Leading through leaders

Leading through leaders is the job that starts when the people who report to you have people of their own. It means choosing who leads, developing their judgment, and holding them accountable for their teams' outcomes and health without taking the teams back. It is a different job from leading engineers, not a larger version of it. The instincts that made someone a strong team leader, being close to every person and every problem, are nearly the opposite of what the work now asks. The previous edition of this standard treated it as the "Professional band" of delegation, feedback and performance, and so understated how different it is. In this competency a manager's reach becomes greatest at the same moment as their information becomes poorest. It matters because the quality of an organisation's managers sets how well it can execute, and that quality is built or wasted here. The examinations assess it from EMP-II upward. There is no team-scope form, because leading leaders requires leaders to lead.

1. Select managers on evidence of judgment about people, not on seniority, tenure or retention. The sound reasons to move someone into management are a real wish to lead, demonstrated judgment about people in adjacent conditions, and the team's trust. Treat management as a reward and you get managers who do not want the job.
2. Managers develop through progressively harder real situations with coaching. Courses and shadowing add to this and cannot replace it. The main instrument is the judgment debrief: going through the hard call the manager faces or has just made, probing the reasoning, and coaching the thinking instead of handing down a ruling.
3. Hold them to outcomes and health, and do not take the team back. A manager is accountable for what their team delivers and for the state the team is in. When either slips, respond with coaching and explicit expectations, and do not quietly absorb their job.
4. Your information is filtered by design; build for it. A manager's own account is the most filtered source there is. A leader of leaders learns what is true from skip-levels used for signal, direct observation, peer input and team-health data, and never uses the skip-level to bypass a decision.
5. Span of control is a function of context, not a number. How many managers or teams one person can lead depends on the managers' maturity, how stable the work is and how much coordination each report needs. A span that works in steady state fails during change.
6. The measure is what happens without you. The system is working when decisions that used to need you are made well without you, and the managers you developed are developing managers of their own.

Less has been written about managing managers than about managing engineers, and most of it is more recent. One large internal study is graded as research below. The rest is practitioner work with clear provenance.

What good managers do research

David A. Garvin, How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management (2013) reports Google's multi-year internal study of its own managers. The study set out to test whether managers mattered at all and found, against the grain of the company's engineering culture, that they did. It identified a short list of behaviours that distinguished the best: coaching, empowering the team instead of micromanaging, showing interest in people's wellbeing, being results-oriented, communicating, supporting career development, having a clear vision, and having enough technical skill to help. It is a single-company study and the list holds no surprises. Its value is as evidence that these behaviours can be measured, and that the difference they make is large enough to show up in retention and satisfaction data. It is the nearest thing to research evidence this competency has.

Managing managers practice

Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change (2017) has a chapter on the move to leading managers and the failures typical of it: skip-level meetings used badly, the temptation to keep doing the old job, and the new manager who needs coaching where a replacement is being considered. This unit adopts Fournier's practical point. The people who report to you now need you to hold them accountable for their teams and to develop their judgment, and both are harder than managing engineers because the feedback loop is longer and the evidence arrives filtered.

Sizing teams and spans practice

Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (2019) takes a systems view of how many people a manager can lead and how many managers a leader of managers can support. It argues that organisational design should follow from those limits, whatever that does to the tidiness of the org chart. The specific numbers depend on context, and the book says so. What carries over is the habit of treating an overloaded manager as a design problem before treating it as a performance problem.

Task-relevant maturity, applied to management practice

This applies Grove's concept from Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management (1983) to the case it fits best. A brilliant engineer newly promoted into management has low task-relevant maturity at management itself, however senior they are technically, and needs close support on exactly the things they have never done. The leader of leaders sets the level of support by the manager's experience with this kind of situation (their first performance conversation, their first hire, their first reorganisation), whatever their title.

Coaching managers through change practice

Lara Hogan, Resilient Management (2019) deals in practical terms with how a leader supports managers through the transitions their teams go through, such as growth, reorganisation and loss. It favours coaching questions over answers and sponsorship over protection. What it offers here is the distinction between coaching a manager and rescuing them, which is the tension this whole competency turns on.

The manager one-on-one as judgment debrief

The weekly meeting with a manager is no project review. At its centre is the hard call they are facing or have just made: what they saw, what they considered, what they chose and why. The leader of leaders asks questions that expose the reasoning and offers a view of their own only after the manager has run out of theirs. Status goes in writing.

The first six months of a new manager

A new manager is being onboarded into a new profession. That calls for an explicit conversation about what changes, a named peer they can ask the embarrassing questions, protected room to learn, and a leader who coaches them to manage outcomes instead of tasks. A new manager who reviews every pull request and redoes junior work does not lose their duties at the first stumble. They are coached to work out what to delegate and what good enough looks like, and protected while they adjust.

Skip-levels for signal

These are regular one-on-ones with the people who report to your managers. Their purpose is unfiltered signal about team health and about issues a manager might miss, and visible accessibility. They are never a channel for decisions that belong to the manager, and what is said in them is never passed on so identifiably that people stop talking. Anything heard is verified before it is acted on, and the action goes through the manager.

Reading a manager

Once a quarter, for each manager, the leader writes three lines: the team's health (attrition, engagement, what skip-levels show), the team's delivery, and how the results were produced. These are read across several quarters and in context. A manager whose personal heroics hide a team that cannot function without them is a risk, however successful they look.

The overloaded manager

When a manager is still doing a lot of individual work on top of managing and is visibly struggling, the leader helps them shed it before they burn out. The leader reads the situation first as a design question (is the span right, is the team the right shape) and only after that as a performance one.

The inherited leadership team

A leader who inherits managers of mixed quality assesses each of them individually against the bar over the first months, on evidence, and then acts deliberately. A purge of the previous leader's people is wrong, and so is letting things drift indefinitely.

This competency has no team-scope form. An Associate leads engineers, and the EMA-I outline lists PL-6 as not assessed. At organisational scope the object is the managers who report to you, meaning their selection, development and accountability, and the typical failure is reaching around them to their teams. At executive scope the object becomes the leadership team as a system. It needs complementary strengths, clear scopes and shared accountability, where the alternative is a set of individually strong rivals for your attention. It also covers the leaders of leaders beneath you, whose readiness for larger scope you have to see before they ask, and the decision to replace a senior leader when coaching has not worked. Delegating a team is PL-1 Delegation, ownership, and decision rights; designing the structure the managers sit in is SV-6 Organisational design and leading change; the pattern is in How Judgment Scales.

• Promotes people into management for the right reasons and supports the transition deliberately. org
• Selects a lead for a new team on demonstrated judgment in adjacent conditions, not on who is loudest, most senior or most available. org
• Understands what a strong engineer who does not want to manage wants instead, and develops or finds another leader. org
• Runs manager one-on-ones as judgment debriefs and stretches managers with real situations. org
• Coaches the new manager who micromanages toward outcomes, and does not strip their duties. org
• Helps an overloaded manager shed individual work before they burn out, and asks whether the span is right. org
• Uses skip-levels for signal, verifies what is heard, protects the sources, and acts through the manager. org
• Reads a manager's effectiveness from sustained team health, delivery and methods, over time and in context. org
• Names a manager's avoidance (the hard conversation not had, the one-on-ones that quietly stopped) as a leadership gap, and coaches it. org
• Channels a manager's ambition, including ambition for your own role, into growth and scope relevant to succession, and names corrosive politicking directly as behaviour. org
• Failure mode: using management as a seniority prize or a retention bribe. org
• Failure mode: drafting a reluctant engineer into leadership. org
• Failure mode: running manager one-on-ones as project reviews. org
• Failure mode: developing managers by course catalogue. org
• Failure mode: reaching around a manager to their engineers because you could fix it faster. org
• Failure mode: treating every escalation as yours to solve, so that the manager's job quietly becomes yours. org
• Failure mode: taking a team back when it struggles instead of developing its manager. org
• Failure mode: tolerating a manager whose personal heroics hide a team that cannot function without them. org
• Failure mode: treating an ambitious manager as a rival, or ignoring corrosive politicking because the manager is talented. org
• Builds a leadership team as a system with complementary strengths, clear scopes and shared accountability, in place of a set of strong individuals competing for attention. exec
• Develops leaders of leaders, and sees the signs that a leader is ready for larger scope before they ask. exec
• Holds a senior leader accountable for an organisation's outcomes and health while acting through them, and knows when coaching has not worked and replacement is the call. exec
• Gives leaders political context instead of political shelter: enough to operate, without the noise. exec
• Assesses an inherited leadership team individually and acts deliberately, with neither a purge nor drift. exec
• Failure mode: a leadership team that behaves as rivals for the executive's attention. exec
• Failure mode: "protecting" leaders into naivety. exec
• Failure mode: a senior leader who refuses to develop successors, tolerated because they are excellent. exec
• Failure mode: leadership development as a programme owned by a function, when it should be an executive responsibility. exec

Coaching versus rescuing. A manager who reports to you is drowning, and doing their job would be faster. Each time you do it, they learn that the job is not theirs, and so does their team. The only help that leaves the manager stronger is the slower kind.

Accountability versus protection. A new manager needs room to learn, and their team needs a manager who meets the bar now. Explicit expectations with a time horizon resolve it. Protected room has a limit, and the manager knows when the protection ends.

Signal versus bypass. Skip-levels exist because you cannot see a team through its manager alone, and every skip-level gives the team a chance to route around the manager. Decisions mark the line. Signal flows up and decisions flow back through the manager, and a leader who crosses that line once has weakened the manager for a year.

Consistency versus autonomy. Managers who lead their teams differently end up with teams that work differently, and some of that difference is the point. The judgment lies in deciding which practices must be the same across teams (the performance bar, the promotion mechanics, the values) and which belong to each manager.

Loyalty versus the bar. The manager who was there first, who was loyal to you and who got the team through a hard year is falling short of what the organisation now needs. They are owed respect and candour, and they are not owed permanent scope. When loyalty freezes the structure, everyone under it pays.

A senior manager with four teams has one manager, promoted eight months ago from the team they now lead, who is visibly struggling. They are still doing a lot of individual work and took the hardest tickets in the last two sprints. Their one-on-ones with their own team have become irregular, and two of their engineers have said in skip-levels that they do not know what is expected of them. Delivery has not slipped yet, because the manager is personally covering the gap, and the manager's weekly account of the team is "busy but fine". The senior manager used to lead this team and knows exactly how they would run it.

The pull is to step in: attend the team's planning, hold the one-on-ones the manager is missing, or quietly take back the two projects most at risk. Any of these would rescue the quarter and finish the manager. The team would learn that its manager is not really in charge, the manager would learn that struggling means losing the job piece by piece, and the senior manager would have taken on a fifth team on top of their four.

The judgment is to diagnose before responding, and then to coach with explicit expectations instead of absorbing the work. The diagnosis is a new manager with low task-relevant maturity at management itself, who has retreated into the work they are good at because the work they are new to is frightening, and whom nobody has told what the job now requires. That makes it first a leadership gap in the senior manager, since eight months in, the expectations of the role have never been made explicit.

In the next one-on-one the senior manager names what they have seen (the tickets, the irregular one-on-ones, the two engineers who do not know what is expected) as situation, behaviour and impact, without passing a verdict. They state the expectation plainly. The manager's output is the team's output, and the team needs a manager more than it needs another engineer. Then they coach the thinking. What would the manager have to stop doing to hold one-on-ones every week? What definition of good enough would let them hand back the hard tickets? Which two things does the team most need to hear about expectations? They agree three concrete changes for the next month and a date to look at the evidence together, and the senior manager says what they will do themselves: nothing in the team directly, and a weekly debrief of the hardest call the manager faced.

The senior manager also asks the design question. Four teams under one senior manager, with one new manager among them, may be the wrong span for this year. If the new manager needs more coaching than the senior manager can give, that is a structural fact to raise upward, and gives no licence to reach around. The thing the senior manager would do best, running the team, is the thing they leave alone.

• PL-1 Delegation, ownership, and decision rights: delegating a whole team to a manager, with reaching around as the organisational form of taking work back.
• PL-2 Feedback and difficult conversations: feedback about how someone leads, gathered at one remove.
• PL-4 Performance management: reading a manager's performance, and quality control on how they manage performance.
• PL-5 Career development and growth paths: the leadership pipeline, with readiness and succession as a system.
• CC-2 Coaching versus directing: coaching the coaches, which means developing judgment in someone who develops it in others.
• SV-6 Organisational design and leading change: the structure managers sit in, with span of control as a design question.

1. What are sound reasons to make someone a manager, and what are the unsound ones that are more common? org
   Answer

   A real wish to lead, demonstrated judgment about people in adjacent conditions, and the team's trust. The common unsound ones are seniority, tenure and retention. Treating management as a reward produces managers who do not want the job.
2. A manager who reports to you is drowning. What distinguishes coaching them from quietly doing their job? org
   Answer

   Who is deciding at the end of the week. Coaching leaves the decisions and the team with the manager and develops their judgment through questions and explicit expectations. Doing their job takes the decisions back and leaves them only the title.
3. What is a skip-level for, and what is it never for? org
   Answer

   It is for unfiltered signal about team health and issues a manager might miss, and for visible accessibility. It is never for decisions that belong to the manager, and what is said is never passed on so identifiably that people stop talking.
4. How do managers actually get better, and what is the role of training? org
   Answer

   Through progressively harder real situations with coaching, above all the judgment debrief on the hard call they face or have just made. Courses and shadowing add to this and cannot replace it.
5. A newly promoted manager is reviewing every pull request and redoing junior work while their team's growth stalls. What is the intervention, and what is not? org
   Answer

   Coach them to manage outcomes instead of tasks, help them work out what to delegate and what good enough looks like, and protect them while they adjust. The wrong intervention is stripping their duties or sending them back to individual work at the first stumble.
6. What determines a healthy span of control, and why is there no magic number? org
   Answer

   The managers' maturity, the stability of the work, and how much coordination each report needs. A span that works in steady state fails during change, so the right number depends on context and is never a constant.
7. What is the difference between a leadership team and a set of strong leaders, and what does the executive do about it? exec
   Answer

   A leadership team has complementary strengths, clear scopes and shared accountability, while a set of strong leaders competes for the executive's attention. The executive designs the scopes, makes the shared accountability explicit, and refuses to referee rivalries.
8. What is the strongest signal your leadership development is working? exec
   Answer

   Decisions that used to need you are made well without you, and the leaders you developed are developing leaders of their own.

• David A. Garvin, How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management (2013): the internal study of what distinguishes effective managers.
• Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change (2017): the transition to managing managers and its failures.
• Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (2019): sizing teams and spans as a design constraint.
• Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management (1983): task-relevant maturity, applied to the new manager.
• Lara Hogan, Resilient Management (2019): coaching managers through change; sponsorship over protection.