How do I assess my manager’s performance?

I used to think a good manager was the person who dominated the Monday meeting, the first to speak and the last to concede a point. There was always a slide, a plan, and a confident tone that filled the room. Then I watched one of my quietest managers almost double a product line over a quarter without presenting a single slide. The shift in my view did not come from a nice story about leadership. It came from the work itself. Shipping sped up. Escalations faded. People stopped bringing me problems that belonged to their manager. That was when I learned a simple rule. Great managers remove themselves as the bottleneck. Poor managers make themselves the main character. From that point on I stopped waiting for HR to design a perfect framework and built a way to evaluate managers that any founder can run with a clear head and a week of focused attention.

Assessment begins with results that touch customers, code, or cash. If a manager claims strong leadership but the work in their lane does not move, the claim does not hold. I look first at cycle time, because anything that matters is a sequence from decision to done. Strong managers shorten that sequence without drama. I look next at the residue that work leaves behind, the defects, reversals, and avoidable escalations that show up after a sprint or a month. The best managers remove repeat defects within two cycles because they fix causes rather than soothe symptoms. I also ask for one leading indicator that helps them predict the next quarter. It might be signups that precede conversion, support ticket mix that hints at churn, or pipeline stage slippage that foreshadows a revenue miss. A manager who cannot show a forward signal is steering with the rearview mirror.

From results I move to seams. Poor management reveals itself where work crosses boundaries. The handoff from marketing to sales, from sales to onboarding, and from onboarding to support often tells the truth faster than any dashboard. I ask the receiving owner what comes in broken and how often they need the sending manager to intervene. Frequent intervention is a sign that the first manager is not building a clean system and that the culture is learning to rely up the chain instead of across. Healthy managers teach their people to collaborate horizontally and to solve with peers. Fragile ones keep every rope in their own hands and call it ownership.

Morale matters, but not in the shallow way that treats happiness as the measure of health. I do not ask people if they are happy. I ask what slows them down, what they are avoiding, and who they turn to when they are stuck. If the answers route to their manager and problems get solved, the signal is positive. If the answers route around the manager, a shadow org is forming. Shadow orgs appear on calendars first, where people quietly start booking time with the operations lead, the product lead, or the founder. They stop trying locally because it feels pointless. That is not a people problem. That is a management problem.

A manager’s real job is to create clarity. Clarity shows up in roles, in decision rules, and in the way the team handles escalation. All three can be reviewed in under an hour. For roles, I ask for a single page that lists the seven most important recurring responsibilities and the name of the person who owns each one. If more than two items say shared or everyone, ownership is missing. For decision rules, I ask the manager to describe one decision the team makes every week and the boundary they use, whether that is a dollar limit, a risk category, or a level of customer impact. If the only rule is ask me, then the manager is the rule, not the leader. For escalation hygiene, I sample five tickets from the last month and look at how quickly they escalated, how clearly the context was packaged, and how often the manager had to jump in because the team did not know the path. Clean escalation beats heroic rescue every time.

Coaching is not a vibe. It is a practice with visible artifacts. I look for recurring one on ones with written follow ups that focus on growth rather than status. The notes reveal the truth. Good notes read like a training plan, with what we tried, what worked, and what we will do next. Weak notes are full of updates and soft encouragement. I also look for feedback that lands. If I cannot find a before and after in someone’s performance within a quarter, the coaching is not working. Either the manager is not specific or the person is not listening. Both are on the manager to resolve.

Prioritization exposes a manager’s judgment. If everything is urgent, nothing is important. I take one quarter’s roadmap and mark what slipped. Then I ask for the reason behind each slip. Patterns matter more than one story. Some managers run on resource fantasy and say yes to five projects with a capacity of two. Others habitually blame external factors while ignoring the rework created by unclear definitions. Strong managers own the math and redesign the system so that the same miss does not happen twice. Weak managers sell a better plan without changing the conditions that produced the miss. I try not to buy the promise. I buy the behavior.

Culture reveals itself in small habits. I watch meeting hygiene. Do people arrive knowing the goal and leave with owners and deadlines that stick. I look for calendar defense. Strong managers protect two blocks a week for deep work and push meetings to the edges. Weak managers stack meetings and call it alignment. I pay attention to hiring posture. The best managers design the role before they go hunting for a hero. Hero hires burn bright and leave smoke. Role clarity keeps talent and reduces churn.

Context matters when a team crosses cultures. In Malaysia and Singapore, direct feedback can feel harsh unless it is paired with care. In Saudi, hierarchy can slow healthy escalation unless leaders model safe upflow. A good manager adjusts shape without losing truth. They say the hard thing with context and hold the line on standards while honoring local norms. If a manager blames culture to avoid standards, the problem is not culture. The problem is courage.

To turn all of this into a habit, I run a simple rhythm. In week one, I pull a short set of diagnostics. I look at cycle time, defects, three handoff stories, one on one notes, and five escalations. I spend an hour with the manager on the evidence and end with a performance thesis that frames the current state. Perhaps the team moves fast but bleeds quality. Perhaps quality is fine but decisions bottleneck at the top. In week two, I observe the team without the manager. I do short skip level chats and ask what slows them down, what they shipped last week that mattered, and who helped them move faster. In week three, the manager presents a repair plan with a single constraint. It must change behavior within thirty days and touch a system rather than a task. It might redefine done, redesign a handoff, or establish a weekly ritual that locks a better habit into place. In week six, we review outcomes against the two or three metrics we chose. If the curve is bending, I coach and stay close. If the curve is flat, I decide whether I am looking at a skill gap or a will gap.

Sometimes the right answer is a different lane. Not every strong individual contributor will become a strong manager, and that is not failure. That is alignment. A technical track with real prestige and pay gives people a path to impact without the burden of people management. If an organization only rewards people management, people will chase titles they cannot hold. That is the founder’s design error, not the employee’s.

Inherited managers add another layer. I begin with a clean slate and hard data. I invite the manager to teach me their system in ninety minutes. If they cannot explain how they create clarity, velocity, and trust, they do not have a system. They have habits, and habits can be coached, but a lack of system awareness takes longer. I set a ninety day trial with explicit markers. By day thirty, the owner map and decision rules should be in place. By day sixty, cycle time should be bending in the right direction. By day ninety, defect residue should be trending down and fewer escalations should land on my desk. If those markers fail, I do not drift. Drifting costs team trust that is hard to win back.

There is one question I ask myself after any conversation with a manager. Do I feel lighter because the problem now sits inside a system, or heavier because I am now part of the system. If I feel lighter most weeks, I am working with a builder. If I feel heavier most weeks, I am dealing with someone who transfers weight. Builders scale the company. Weight shifters scale the founder’s stress.

Founders also need to audit their own role. Many managers perform poorly because the founder keeps stepping in. The intention is to help, but it trains managers to wait for rescue. For the next month, every time someone routes around their manager to reach me, I ask a single polite question. What did your manager recommend. If they do not know, I send them back to get the recommendation. I am not avoiding help. I am building a habit. Soon the right problems reach me with context and options, and that is how management matures.

In the end, to assess a manager’s performance is to read the system they are building. Systems leave footprints. You can see them in speed, in residue, in seams, and in the quiet ways people use their calendars and their courage. When you learn to read those footprints, you know whether to coach, reassign, or let go. If a name is already in your head as you read this, do not ignore it. Start the rhythm now. Pick the movements that matter in that lane, pull the evidence, and have the conversation with kindness and clarity. Managers deserve a fair shot and a fast answer. Your team deserves a leader who makes the work feel possible. You deserve a company where the middle is strong enough to hold even when you are not in the room.