Quality of Leadership


 Quality of Leadership


Before You Decide a Manager “Isn’t a Fit…”
By the time a manager is labeled “not a fit,” most executives have already made up their mind. The story is tidy: we hired the wrong person; they could not get it done. But if you sit in a director or C‑suite seat, that decision is not just about them. It reflects the quality of leadership above them. When we get comfortable, get in the clique, and lose touch with the floor, we start grading managers against a version of ourselves that no longer exists—different time, different resources, different culture. We see problems we leave unfixed and then measure a manager against those same unfixed problems.

Before you decide a manager “isn’t a fit,” go back to the basics of what you control:

What did we give them? 
  Did we give them real tools, real authority, and clear priorities for the problems we keep handing them—or just a title and a to‑do list?

How close did we stay to the work? 
  Have we gone with them to see the work often enough to understand what they are up against, or are we judging from a conference room and old memories of “when I was a manager”?

What did we do to build the manager we say we want? 
  We keep describing a “perfect manager” who can fix culture, stabilize operations, and hit every metric. What involvement have we had in molding, developing, and publicly backing that person before we say they failed?

Your leaders are accountable to you. You're equally accountable for the environment, structure, and support you built around them. If that same manager goes somewhere else and thrives, we owe ourselves the courage to ask whether we misjudged them, underbuilt the role, or both.

Back to basics: if you are going to re-evaluate a manager, be just as willing to re-evaluate the leadership they report to first.

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