What Makes a Great Manager?

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Think about every manager you’ve ever had. Odds are you can sort the good ones from the forgettable ones almost instantly– and a name or two probably just came to mind.

The difference between a great manager and a mediocre one isn’t subtle. So, what actually separates the great ones? The answer isn’t their charisma, or technical capabilities, or even their time-management skills.

According to a Chicago Booth study that examined 10 years of data from 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers, the best managers excel at one key skill: matching their employees to roles that best align with their skills.

What’s worth emphasizing here is that finding the best employee-skills job match benefits both parties. On the one hand, it drives more productivity in the workplace. On the other hand, the employee who gets reassigned to a role where they can shine also ends up with higher pay and a greater likelihood of promotion.

In fact, the study found that six years under the best managers drove 20 more salary increases, 10% higher pay and bonuses, and three more promotions for every 100 workers, compared to before the switch. What these numbers suggest is that great managers don’t just create talent out of thin air. They’re better at spotting where talent is being wasted and moving it to where it can create the most value.

Not surprisingly, the study found that the best managers (which it called “highflyer” managers and defined as managers promoted to middle management by age 30) were themselves later managerial successes, with higher likelihoods of promotion to director level, stronger performance ratings, and more positive leadership feedback relative to all other managers.

The Best Managers are Good at Playing Chess

Marcus Buckingham, who has built a career studying what unlocks performance at work, put it memorably in his Harvard Business Review article ‘What Great Managers Do:’

Average managers play checkers, great managers play chess. In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can’t play if you don’t know how each piece moves…Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

So, How Does a Manager Actually Do This In Practice?

Buckingham offers the following four tips:

Capitalize on each worker’s unique strengths

Observe the tasks they’re naturally drawn to, or take note of the tasks they tell you they enjoy doing. Assign them work that aligns with those talents.

This may mean reconfiguring responsibilities across your entire team.

The benefit of doing this is that it introduces a healthy level of disruption into the team. It starts re-shuffling any existing hierarchies or practices that were once considered the laws of the office.

By capitalizing on each person’s unique strengths, you make them more accountable for the task by allowing them to take ownership of their specific strength. Over time, that ownership allows them to refine how they do their task to the best of their abilities.

It also creates a sense of interdependency in a team, where each employee can rely on one another’s skills and specialties.

Learn the idiosyncrasies of each individual and identify what motivates them

Pay attention to your employees and notice the unique things that galvanize each person in the team.

An employee who used to be an athlete, for example, might be motivated by the challenge of measured KPIs. Other workers might respond better to public recognition, which could mean they’re more motivated by goals set around earning an important job title.

At a day-to-day level, you also need to spot the ‘performance triggers’ that may just switch on an employee’s performance. This might be a specific time of day when they’re most productive. If they’re a late owl, then maybe their productivity hits at 11 pm. Or the trigger may be in having regular catch-ups with you, their manager.

According to Buckingham, the most effective trigger isn’t actually money– it’s recognition. No worker likes to feel ignored. Great managers know this and will tailor their recognition around what the worker responds best to– whether it’s praise in front of colleagues or a professional award.

Shape how you coach your employees around their learning style

Once you’ve figured out what motivates someone, the next challenge is figuring out how they learn.

Your employees will most likely fall into one of three broad learning styles:

• The Analyzer — They understand the task by taking it apart, examining and rebuilding it, piece by piece. They will need to get all the information first before they feel comfortable with the task. Teach them by role-playing and giving them a breakdown of each part of their performance afterwards. The analyzer doesn’t ‘wing it,’ so don’t expect them to thrive in new situations without giving them all the cards first.
• The Doer — Unlike the Analyzer, the Doer does all of their learning
• The Watcher — They learn by seeing the entire task being done, rather than by studying or doing the task themselves. You teach them best by taking them out onto the field and having them shadow your top performers on the task.

Don’t spend most of your time fixing weaknesses

Spending countless hours trying to coach an employee into doing a task they’re not good at is not likely to get you great results. It’s just not the best investment of your time. You’re better off spending that time carving out a role that actually utilizes their natural strengths.

Buckingham explains that great managers focus on strengths rather than weaknesses.

This speaks to research from Albert Bandura, the father of social learning theory, who found that self-efficacy (or the self-assurance in one’s ability to achieve their goals) allows one to set higher goals and stay more resilient through challenges.

Managers are therefore much better off encouraging self-efficacy by focusing on their workers’ strengths, rather than drilling into their weaknesses.

Great Managers Pay Attention, Now More Than Ever

The best manager isn’t ever going to be the smartest person in the room.

They’re also not the leader who delivers an inspiring speech that rallies everyone around one shared goal– that’s what makes a good leader, which requires a different skill from what makes a good manager.

Being a good manager is about knowing your people well enough to put them in the right seats and give them the tools, recognition, and space to thrive.

This requires you to pay attention– something that, in an era of remote work and overflowing inboxes, is harder than it sounds.

But that ability to pay attention is becoming more valuable than ever, especially given the current business landscape where technological change is occurring at a rate we’ve never seen before.

According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, 61% of employees expect their job roles to change significantly this year, in response to rapidly emerging technologies like AI.

Gone are the days when a manager’s role was limited to overseeing static job descriptions. Change is now essential for employees’ jobs to stay relevant, and the faster those roles evolve, the more important it becomes for managers to understand where each employee’s strengths can create the most value.

In a world where jobs are changing faster than ever, great management increasingly comes down to putting the right people in the right roles at the right time.

Put differently: the job was never to make better players out of the pieces you already have. It was to remember they were never checkers in the first place.