Managers have a peculiar problem: it is extraordinarily difficult to know whether you are actually good at managing people.
Your reports generally do what you ask. Your difficult conversations mostly end in agreement. People rarely tell you that your advice is terrible or your communication style is making them miserable. It is tempting to interpret all of this as evidence that you’re pretty good at the job.
Which brings me, naturally, to bowling with small children.
I was babysitting recently, and we decided to go bowling. It was…an experience.
I grabbed a couple of bright pink eight-pound bowling balls off the rack and set up the bumpers. In the first few frames, they were timid, rolling the ball granny-style down the lane. It crept so slowly I wondered if the ball might get stuck. On the ponderous journey down the lane, the ball bounced off the bumpers once or twice and managed to knock down a few pins.
Once the kids realized the bumpers guaranteed no consequences, they got more…spirited…chucking the ball overhand. I winced after every cacophonous crash into the wooden planking.
By frame six, all composure had been lost. I had four overstimulated goblins, and their exuberance was feeding back into itself like an ouroboros fueled by Sprite and screaming.
They were positively launching the ball as hard as they could at the bumpers just to watch it ricochet back and forth. Pins exploded into haphazard split configurations I did not think possible. All hope that any one of them would “learn to bowl” was lost.
As I prayed for the game to end before someone broke something, I realized I had been watching a remarkably accurate simulation of people management.
(I am a sick, sick person and do not belong in polite society.)
The kids thought they were bowling. They weren’t. The bumpers were doing far more of the work than they realized.
Managers have bumpers too.
Weber’s Got a Gun
As the manager of a team, you possess positional authority. That is, you have an innate capacity to influence or compel behavior through rules, rewards, and coercion. It is a form of hard power, distinct from the charismatic authority you derive from your relationships, personality, and ability to win friends and influence others. I’m loosely summarizing Max Weber’s Tripartite Classification of Authority.
Students of modern management theory will tell you they don’t rely on hard power because command-and-control doesn’t work—nobody wants a micromanager! They motivate their teams through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. They cultivate relationships and build deep mental models of their reports to better understand and support their continued growth. Servant leadership and all that jazz. They would attest that most, if not all, of their influence derives from charismatic authority. Why else would they spend all that time getting to know you in 1-1s and reading up on the latest pop-psychology!?
I hate to break it to you, but you’re bowling with bumpers.
That positional authority you supposedly “don’t use” is doing a lot of work behind the scenes to influence behavior. Every radically candid, non-violent, crucial conversation you have that ✨magically💫 ends well owes as much to your formal authority as to your interpersonal skills. It’s actually pretty obvious if one could hear how transparently awkward they sound most of the time!
Delusions of Grandeur
When we attribute our cat-herding success to exceptional empathy, communication acumen, and adroit people-reading, there is a lot of self-deception at play.
The deception begins when we assume that the lack of feedback implies exceptional performance…but that isn’t what it means at all. Your boss rarely observes your day-to-day interactions closely enough to judge them, while your reports have excellent information and terrible incentives to share it.
When was the last time a subordinate vehemently disagreed with you or delivered real, honest, direct feedback? Go on, think hard, I’ll wait.
Most managers cannot think of anything except a few times when someone rizzed them up about “learning so much from them” or some such vacuous blather.
The really severe disagreements and deep cuts I’ve encountered all came from low performers—people who were being actively managed out and whom I had already written off as “just not getting it.” How suspicious that the only negative feedback signals we encounter tend to come from untrusted sources and are easily ignored!
Simply possessing hard power is enough to coerce and to create an echo chamber that reinforces our self-image and confidence in our own superiority. We are all doing the managerial equivalent of hurling bowling balls into the gutter, blissfully unaware of the invisible bumpers that ensure we get a strike.
No Country for Candid Men
I have attempted to “fix” this so many times.
Directly asking for candid feedback: doesn’t work. It just stresses your reports out, and they inevitably dress up some strength as a faux weakness, like a bad answer to the “What is your greatest weakness?” interview question.
Carefully self-deprecating to set the tone that you are feedback-oriented: reports will either try to puff you up (“no you’re not like that at all!”) or they will interpret this as a signal you are aware of the issue but can’t/won’t actually improve.
Anonymous feedback surveys: anything delivered here is usually obfuscated to the point of being inactionable. Just as useful feedback to a report needs specific situations and behaviors (wahoo for SBI), useful feedback to you does too.
Asking for feedback about extremely specific moments: this one actually sort of works, assuming you follow through on improving. If you don’t, or quietly disregard the feedback, then your reports will stop responding honestly. Moreover, you cannot do this all the time—it gets annoying—and it relies on a rare level of self-awareness to know “I should ask about <this specific interaction>; I’m not sure it went perfectly.”
Beyond your specific choice of tactics, you will deal with employees who are constitutionally unable to be direct. Maybe they are from a “guess” (high-context, indirect feedback) culture. Maybe they gave real feedback to some prior manager who snapped and lashed out, and now they are permanently scarred. Maybe they are in a compromising situation that makes the risk/reward of upward feedback not worth it (e.g., visa sponsorship).
Subordinates who trust you enough to be brutally honest are extremely rare, often cultivated over many months/years of collaboration, and are worth their weight in gold. This is half the reason new leaders import their own cronies from past roles: it can sometimes be the only way to avoid flying completely blind!
Waiting for the Exit Interview
At its core, the real problem is a disrupted and delayed feedback loop—the time between “oopsie I said something insane to my employee” and “something bad happens” can be weeks/months/never. Your inability to connect bad behavior with consequences that come many months later means you’ll never figure out what went wrong or how to improve.
I remember very poignantly a 1:1 where I showed my manager a list of things I had accomplished over the prior week. As one of the uber tech leads for Google Drive, I often got pulled into lots of emergencies and cross-org technical discussions rather than working on “one big thing,” and this week was no different. I had resolved a major production outage, prevented a major security vulnerability from shipping in Gemini, unblocked the (now launched) Help Me Organize feature, and solved a we’re-totally-fucked, extinction-level bug impacting enterprise users. After walking through all this, she said, “Some feedback for you: this is great work, but I can’t really reward you for any of this. You need to work on more visible priorities.”
And that, my friends, was the beginning of the end. I had saved our (her) ass four times that week and wasn’t expecting anything for it beyond “thanks, carry on”—and got something very different instead. I would exit the company five months later.
I showed no distress or dissent in the moment; in fact, I agreed for a litany of reasons:
As a key power player, there was an enormous opportunity cost to not working on the major revenue drivers.
We needed to build a deeper bench of tech leads and couldn’t rely on the same two people all the time. The only way to do that is to trust them and let them fail if need be.
I am no stranger to the politics required to land senior promos as a former manager of managers (…of managers of managers of managers—kill me), and it was in our collective interest to get more Drive leads elected into upper leadership.
From her side of the table, the conversation probably looked like a successful coaching interaction. To this day, she probably has no idea it was that 30-second discussion that started the domino rally of my exit. It wasn’t an obvious, bombastic disagreement… but as someone who believes deeply in serving our users above all else, it was clear our values weren’t fully aligned. As a result, when a recruiter pinged a couple months later, I was receptive and took the call. The folks on the other end were very persuasive, and the rest is history.
That is the fundamental problem with managerial feedback loops. You can say something damaging on Tuesday, receive nothing but apparent agreement on Wednesday, and discover six months later that the person has quit. By then, there may be no observable connection between cause and effect—and quite possibly no feedback at all.
Retracting the Bumpers
If you care at all about actually being good at your job (or, IDK, a good person even), your prime directive is to figure out a working feedback loop: a way to know in real time whether you’re truly connecting with and influencing your reports or just straight up coercing them.
This is hard. As I mentioned above, you can carefully curate your direct reports to prioritize bluntness and mutual trust, but that isn’t exactly scalable. Also, people won’t necessarily jump ship on your schedule (damn you, Matt). Turning new reports, aka strangers, into close confidants is a labor of love that takes 6-12 months of concerted effort and a lot of luck.
At an absolute minimum, you need a few trusted truth-tellers: individual contributors others confide in, but willing to share what they hear with you. This has worked absolute wonders for me no matter how high up in the org I get. Even now, I have regular 1:1s with a couple hand-picked engineers three layers down! I know what you’re thinking: “snitches get stitches,” but there is a way to approach this that is supportive rather than tattling. There’s a big difference between “Sally thinks you’re a smelly loser” and “Sally interpreted what was shared at the all-hands differently than you intended and it really demotivated her.”
Barring that, there is always the nuclear option. Give up your hard power. Go back to being an IC.
Even a Staff/Principal IC only has a modicum of positional authority since you no longer sign anyone’s paycheck. Even better, the expectation that you have Big Huge Org/Company-wide Impact™ means you’ll be forced to influence dozens of peers who have no incentive to listen to you.
As an IC, the bumpers come down. If your communication is confusing, people remain confused. If your proposal is unpersuasive, nobody adopts it. If people don’t trust your judgment, they stop involving you. The failures that positional authority once concealed become observable again.
If you’re going to lots of meetings and dispensing lots of advice, but none of your ideas ever leave the “concept” phase, then you’re probably failing.
If others are taking your ideas and running with them, or managers are throwing resources at you, or you find yourself getting the green light to start more projects than you have time for, then you’re probably succeeding.
This is another reason I adore the engineer/manager pendulum and have been a practitioner for going on 18 years—nothing like returning to the dojo and honing your skills.
Whether you’re an IC or a manager, a reliable signal is how often peers come to you unprompted for advice (and whether they follow up for yet more advice afterward). Whether it’s technical assistance, help with a cantankerous manager, formal mentoring, or one-off career advice, it’s all a sign that you’re credible. You simply cannot fake this level of trust. Bonus points if they work somewhere else because then there is even less incentive to stroke your ego.
If you want to know whether people follow you, first make sure they are free not to.