What Years of Coaching Managers Taught Me About Measuring Them

By Nick Herinckx, Co-CEO of Oxygen, the leading provider of management training, benchmarking, and effectiveness scoring

I coached a manager a while back who was, by everything I could see, doing the job well. Deadlines held, her people stayed, nothing was escalating to her boss. When I asked how she handled feedback, she told me she gave it constantly, and she meant it. What took us months to uncover was that most of that feedback happened in her head, in the two seconds before she decided it wasn't worth saying out loud. Her team experienced her as almost completely silent. She wasn't lying to me. She had no way to see the distance between what she intended and what actually landed, and honestly, neither did I.

Coaching starts blind, and that gets expensive

That distance is the thing I've spent most of my career working around. When you start with a manager, the only instrument you have is the manager. You ask questions, you listen for what isn't being said, and over a few months you triangulate your way toward the real picture. It works eventually. But you burn the most valuable stretch of an engagement just figuring out where somebody stands, and by the time you know, a third of your time together is gone.

This isn't one person's quirk either. Gallup found that about half of managers say they give feedback weekly, while only around one in five of their employees say they receive it. Both groups are answering honestly. They're just not describing the same reality, and no amount of asking the manager harder questions will close that.

A read on how someone manages, not who they are

There are good instruments out there for understanding how a person is wired, and I've used plenty of them over the years. They'll tell you someone's disposition, how they sit with ambiguity, where they get their energy. What they won't tell you is whether that person sets direction their team can actually follow, or hands off work and then resists the urge to hover, or says the difficult thing while it's still small enough to be a conversation instead of a confrontation.

Those are behaviors. You can see them, you can learn them, and they're what the job is actually made of. That's the whole premise of the Oxygen Management Impact Model, the nine dimensions we've used to define good management inside Management Essentials since day one. Seven of them describe capability, the craft of managing. Two describe readiness, meaning whether this person is open to changing and whether their situation gives them any room to try.

How the assessment actually works

The Management Effectiveness Assessment takes that model and turns it into a measurement. Every manager gets read against the same nine dimensions on a one to five scale, with bands that say plainly whether something is an established strength, a developing area, or where the attention needs to go first.

The part I care most about is where the input comes from. We ask the manager, we ask their team, and we ask their supervisor. Then we show you where those three views agree and, more usefully, where they come apart.

We were deliberate about the guardrails. A manager needs at least three direct reports before we'll produce a full report, so nobody can work out who said what. The supervisor's view is shown as the single perspective it is, rather than blended in as if it were consensus. No verbatim comments travel back. And the narrative is formula-driven, so two managers with the same pattern get the same read every time. A report that shifts depending on who wrote it isn't really a measurement.

The gap is usually the finding

Most of the time, the page people sit with longest is the one comparing how a manager sees themselves against how their team experiences them. Almost everyone is stronger somewhere than they give themselves credit for, and softer somewhere else than they'd guess.

The supervisor comparison does something different and occasionally uncomfortable. When a manager's boss rates them well above where their team lands, that's worth a conversation, because it usually means the boss is seeing the work and missing the management.

Neither of those findings is available from a conversation. You have to measure to get them.

A score only matters if something happens next

A number on its own changes nothing. I've watched organizations run assessments, circulate a deck, feel informed, and do nothing differently. So every development priority in the report comes with specific actions a manager can start in the next two weeks. If one-on-ones are where someone is thinnest, the report says so, and it tells them what to do about it. If delegation is where a manager is thinnest, the report says so and says which session addresses it.

Then we measure again. That part is the whole reason I wanted this. After a cohort, you can see what moved, dimension by dimension, and whether the movement is real or noise. Development stops being something everyone agrees is valuable and becomes something you can put next to your other results.

It's worth saying the effect doesn't stay in one place. Harvard Business School researchers found that training frontline workers made their managers more productive too, even though those managers got no training at all, and that spillover accounted for close to half the total benefit. Capability travels through a team in both directions.

Why this one is personal for me

For years the honest answer to "how are our managers doing" was somebody's impression. Usually a thoughtful impression, often from someone who had been in the room a lot. Still an impression. Meanwhile the same company could tell you their pipeline coverage to the decimal.

Management is the highest-leverage role most companies have and the last one they got around to measuring. Being able to hand a leader a real read on their management layer, and then hand each manager a specific place to start, is the thing I kept wishing for in every coaching conversation I've ever had. Now I get to.

See it for yourself

Take a look at a sample report to see what a manager actually receives.

Or book a walkthrough and we'll show you what this would look like across your own managers.