The Best Manager in the Company Has to Be You

"The quality of a company at scale is equal to the quality of the management team."

Some CEOs put in great performances at the all-hands.

They talk about people being the company’s most important asset. They eloquently speak about respect, growth, treating employees well. You feel like you’re at a motivational TED talk!

But then that same CEO can walk back to their office, reschedule their 1:1s for the third week in a row, fire off a terse message to the CMO, and shrug when they find out the engineering team has lost another employee.

No matter how invigorating the speech at the all-hands, employees will base their actions on what they see from the CEO. That’s especially true for managers. If they see the CEO slacking off on basic management duties, why should they put in the effort?

When you attain the level of CEO, you might assume you get to do just the exciting stuff. You make the big calls, raise capital, craft strategy, work with the board. It’s heady stuff.

But the truth is, you’re still a manager, and you’re the most influential one in your company. You can’t give up the actual craft of management: 1:1s, feedback, setting expectations, giving coaching and development. You now offer that stuff to seasoned professionals — i.e., your executive team — but you still have to offer it.

Your company manages the way you manage

Organizations are imitation machines. People take their cues about what’s acceptable, what’s valued, and how things are really done not from the values statement on the wall but from the most powerful person they can watch. For your leadership team, that person is you.

For everyone below them, it’s their manager, who is, in turn, copying you.

Whatever you actually do with your direct reports propagates downward, manager by manager, until it hardens into “how we manage here.” If you give vague feedback, your executives learn that vague feedback is acceptable. So they give vague feedback to their managers. The cascade continues.

As CEO, you personally set the bar for what good people management looks like. You cannot install a management culture you don’t personally practice. The CEO who “leads but doesn’t manage” is simply a CEO whose direct reports are unmanaged. And those direct reports run most of the company.

Managing execs is different, yet the same

Managing a seasoned executive is not the same as managing a 22-year-old in their first job. But the seasoned executive still needs management. They need clear expectations from you. They need to understand how they are performing, from your perspective. They need encouragement to continue developing along their career path.

They might have 100 times the knowledge you do about their domain, but that’s the great thing about management: It’s not about imparting specific knowledge to the employee or training them in certain skills. It’s about creating clarity on how that person is performing in the context of company priorities, and ensuring they have what they need to keep growing as professionals.

The comparison I make a lot is to elite athletes. Coaches at the Olympics can’t perform the feats their athletes are doing. Many of them never could. But those athletes need the support of a coach.

The quality of your company is the quality of its managers

The management culture you create matters because, at scale, the quality of the company is roughly equal to the quality of internal management, from boardroom to frontline. Why? Because for a business to function at scale, that coordination, motivation, and alignment that managers create is the difference-maker.

If you have the world’s most brilliant coding team but they're managed by a bozo, who’s also managed by a bozo, do you think you’re going to get great results in the long term?

Some talent shines through bad management, it’s true. But usually not for long. And not at the strength you could get from someone with a great manager.

The CEO job requires a lot. But getting there doesn’t mean you graduated out of people management. Not at all: You became the most critical people manager on the team.

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