Most relationships at work matter less than we think. Plenty of people look powerful and well placed, and still have limited influence over how comfortable your days are, over your rating at the end of the year, even over your promotion and your pay. The one relationship that directly determines how happy you are at work is the one with your direct manager.
So when people are changing jobs or changing teams, the thing that deserves the most thought is this manager: am I willing to follow them, or should I be leaving? Here are a few angles for judging whether a leader is any good, and some of the traits that mislead us.
They don’t have to be easy-going, but they do have to be clear and consistent. An easy-going manager may hand you small kindnesses, or leave you feeling heard. Work with them long enough, though, and you’ll notice they’re easy-going with everyone. Which means that in the end they can’t shelter you from anything, can’t push back on an unreasonable demand. And because they’re so accommodating, they’re continually swayed by other people. The direction changes week to week and there’s no spine to any of it. A manager who’s actually useful should leave you feeling that they have their own standard of judgement, so you can predict fairly clearly how they’ll view something and roughly where they’ll land. And you should know clearly what your scope is under them and what you’re being held to. You don’t need to find them easy to get close to. You do need to feel safe working under them.
Their scope keeps growing, or keeps getting more important. Put differently, this leader is capable of making their team’s pie bigger. This one is critical. If the pie doesn’t grow, or starts shrinking, the team inevitably turns inward and starts competing with itself and playing pointless politics. Energy that isn’t spent expanding outwards and getting things done gets spent fighting each other for a share. So if you want a team with a decent atmosphere, where you meet people who inspire you, where you get a sense of achievement, where things actually get built and you learn something, follow someone who goes out and takes new ground.
They’re willing to give up their own interests for the team’s. For me this is the single clearest line between a leader and a manager. Not that a leader has to be selfless with no agenda of their own. Quite the opposite. The ones willing to trade their immediate interests for the team’s usually have a larger goal in view, and reaching it will certainly be good for them in the end. It’s the leader whose eyes never leave their own small patch and their own immediate gain who tends to have no real vision, and isn’t worth following. An example: one of the best managers I ever had was in my first year of work, when I was a graduate trainee. She gave me a great deal of exposure to senior people. What she said to me was: go ahead and do it. If it works it’s yours, and if it goes wrong I’ll carry it. That’s a leader people will follow anywhere.
They don’t need to know the craft better than you, but they must understand people and politics better than you. Most of the real obstacles at work aren’t technical. Or rather, the technical obstacles can be solved by you, with effort and ingenuity. The hard obstacles are the human ones. That’s when it becomes essential that your manager has a good network, knows what each person desires and fears, knows how to influence and how to pitch, knows how to tell a narrative. They clear the roadblocks and you get to concentrate on what you’re best at. The other benefit is that it gives you and your manager a clean division of labour: each doing their own job, so they can’t easily micromanage you and won’t want to, and when the thing succeeds you each have your own credit and your own reward.
Those are the ones that strike me as most important. The rest matters too, whether your energy matches theirs and whether you like them as a person, but I don’t think it’s what matters most.
A good manager is not easy to find. When you find one, bind yourself in, be willing to give, be willing to take their side, be willing to grow alongside them.