How to Identify & Recognise Your Top Managers

Summary: Create a culture of excellence where employees feel acknowledged and appreciated for who they are and the work they do. Here I explain how to identify, and more importantly, recognise the good work of outstanding people-managers.

“Organisations have the seeds of its future success in its best managers, yet most fail to study them closely, which is a missed opportunity” (Laszlo Bock)

It is easy to identify a manager, in very simple terms, it is an individual responsible for administering (planning, organising, directing, and controlling) a group of staff. However, nowadays a manager does more than that, they are not only accountable for their team’s output, but they are also responsible for fully engaging and enabling all individuals that are under their supervision.

Great managers need to be good communicators and display high level of emotional intelligence. This means empowering team members with the necessary resources and ability to complete their tasks, understanding what motivates them, what their strengths are, guiding them in those areas they need to develop, helping them nurture the mindset to envision their own success and that of the organisation.

Manager quality is the single best predictor of whether employees will stay or leave your organisation. Effective managers drive performance, retention, and happiness, with them your company will perform better over time. Therefore, for your organisation to succeed, you need to identify, develop, and support those managers responsible for driving your future business growth.

Identifying Your Top Managers

Typically, organisations conduct manager performance evaluations annually with regular check-ins throughout the year. They normally assess their managers’ job performance and productivity in relation to certain pre-established criteria and organisational objectives, organisational citizenship behaviour, accomplishments, potential for future improvement, strengths, and weaknesses, etc.

Personally, I do not think this is enough to evaluate the full effectiveness of managers. Relying solely on bi-annual or annual performance appraisals may not be fully accurate. Evaluators have a good idea of what a good or bad manager looks like, but that is a subjective standard. Specific line-managers may have different expectations for their people and interpret anticipated performance standards in their own idiosyncratic manner. We should not allow for the caprices of a single team leader to define the future of an employee/manager. We want people to be recognised and promoted based on actual merit, and not mere internal politics.

To achieve a fair evaluation across the organisation there needs to be a careful calibration of the whole system. Here we need to be consistent on how we frame that comparison. For more accurate insights on each team manager and to avoid any potential evaluation bias, I suggest employing additional lenses to review the effectiveness of each team leader.

Consider not only your standard annual performance appraisals (hard-outputs), but also your corporate census survey results at team level (soft-inputs), in which each manager receives a confidential overall team-score. Organisations normally focus on employee survey index scores linked to Team Engagement and perceived People Management Skills.

For additional accuracy, some organisations also include 360-degree evaluations which solicits specific feedback about a manager from different directions: their line-manager, co-workers, and direct reports. Such feedback can also include, when relevant, feedback from external sources, such as customers and suppliers or other interested stakeholders.

Analysing the Feedback

The combination of these three assessment methods offers a fairer and more holistic way to evaluate managers. Based on hard performance ratings (e.g., sales target percentage, project profitability, customer satisfaction, etc.) and overall softer people skills ratings for each manager (e.g., employee satisfaction ratings), it will provide a more rounded and accurate individual manager score. If necessary, for additional accuracy, it is also possible to rank each assessment with slightly different weightings. This combined manager assessment method will allow you to rank your managers in a more objective manner (see image below).

High performing managers are highly context dependent, so you need to focus on your own internal best practices because these have already been tried and tested and are successful in your specific work environment.

In this respect you can identify your managers’ top attributes by comparing the feedback scores of your top 10 versus your bottom 10 percent performers. The idea is to identify the gap between these two groups of managers with the intention to support poor performers on those specific areas for potential improvement.

Google’s project Oxygen (See ‘Work Rules’ by Laszlo Bock) used a similar method to evaluate their managers. It revealed that their top 10 percent managers shared the following attributes:

• Having a clear vision/strategy for the team.
• Being a good coach.
• Empowering the team by avoiding micromanagement.
• Helping the team with career development.
• Being a good communicator (listen and share information).
• Expressing interest and concern for the team members’ success and personal wellbeing.
• Having important technical skills that help advise the team.
• Being very productive and results oriented.

The above are manager success factors in Google but perhaps not in your organisation. Evaluating your high performers closely and then building programmes to measure and reinforce their best attributes for your entire workforce will dramatically improve your organisation’s culture and associated productivity.

Note: For the purposes of this exercise, I suggest focusing on managers with teams of no less than five and hopefully no more than 12 individuals. Based on research, the widely accepted ideal size for a working team is five to eight people. If you go beyond eight people the team starts to lose individual performance and finds constructive interaction difficult, while teams smaller than five people can experience awkward team dynamics and skills gaps. Also, from an implementation perspective, feedback from teams with less than five people can raise confidentiality concerns among appraisers.

Celebrating Your Top Managers

Once you have identified your top managers, what should you do? Most organisations publicly recognise them in a yearly event. Well-conceived recognition and well-run incentive programmes will sustain and improve your managers’ performance.

For example, a well-thought ‘Manager of the Year Awards’ is a powerful public way to recognise your top managers. This sort of manager recognition drives motivation not only for the awarded manager, but also become an inspiration for other upcoming individuals in the organisation. These top managers will become role models within the organisation.

Budget dependent, organisations can also offer these top managers ‘experiential rewards’ which are more compelling than traditional monetary rewards. These leave a more lasting impression and memory, get people out and about, and give those celebrated managers something to do, rather than just sticking more numbers on their pay slip. Examples include fully funded holiday trips, VIP event passes (e.g., music or sporting events), extreme adventures, learning experiences (e.g., cooking classes/wine tasting), restaurant vouchers, etc.

Developing Your Top Managers

Another way to recognise top managers is by positioning them for internal promotions. One of the most powerful ways an organisation can engage its people is by promoting from within. Effective succession planning by placing top managers in line to becoming your next generation of leaders offers a powerful message for the whole organisation: We promote our people on merit!

“The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it” (John Ruskin)

The goal is to make sure that your top managers are prepared and qualified for the next position rather than just their current role. Here you may want to employ different talent assessments and review processes to obtain a clearer understanding of the current state of your talent pool and their skills requirements at every level in the organisation. This will allow you to reinforce personalised learning journeys through targeted content and on the job coaching/experiential practice.

What talent/skills do these managers need to succeed? You may assess your top managers’ accountabilities, competencies, their personality traits, what drives them, as well as the experiences that are aligned to their roles. The precise benchmarking of those assessment results against carefully developed ‘Success Profiles’ (what ‘good’ looks like) will reveal potential talent gaps that will need to be addressed as part of your talent pool’s succession plan.

The assessment will determine how well your top managers skillset and personality fit with strategic positions within your organisation. Such research-based / validated assessment process will pinpoint specific developmental needs that will enable you to build tailored and differentiated learning journeys / training programmes for each of your managers to maximise their individual impact on the organisation’s future success (Read more: 8 Steps to a Colossal Career).

Through careful job grading, job description, and benchmarking against ‘Success Profiles’ you will also be able to evaluate your current compensation packages to ensure you are offering your top managers competitive rewards based on their role’s unique level and requirements.

Supporting Less Effective Managers

This exercise will also identify those managers that are performing less well than you had hoped for. Here you can assist them by addressing weaknesses quickly before these get out of hand. Remember, people who are performing poorly know it and want to get better, so the right thing to do is give them a fair chance to redeem themselves. Consider the following:

• Do not wait too long to raise performance concerns.
• Establish what the performance issue is.
• Meet with the manager to discuss the issue.
• Discuss what the reason for the underperformance is.
• Devise a solution to turn around poor performance (resources/coaching/training).
• Outline targets and regularly monitor progress.
• Do keep a clear document trail for the whole performance evaluation.

Based on this process, if necessary, you may need to reassign the manager’s strengths somewhere else within the organisation or help them find a new position at another company, or help them become an independent contractor, or help them launch their own business, or if it is the case, help them transition to retirement. No matter how many times you do it, transitioning an employee’s career is never going to be a straightforward experience. The aim is to make the experience less stressful for all parties involved.

Note that reassigning such managers is a better option than exiting them since the company has already invested in them. Also, those managers already know your organisation, they are loyal to the company and they do not need any time to get used to the company culture (Read more: The ‘Golden Rule’ for Managing People).

Some Final Thoughts…

Recognition and appreciation should be an important part of your company culture. People who feel appreciated end up experiencing more self-worth and their ability to contribute to the company increases as a result. It helps managers see that your company values them, their efforts, and their contributions to the success of their teams and organisation. It ensures managers build a sense of security in their value to the company, further engaging them to continue with their great work.

The individual evaluation, recognition, and development programme that I propose in this opinion blog should help you enhance your organisation’s internal talent selection and succession management capabilities. Of course, if the implementation of this manager assessment programme reveals that your succession plans will not yield the future leaders your organisation requires, then external recruitment will need to be considered. You need to guarantee that the right leaders are ready when and where they are needed, now and in the future.

• Read more: Creating a culture of ‘Respect and Trust’
• Read more: Critical Steps for Aligning Strategy, People & Culture
• Reference: Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead (2015) by Laszlo Bock

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Disclaimer: The author is making this ‘Opinion Blog’ available in his personal effort to advance the understanding of best practices in workplace related matters. The author assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content of this ‘Opinion Blog’ or for the results obtained from the use of the information provided. The information is provided on an ‘as is’ basis with no guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness and without any warranties of any kind whatsoever, express or implied. The views expressed are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of any entity whatsoever with which the author has been, is now, or is to be affiliated in the future.