hit with a feedback bomb — something that could have been prevented if your manager had simply been able to communicate with you from the beginning. Instead, he avoided conflict, preferring to come across as your friend rather than figuring out how to clearly articulate his expectations and thoughtfully deliver critical feedback you needed to succeed.
Most managerial failures come from a breakdown in either trust or communication. Sometimes it’s both. But great managers are the ones who are willing to work on their relationships and put their people and company first.
Bad managers can take many forms, and they don’t discriminate across disciplines or even industries. In our case, we’re product designers and, like most people, we’ve had our share of managers who have made our jobs less enjoyable, stifled our growth, or failed to communicate with us effectively. The question of “what makes a great design manager” is something we are constantly refining at Thumbtack. We’ve all had the opportunity to learn from past managers both how we should lead and how we need to be led.
Recently, we sat down with our entire team of product design and research managers in hopes of distilling the essence of what separates a bad manager from a good manager from a great manager. Not surprisingly, we kept coming back to the same themes — it turns out most people know the traits they look for in a manager and most great managers have those traits in common.
They Grow Their Reports
A good product design manager should be bullish on making their reports better. Some managers can be too willing to let the members of their team coast. But a manager’s charge is to keep team members from stagnating. A good manager understands the importance of pushing their reports to actually get better.
Now, pushing members of your team to improve and grow doesn’t mean simply throwing them into the deep end and telling them to swim. A manager’s job is to help nurture those new skills by working closely with their individual team members — often privately — and giving them a safe space to fail. At Thumbtack, our design team likes to say “fail privately, succeed publicly.” This means, when our manager pushes us outside of our comfort zone, we are given the room to make mistakes without feeling judged or worrying about being made to feel incompetent in front of others.
The best managers are able to show rather than tell, and they work with their reports one-on-one on both hard and soft skills. Once the report starts to pick up what is being taught, they can start to take the reins with the manager in a more supportive or consultative role. Eventually, the manager can fully step away, but the hard work has already been done — the report has learned a new skill or has taken on a new project without being set up to fail on a public stage.
They Provide Regular Feedback — Good or Bad
The relationship between a manager and a report should be a partnership. But just like in the performance-review situation we described earlier — a variation of which actually happened to both of us in previous jobs — the partnership between manager and report can only thrive when there is constant and transparent feedback. This relationship will work only if the manager sets clear expectations, timelines and action plans and the report trusts that the manager is genuinely interested and empathetic to their concerns.
The type of manager who would be guilty of delivering that surprise “feedback bomb” would fit the classic “people pleaser” persona: great at personal connections, bad at delivering critical feedback. People pleasers know how to make you feel good about yourself but freeze when it comes time to give you the kind of feedback that makes you better. The former is nice, but the latter is critical to a report’s long term success in their career. A manager who only knows how to tell a report what they want to hear is failing. The ones who are clear about their expectations and are able to hold their reports accountable when they don’t reach them are the ones who earn the trust of their team.
They Value Collaboration
Successful managers all know how to deftly navigate that delicate balance between enabling autonomy and knowing when it makes sense to be more collaborative. For some managers, collaboration can simply be knowing which members of the team would work best together on a particular project. That’s certainly an important skill to have. But the best managers are also able to build bridges between members of the team and other departments. When you’re an individual contributor and you’re focused on problems or issues specific to your own department, you may not always know the implications that your work could have with other teams or other parts of a product. Managers need to be able to have those relationships with people on other teams and be able to connect people and projects across the company.
That spirit of collaboration also applies to being the main conduit for information between management and individual contributors. Knowing how to manage both up and down is, in some ways, the most important form of collaboration a department leader needs to master. A manager’s reports need to trust that they have an ally who can effectively communicate their thoughts and concerns to the company’s top leadership. Similarly, the executive team must have faith that their managers can honestly communicate the company’s ideas to their reports as if they were their own, even — and, perhaps, especially — when that idea might be unpopular.
They Lose Their Ego
Becoming a manager has its perks: Managers have a higher profile within the company. They get to sit in on high-level meetings and learn all of the “need-to-know” information before anyone else. Their title is seen as more prestigious. The danger this presents, especially for new managers, is the potential for an inflated sense of importance. But the best managers are the ones who are able to put the company first, their team second and themselves (a distant!) third.
One of the themes we kept hearing when we talked to our product design managers at Thumbtack, was they all identified great managers as people who prioritized the team and company first. They valued managers who let their team take credit for their successes, rather than trying to assume that credit themselves.
A manager is a coach. A manager is a facilitator. A manager is a delegator. A manager finds personal satisfaction in setting people up for success. As product designers, we’re used to that sense of pride we feel when we are recognized for something we’ve created. When we cross over into management, we have to be willing to relinquish that limelight and let our individual contributors have ownership over the work they do. A manager’s success is defined by their team’s success and growth.
Everyone has their own “bad manager” cautionary tale. And for those of us who make the jump to management ourselves, the horror stories we may have lived through can actually have some value as we figure out our own style, our own way of communicating, and our own sense of right and wrong when it’s time to lead our own teams. Most managerial failures come from a breakdown in either trust or communication. Sometimes it’s both. But great managers are the ones who are willing to work on their relationships and put their people and company first.
Special thank you to Evan Smith for helping co-write the article and to Lauren Porter, Rannie Teodoro & Aaron Bailey for providing their insight into what makes a great manager 🙏.
