Episode 36 - It's All About Management, Baby: The Unglamorous Skill That Determines Everything Else
Ben Brooks usually asks the questions on The Lift, but in this episode the show's Executive Producer, Steph Colbourn, takes the host chair and interviews him about management. They cover his PILOT Six framework for defining what good management looks like, why new managers are rarely told what they are actually signing up for, and what his own 360 feedback revealed about where he still falls short and what he is doing about it.
Leadership gets the TED Talks, and management gets the eye rolls. Yet 70% of the employee experience is determined by the quality of a person's manager. Management is the entire subject of this episode of The Lift, which flips the show's usual format. Steph Colbourn, The Lift's Executive Producer, takes the host chair, and Ben Brooks, founder of PILOT and the person who usually asks the questions, takes the guest seat.
As a former management consultant, Ben notes that consulting firms have always reached the same conclusion: the secret to digital transformation, AI adoption, or inclusion is middle management. Executives trying to explain a failed strategy or a stalled rollout often trace the problem back to the same layer. Management is a known problem, and yet organizations keep talking around it instead of dealing with it directly.
Leadership is the multiplier
Ben frames the distinction with cars. Leadership is the luxury brand, the Mercedes-Benz. Management is more of a Chevrolet, a little less glamorous. He once had a group of insurance executives draw what came to mind for each word. Their leadership drawings showed heroes and comic book figures who had won their battles. Their management drawings showed feet up on a desk next to a coffee cup.
He also offers a working definition. Management is more of a science, repeatable and observable across many contexts, while leadership is more of an art and more contextual. A business school professor of his defined management as simply the achievement of results through others. On a team, the manager's job is not to be the star but to help everyone else become one.
In Ben's words, "Leadership is really the multiplier. But if you're multiplying a mess, you just get more mess." He has found it easier to develop someone into a better leader when that person is already a good manager.
What under-managing looks like
Ben's own example comes from a senior HR role at a large professional services firm. He excelled at managing up and across, securing budget, headcount, and approvals while running interference on the politics so his team would not be bothered by it. His boss once gave him glass cufflinks shaped like fish, explaining that getting anything done there meant swimming upstream and that he was the best swimmer they had. He kept hiring strong people and giving them clear direction, but by his own account he did not spend enough time with them or manage down as well as he managed up and across.
He traveled all over the world and answered email offline on long flights, so when he landed, his team's inboxes filled with hundreds of messages at once. Some of those replies were approvals and guidance they had been waiting on for hours, days, or weeks. He missed one-on-ones his team had prepared for. One employee began printing out whatever needed his attention and placing the pages between the keys of his keyboard.
He describes a level of misalignment. Team members were unsure what they could decide without him, work drifted in directions he did not know about, and colleagues elsewhere in the organization pulled his people into projects outside his focus. Ben believed he was doing what was best, taking care of his team and protecting them. Looking back, he describes himself during that period as completely out of balance.
Where the pattern still shows up
Ben has since developed a lot more standards for how his company operates. He documents what people can decide on their own, defines roles, and writes down expectations that used to live only in conversation, which helps people with thinking and learning differences and people working remotely. Still, he describes a lookalike of the old pattern creeping back, and his exit interviews and 360 feedback point in the same direction. He does a good job of setting up the right team environment and setting clear strategy and standards. His growth area is following through on accountability, problem solving, and end performance.
He notes that part of what makes him a great CEO and executive coach, in his opinion, sometimes makes him a weaker manager. He tends to double down on encouragement, development, and meeting people where they are. The biggest obstacle to becoming more directive, he says, has been his own anxiety about how people will respond and whether he will come across as too aggressive. So far, people have responded more favorably than he expected.
The PILOT Six
Ben also walks through the PILOT Six, his framework for pinning down what good management actually looks like. Ask twenty executives around a table to define a good manager, he says, and you get twenty different answers. Without a shared yardstick, evaluating managers fairly is very hard.
The framework groups six practices under three headings. Under team, managers cultivate strong people and create a thriving environment. Under plan, they set clear direction and optimize resources. Under performance, they drive solutions and deliver results. The list leaves out courage, boundless vision, creativity, and strategic brilliance, which Ben places in the leadership realm. Done well, he argues, these six practices produce employees who are happier, stay longer, get more done, and refer customers.
He applies the framework to himself as well. Team and plan are his strengths, and performance is his growth area. As Ben puts it, "Being a great manager involves admitting where you're not a great manager."
The cost of getting it wrong
Bad management spreads in every direction, rolling uphill and across as well as down. People join companies and leave managers. The best people will leave a mediocre manager, especially early in their careers. At that stage, Ben says, a manager is a gem cutter shaping the trajectory of someone's career. The risk usually comes from mediocre managers rather than bad people. The damage extends to customer service, reputation, safety, compliance, and profit. Whatever an organization cares about, poor management can undermine it.
Every manager makes mistakes. To tell a one-off from a real problem, Ben looks at patterns and severity. A single sharp moment in a meeting calls for acknowledging the impact and apologizing. The same behavior repeated again and again is a pattern, and its cause may lie in stress outside work. A manager who is unsure which applies should ask.
What new managers aren't told
Getting promoted to manager is too often Latin for "I'll make more money." Few new managers are told that the role means less of the work that made them successful and more planning, paperwork, discipline, and meetings. Ben's advice is to ask people whether they want the job, make clear what they will give up, and create other career pathways.
For executives promoting someone into a first management role, Ben's advice is to assume the new manager will fail, since fear and risk push people to act. New managers need more supervision of their supervision, a clear standard for what good management looks like, and a comparison between their self-assessment and their boss's assessment. Executives also need a way to check how things are going with the new manager's team before high performers quit. Those who lack the capacity can assign a coach, an HR business partner, or their strongest manager to the job.
What organizations can change
Ben's structural recommendations start with a single, simple definition of a good manager rather than many versions for different levels. That definition then gets localized, since good management in sales looks different from good management in legal. Finally, organizations need systems to measure, reward, and gather feedback on whether it is happening, because annual performance reviews are a poor and infrequent way to check. He also challenges executives who do not know who manages their managers. Inattention, in his view, is a form of not caring, and where leaders direct their attention shows what they value.
What to do this week
– Ask your team what they wish you did more of and less of. Better management sometimes means doing less of something, such as checking in.
– Ask your own manager how you could be a better manager. As Ben says, "It's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar."
– Pick one thing to improve rather than a laundry list. For Ben right now, that is delivering results.
– Tell your team what you are changing and why before you change it, so a shift in your approach does not read as a sign that something is wrong.
Related Episodes
– Episode 01 - Lead Like a Learner: Helen Tupper on "Squiggly Careers" and the Power of Vulnerability
– Episode 02 - Toxic Leadership Explained: What Makes a Bad Boss with Mita Mallick
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