Expecting the Most
Some years ago I read the feedback my direct reports had written about my leadership, anonymously and in their own words, and I read it the way the form invited me to: as a list of things I could do differently. Some of it was fair and squarely mine. I was told, kindly, that patience did not come naturally to me, and that it could be hard for me to wait for colleagues to get to the same place, something they noted I was conscious of and was managing increasingly well. I took that to heart. I have also been told, more than once, that I speak quickly, and I am, after all, a New Yorker.
Two other comments asked for something different. One person wrote that they simply hoped for more time with me, to talk and to learn. Another suggested that I give the people who reported to me more opportunity to manage people themselves. The form asked how I could advance my leadership, so both were recorded as observations about me, and in part they were, because protecting that time and handing over that opportunity were partly within my control. Read again, they also ask for time with a manager, room to lead and a next step to grow into, and the decision about how much of each to fund is made well above the person in the role.
I think about that feedback often, because so much of what is written about leadership works the way that form did. It asks what the employee should do to be their best, or what the leader should do to show up differently, and it says very little about the structure, the climate and the environment that both of them are working in. Advice given that way is decontextualized, and it puts all the onus on the person least able to change the structure around them.
I see this most clearly with the managers in the middle of the organization. Over the last several years of restructuring, many organizations have removed layers of management, and some of the managers who remained have taken on larger teams without giving up their own individual work. In Gallup's U.S. data, 97% of managers report doing individual-contributor work alongside leading people, a median of 40% of their time, and those who exceed that share are less engaged, more so as their teams grow. Worldwide, Gallup reports that manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% between 2024 and 2025, leaving managers barely more engaged than the people they lead.
The engagement survey and the performance review then record what follows as a leadership problem: a manager who has stopped coaching, who is short with their team, who no longer seems to care the way they once did. In my advisory work I ask what a decision gave up, what it displaced and who absorbed the difference, and a decision to remove a layer is seldom examined that way. The salary saved is counted to the dollar, while the coaching, the candor and the career conversations that layer provided go uncounted, and few organizations try to estimate what the team would have become had it stayed, or who will be ready to lead it in ten years. So when the cost becomes visible, it is recorded as a fact about the manager.
When the cost becomes visible, it is recorded as a fact about the manager.
The manager who passes that strain down to the team still owns that choice. By Gallup's measure, managers' engagement has fallen further than that of the people they manage, and it is fair to say that many of them have very little left to give. That depletion is real, much of it was done to them, and the cost still reaches the people they lead. The person who wanted more time with their manager, and the person who wanted the chance to lead, bear it as well, and they are often the people an organization says it most wants to keep.
A colleague with a long career in regulatory science told me recently how that career began. Some forty years ago, as a student trained in clinical research, he was approached by a pharmaceutical company hiring for a regulatory role he had never heard of, and when he asked what the work involved, they told him they would teach him. He went on to build his career in a field he had known nothing about, because an employer saw his potential and invested in it. That type of investment in employee development is far rarer today, and much of that teaching once happened in management layers that have since been thinned.
Talent is still the differentiator, and I believe it always will be. A job description sets out a fair and reasonable set of expectations, and someone who meets them is doing the job well. A high-impact employee stands apart in what they give freely beyond it: the extra hour of thought, the honest objection in a difficult meeting, the willingness to stay through a hard quarter. No one can require that part of a person. An organization can enable it, by creating the conditions in which people can show up as the best version of themselves and contribute to something great, and those conditions are built from the very things that tend to go first in a restructuring: time, room to grow and genuine care for the person.
When I coach a manager who is struggling, I begin with the week they are actually living: the size of the team, the individual work that never left, the decisions they are accountable for without the authority to make them. Self-awareness matters a great deal, and I find it most useful once a person can see the structure they are working against. If, as a leader, you are giving your employees the least, how can you expect the most from them?
