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Managerial Effectiveness Assessment

Doing the individual-contributor work themselves, alongside managing

Coordinating tasks and reporting status upward

Coaching, removing obstacles, and creating conditions for their team's best work

Q1. When you think about your managers' primary time allocation, what dominates?

They tend to soften it or delay it to preserve the relationship

They give it, but mostly during formal review cycles

They give it close to the moment it's needed, framed for growth rather than judgment

It varies widely manager to manager, with no consistent standard

Q2. How comfortable are your managers giving direct, difficult feedback in real time?

They escalate upward by default, to be safe

They make the call and inform their manager afterward

They understand their decision rights clearly enough to act confidently within them, and escalate only genuine exceptions

It depends on the manager's personal risk appetite

Q3. How do your managers make decisions that sit at the edge of their formal authority?

They tend to work around the person, absorbing the gap themselves or through others

They document it carefully and escalate to HR for a formal process

They address it early and directly, combining clear expectations with genuine support to close the gap or make a clean decision

They hope the situation resolves itself over time

Q4. How do your managers handle a team member who is consistently underperforming?

They pass down the strategy communication largely as received

They add some context but the connection to daily work stays fairly abstract

They translate it into specific, concrete shifts in their team's priorities and ways of working

Strategy communication mostly stops at the senior leadership level and doesn't reach managers in a form they can use

Q5. How well do your managers translate top-level strategy into what their team should actually do differently?

They protect their own team's priorities first, since that's what they're measured on

They escalate the conflict upward for resolution

They negotiate directly with peer managers, optimising for the larger organisational outcome even at some cost to their own metrics

Collaboration tends to happen informally, depending on personal relationships between managers

Q6. How do your managers approach cross-functional collaboration when priorities conflict?

Largely unsupported: competence in the previous role is assumed to transfer

A short onboarding or orientation on management basics

Structured, ongoing development: coaching, peer cohorts, and explicit unlearning of the "doer" identity

Support exists but is inconsistent depending on the business unit

Q7. When a manager is promoted from being an individual expert, how is their transition into management supported?

Mostly intuition and relationship-based judgment

Standard dashboards and metrics reviewed periodically

A blend: data informs the conversation, but judgment and context shape the decision

Heavily metric-driven, with limited room for contextual judgment

Q8. How do your managers use data or performance signals to guide their team?

People tend to filter what they say, especially bad news

It depends heavily on the individual manager

There's a consistent norm across managers that surfacing problems early is valued, not punished

Q9. How psychologically safe do team members feel raising concerns, disagreement, or bad news to their manager?

On-the-job learning, largely self-directed

Formal training programmes, delivered periodically

A blended system: training, coaching, peer learning, and stretch assignments, reinforced by how managers are actually evaluated and promoted

We don't have a deliberate system for this yet

Managerial Effectiveness Assessment

How Strong Is Your Mid-Management Layer?