Article
Project Oxygen
Google People Analytics
Google set out to prove managers did not matter and found the opposite, then published the behaviours that separated the best from the rest. Behaviours, not personalities.
Tool 50 · Develop yourself
What is it like to be managed by me?
This exercise does not grade you and does not accept caring about your team as evidence. It works from occasions.
A guided 20 to 24 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
What did you do in the first ten minutes after the last mistake?
Not the policy, and not what you would like to have done. What you actually did, and what the person went home thinking.
Count the promotions. It is the least sentimental measure of a manager there is.
What you'll explore
- 01One recent occasion
- 02How mistakes go
- 03Who has grown
- 04The outstanding conversation
A note from Mark
The question is not whether you are a good manager. It is what it is like to be managed by you, and only one of those has an answer you can get at from the inside.
I would start with mistakes, because nothing reveals a manager faster. Not the policy. The first ten minutes. Whether the reaction is to find out what happened or to find out who did it, and whether anybody now hides small problems until they are large ones. That single pattern tells you most of what you need to know.
Read my full view ↓
Then I would count. Promotions, moves, people who took on more, people who left for something better. Two years is enough to see it. Good people grow around good managers and it shows up in the record whatever anybody says in a survey.
And there is always an outstanding conversation. Everybody has one, and how long it has been outstanding is the finding, not the fact that it exists. The costs of avoiding it are being paid by somebody, usually the rest of the team, and they can see exactly what is happening.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
Intention against effect
02
How mistakes go
03
Who has grown
04
The avoided conversation
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What you believe you do
- 03What the evidence shows
- 04What it is probably like to be managed by you
- 05Where people know where they stand
- 06Delegation and control
- 07How mistakes go
- 08Who has grown around you
- 09The difficult conversations
- 10The rival reading
- 11What deserves protecting
- 12The credible alternative
- 13What this exercise cannot decide
- 14What remains unresolved
- 15Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
What the evidence shows about how you manage.
02 · Test it
Ask one person what would make their job easier and do not defend anything they say.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Work from occasions. Nothing else is evidence.
- 02
Notice the difference between what you intend and what people experience.
- 03
Count the promotions. It is the least sentimental measure there is.
- 04
Look at what happens in the first ten minutes after a mistake.
- 05
Ask somebody. Actually ask them, and then be quiet.
Test it
- 01
What did you do in the first ten minutes after the last mistake?
- 02
Could each person tell you what good looks like this quarter?
- 03
Who has been promoted or moved on in the last two years?
The alternative
The expected question is whether you are any good. Two alternatives usually produce more. The problem may not be harshness but vagueness. Managers who are widely liked and never quite clear leave people anxious in a way that is much harder to detect than being difficult, because nobody complains about a nice manager. Or the issue may be under management rather than over control, where autonomy has been given to somebody who needed direction and is quietly drowning in it. And there is the case where the evidence is genuinely good and the user is anxious rather than deficient, which is a real finding and should be stated as one.
Think about this
- What happened the last time somebody made a mistake.
- Whether each person could tell you what good looks like this quarter.
- What you have handed over and then quietly taken back.
- Who has been promoted or moved on in two years.
- The conversation you have been meaning to have since spring.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
How am I showing up?
If the gap is between what you intend and what people experience
Further thinking
Project Oxygen
Google People Analytics
The Fearless Organization
Amy Edmondson
The Feedback Fallacy
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
Explore the thinking ↓
Book
The Fearless Organization
Amy Edmondson
The original research on psychological safety, which began with the finding that better teams reported more errors rather than fewer. Read it before using the phrase.
Article
The Feedback Fallacy
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
An argument that most feedback tells the recipient more about the giver than about themselves. Contested, and a useful corrective if you pride yourself on being direct.
Book
Give and Take
Adam Grant
Grant's finding that givers occupy both the top and the bottom of most performance distributions is the practical heart of this. What separates them is not generosity but whether the giving is bounded. If you have ever concluded that you should do more while quietly running out of road, read this before you add anything.