Managers & Leadership

You can read the health of a team in the first four minutes of a skip-level, by what people are willing to say when their manager is not in the room. Most leaders waste that signal. They treat the skip-level as a morale gesture, ask how things are going, get all good, and leave with nothing. The meeting that could have been the cheapest capability diagnostic they have becomes theatre. A skip-level is not a temperature check. It is a controlled experiment in whether the truth

"I was brilliant at my job. Now I'm bad at a job I didn't know I'd taken." A newly promoted team lead in a BFSI client said that to us, six weeks into the role. She was not exaggerating. She had been the top individual contributor on her team. That was exactly why she was promoted, and exactly why she was struggling. The skills that made her excellent were no longer the skills the job required. This post is about that gap: the identity shift every first-time manager goes thro