The Shocking Under-Utilization of Manager Feedback In Corporate America
No company consistently requires managers to actually use this data to improve.
Summary: Studies repeatedly show links between good management and outstanding employee performance. Every year, many companies distribute manager feedback surveys to assess how good of a job their managers are doing. Google –– where the author of this article led global teams for five years –– collects perhaps more data than any company about its managers. This is priceless, painstakingly-gathered information with the potential to transform management as we know it throughout the economy. Yet despite the wealth of data being collected, no company consistently requires managers to actually use this data to improve. In this article, a former leader at American Express, Google, Meta, Tableau, and Salesforce reveals his on-the-ground experience of what data gets collected –– and what usually happens to it.
If one variable was correlated with all of the biggest performance outcomes in your company, wouldn’t you want to improve it?
That probably sounds like a rhetorical question –– who would say no? Yet I’m fairly certain that what I’m about to share will, at the very least, raise your eyebrows.
The “holy grail” variable that I’m talking about is employee engagement: the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.
In 2020, Gallup did a meta-analysis of the relationship between employee engagement and 11 different performance outcomes.
They analyzed “456 research studies across 276 organizations in 54 industries and 96 countries” in total. Their researchers “statistically calculated the work-unit-level relationship between employee engagement and performance outcomes that the organization supplied”, which spanned “112,312 work units, including 2.7 million employees.”
In other words: this wasn’t a small-scale analysis or cherry-picked set of conclusions, but a deep and wide look at the true impact of employee engagement.
The results were consistent and convincing. After comparing employee engagement levels, the researchers found that top- and bottom-quartile business units and teams had the following differences in business outcomes:
81% in absenteeism
64% in safety incidents (accidents)
58% in patient safety incidents (mortality and falls)
43% in turnover for low-turnover organizations
41% in quality (defects)
23% in profitability
28% in shrinkage (theft)
18% in turnover for high-turnover organizations
18% in productivity (sales)
10% in customer loyalty/engagement
However, as remarkable as it is that employee engagement correlates with all of these outcomes, that isn’t even the most remarkable thing of all.
It’s the fact that, according to Gallup, “70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.”
Meaning that how engaged a team is comes down more to who is managing them than any other thing.
And yet –– while it may be surprising to hear –– I can tell you that most companies have no accountability in place to improve the performance of their managers.
I would know: I spent 15+ years leading teams at American Express, Google, Meta, Tableau, and Salesforce. I actually won Google’s Great Manager Award in 2016 (the final year Google gave those awards out to the top 25 managers in the company.)
When I got to Google in 2011, I was far from a great manager. I was barely even adequate. In fact, the results of my first manager feedback survey (MFS) put me in the bottom 25th percentile of all managers at the company with an overall 72% favorable score.
By 2016, the year I won their Great Manager Award, I was one of the top managers with a 96% favorable score.
So why am I claiming that companies are not accountable for improving management performance when I myself improved that much in five years?
Didn’t Google’s management feedback surveys play a vital role in that transformation?
The answer is no and yes –– which is both a problem and an opportunity for companies that want more good managers and engaged employees.
While Google and most companies do collect team feedback about managers, nothing requires that feedback to actually be used towards positive change.
As a result, the managers who use the feedback to shore up their weaknesses and get better tend to be those who are intrinsically motivated to do that.
Meanwhile, managers with other priorities (power, more compensation, a bigger title, the chance to build an internal empire) can and do essentially disregard their team’s feedback altogether.
The resulting selection bias creates a dynamic where total company-wide engagement (and thus, performance) is far below its truly achievable heights.
Since I have never seen this discussed in detail, I would like to offer my analysis of the problem.
Starting with the hiring of Laszlo Bock as Head of People Operations (HR) in 2006, Google set out to measure the role that managers played in the company’s performance with the same data-driven rigor they used in all of their operations.
Three years later, under Bock’s command, the New York Times wrote that Google’s people analytics team embarked on Project Oxygen: an ambitious effort of “analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards” to uncover patterns in the company’s best managers.
From this deep dive came 8 guiding principles such as:
“Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.”
“Help your employees with career development.”
“Be productive and results-oriented.”
From there, Bock and his team set about rank-ordering these principles to see which ones truly made the biggest difference,
As the New York Times writes, “this is where Project Oxygen gets interesting.”
“Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise –– the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep –– ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.”
“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”
By the time I got to Google in 2011, these eight principles had been codified into manager feedback surveys as “Oxygen Attributes”, which were:
Is a good coach
Empowers team and does not micromanage
Expresses interest / concern for team members’ success and well-being
Is productive and results-oriented
Is a good communicator
Helps with career development
Has a clear vision/strategy for the team
Has important technical skills that help him / her advise the team
(Two of these Oxygen Attributes were updated after I left Google, and two more were added, making a complete list of ten that you can see here.)
When I left Google in 2016, Manager Feedback Surveys went out four times a year –– twice as part of a broader Googlegeist survey, and twice as one-offs.
All direct reports get asked questions about their manager’s performance along each of the Oxygen Attributes. These aren’t popularity contest questions, mind you. It’s not “Does Dave take the team out for beers”, but rather, pointed questions about what kind of work environment the manager creates. Questions like “Does my leader create an environment where I can take risks and not get punished for it?” Or “Does my leader prioritize correctly?”
Then, after the people analytics team crunches all the data, a full report is presented to each manager at the company.
So far, so good –– Google’s distillation of manager performance down to eight thoughtful attributes is a huge step forward from past efforts to quantify the squishy science of management.
And it’s easy to see why a manager who measures well on these dimensions would have more engaged employees than one who doesn’t.
The problem is what happens (and more often doesn’t happen) with all of that excellent feedback once it’s collected.
At Google, and every other Big Tech company where I worked, the company essentially hands the manager their feedback and says “do with this what you will.”
Imagine all the time, effort, and resources that go into collecting employee input on the job their managers are doing, with no mandated action step for using any of it.
Well, you don’t have to imagine it, because that is the actual living reality in every company where I worked.
Granted, every company has different policies for who can access manager feedback data internally. At Salesforce, I could look up any of the thousands of managers at the company who had gotten feedback from at least five direct reports and see what that feedback said.
But even there, no manager was under any obligation to actually do anything with the feedback they received. Or in any way prove that they took action from it.
In fact, when I was at Google, I saw many teams bar MFS scores from being included in a manager’s performance review. Team leads would say “MFS is about you as a manager, not about your performance.”
I found that outrageous and unbelievable. If you’re a manager, how is the feedback you receive about your management not related to your performance? What is your performance, if not how good of a manager you are?
Not all teams and managers treated the MFS scores this way. Good bosses used the MFS data to coach people and create accountability. When I scored in the 72nd percentile in my first year as a manager at Google, the organization I was a part of (Media Publisher Services) was run by a terrific leader named Russ Laraway.
Russ was a Great Manager Award winner at Google himself. He also wrote the book When They Win You Win and is now the Chief People Officer at Goodwater Capital. Russ was one of the managers who cared a lot about developing other great managers. As part of his organization, I got coaching and feedback to improve my weaknesses and it paid off.
However, while there were pockets of people like Russ who used manager feedback to help managers improve, this was not the norm. Not at Google, not at Meta, not at Salesforce, and not at any other company where I managed people.
The result is a selection bias that systematically degrades the quality of management (and thus, employee engagement) throughout all companies.
When a manager cares about the feedback their direct reports share, they take concrete actions to try to improve their weaknesses. Every time I got my MFS score, I actively addressed the feedback with my team and pledged to improve in specific and meaningful ways.
For instance, if the team shared concerns about work / life balance, I might promise to stop emailing them on weekends. If they said that I needed to set a clearer vision, I would go back to the drawing board and create a simpler vision they could sink their teeth into.
I was not the only manager who did this at Google or the other companies where I worked, but it never ceased to amaze me that no company policy actually required managers to take such corrective steps.
More often than not, manager feedback surveys figuratively collect dust inside of a filing cabinet, never to be used in any meaningful way.
Even though, as Gallup reported, the manager determines a full 70% of how engaged their team is.
Harvard Business Review recently published an insightful article by Kim Scott, Lizz Fosslien, and Mollie West Duffy called How Leaders Can Get The Feedback They Need To Grow.
Their message essentially boils down to: collect the feedback, acknowledge the feedback, do something about the feedback.
Scott, Fosslien, and West Duffy encourage managers to not simply listen, but to “make your listening tangible.” Make it clear to your team exactly what you intend to do about the concerns and suggestions that they shared with you about your management of them.
Unfortunately, while this is exactly the right advice, there are no incentives in place to make sure managers do this.
Those who are personally motivated to improve will (and are) while those who aren’t, never will.
Now, you may ask the question: “is anything stopping executives at any company from giving real teeth to these manager feedback surveys and making sure managers use them?”
In theory, no. These companies all measure how much revenue their products bring in. As well as their expenses and overhead. Heads roll every single day when these numbers aren’t to leadership’s liking.
The same leaders who demand results for quarterly sales quotas or customer retention could certainly apply similar scrutiny to these tracked management KPIs.
As with all things inside of companies, though, it comes down to prioritization and where the company chooses to focus its efforts.
So while I would love for some brave and courageous executive to stake political capital on changing this, I’m not holding my breath that this will happen anytime soon.
Therefore, it is incumbent on all employees to know –– before accepting a job at any company –– that you will encounter good and bad managers.
Some of the bad ones will want to change and make the changes to improve, but many will not.
So if you know that the quality of managers is inconsistent, and that there is little incentive for them to change, it’s a good idea to assume that the way your managers are now is the way they will continue to be.
Therefore, it’s incumbent upon you to decide if your job is worthwhile enough to stick around for, or whether it’s time to explore greener pastures.
Either way, make the decision yourself to Own Your Career!