Does Your Boss Know Your Strengths and Help You Pursue New Roles Based on Those Skills?

Source: https://www.skillscaravan.com

Has one of your former bosses identified your (perhaps previously undiscovered) strengths and helped you pursue new roles that were well-suited to those capabilities? If so, you are very fortunate. The benefits from having such a boss may be significant and long-lasting.

In today's Wall Street Journal, University of Chicago Professor Virginia Minni explains the findings from a well-designed study of managers at a large multinational company.  She identified "top managers" as those who were promoted much faster than their peers.  She explains her methodology and results:

Here is how it worked. Let’s say two different teams of comparable workers have a regular boss (in other words, not a top manager). Then the managers rotate, and one of those two teams gets a top-performing leader while the other team gets another lesser chief. Since the two teams are otherwise the same, the manager would be responsible for any changes in performance.

The results were striking. For one thing, employees who had contact with a high-quality manager were much more likely to make a lateral move within the firm—about 40% more likely than other workers, within seven years of being assigned to a top manager. These weren’t trivial moves, either: They often involved large changes, such as moving between completely different roles at the company.

That leads to the next striking difference in performance. The workers who served under a top manager and changed jobs were much better paid and much more productive than other workers. Within seven years of contact with a top manager, these people earned about 13% more than workers with lower-performing managers. And their performance metrics—like sales per capita—were 16% higher than other workers’ numbers.

Minni discovered that the effects endured, meaning that the workers did not just benefit while working for the highly effective boss.  They continued to excel in their career after shifting roles and working for different leaders.  She finds that these excellent bosses spent more time in one-on-one meetings with workers, which she argues helped these leaders match their employees with the right roles moving forward.  Moreover, they coached people to excel in those new roles.  

While the study may not offer earth-shattering (or even mildly surprising) results, it does document in a very rigorous way the impact of having an excellent boss who looks out for your interests.  What I would add is that some managers are not bad at leading their current teams, but they do hoard talent.  In other words, they are not always looking out for the interests of their team members.  They would rather hold on to talented individuals, rather than helping them find the next great role that could advance their career.  The best leaders create high-performing teams, but they also develop their people and help them secure great new opportunities.  Because they know how to identify and develop talent, these great leaders don't worry about losing that talent.  They are able to find new people who they can coach and develop to replace the people who have shifted to new roles.