This article has everything you need to know about how to be a good manager and leader.
Nobody hands you a manual on the day you become a manager. You get a new title, a few more meetings, and a group of people who now look at you a little differently. Most of us got promoted because we were good at the job itself. Then, overnight, the job changed.
That gap shows up in the numbers. Gallup’s latest global workplace data, covering more than 140 countries, finds that managers are now barely more engaged than the people they lead. Teams feel that. They feel it in vague instructions, skipped check-ins and decisions that arrive with no explanation.
The good news is that most of what separates a decent manager from a great one is behavior, and behavior can be learned. Below are 22 habits, each backed by research or real data, with a small thing you can do this week. You won’t need all of them at once. Pick two or three that sting a little when you read them. Those are usually the ones worth starting with.
1. Treat managing as a skill you have to learn
Being excellent at your old role does not make you good at this one. Managing people is its own craft, with its own techniques, and it rarely comes naturally.
The data from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report makes the point bluntly. Drawing on 263,810 respondents surveyed through 2025, Gallup found that global manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with the sharpest drop (five points) in the last year alone. Over the same period, non-managers barely moved.
| Year | Managers engaged | Non-managers engaged |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 31% | 20% |
| 2023 | 30% | 18% |
| 2024 | 27% | 18% |
| 2025 | 22% | 19% |
Managers used to enjoy a clear engagement premium. That premium has nearly vanished. Yet Gallup also reports that in its best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025, almost four times the global figure. So decline is not destiny. Where companies treat management as a learnable skill and support it, managers do far better.
If you want a quick sense of the qualities people look for, this guide on how to be a good boss is a useful companion.
Start small: block one hour a month in your calendar labeled “getting better at managing” and protect it like a client meeting.
2. Coach people instead of directing them
Google once tried to prove that managers didn’t matter. It failed, and the failure became one of the best-known case studies in management.
Project Oxygen began in 2008. Google’s people analytics team mined performance reviews, employee surveys and award nominations to work out what its highest-rated managers did differently. The first behavior on the resulting list was “is a good coach.” Others included empowering the team without micromanaging, caring about people’s success and wellbeing, communicating well, and supporting career development. When Google revisited the research in 2018, it added two more behaviors (collaborating across the company and making strong decisions) and reported that the updated list of ten predicted turnover, satisfaction and performance better than the original eight.
The limits are real. This is one company, measured mostly through its own surveys, and Google published the findings itself rather than through peer review. Still, the core idea travels well: the managers people rated highest spent their energy helping others solve problems rather than solving everything themselves.
Your move: the next time someone brings you a problem, ask “What have you tried so far, and what would you do if I weren’t here?” before you offer a single suggestion.
3. Define what great work looks like
People can’t hit a target they can’t see. That sounds obvious, yet it is where many teams quietly fall apart.
In January 2026, Gallup chief scientist Jim Harter reported that clarity about what is expected at work showed the largest decline of any engagement item among U.S. employees since 2020, down nine points. The sample was large: 78,945 full- and part-time workers surveyed across 2025. Among Gen Z and younger millennials, the share who strongly agreed they knew what was expected of them fell from 51% to 42%.
The more striking figure concerns excellence. In a Q3 2025 sample of 21,923 workers, only about 22% of people managers and individual contributors strongly agreed they had a clear definition of exceptional performance in their role. Leaders were higher, at 32%. Those who did have that clarity were roughly four times as likely to be engaged (66% versus 18% among individual contributors). That’s a correlation, not proof that clarity causes engagement, but the gap is too wide to ignore. When Gallup asked what would help, 35% of respondents pointed to better communication, far more than any other answer.
Test it this week: ask each person on your team to write down, in one sentence, what an outstanding quarter would look like in their role. Then write your own version for each of them and compare notes.
4. Hand one-on-ones over to the other person
Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has spent more than two decades studying meetings. His 2024 book Glad We Met, published by Oxford University Press, focuses on the one meeting most employees say they want more of.
Rogelberg’s surveys suggest people prefer weekly one-on-ones of around 30 minutes, with every other week as a second choice. He also found that employees rate close to half of these meetings as suboptimal, and that managers tend to think their one-on-ones go better than their reports do. In an interview with Quartz, he called them “the meeting that should never be an email.” His practical advice is to let the employee shape the agenda and do most of the talking, because a manager who dominates the conversation defeats its purpose. Much of this rests on Rogelberg’s own survey work rather than controlled experiments, so treat it as strong expert guidance rather than settled law.
If you need help keeping these talks from feeling stiff, these tips on how to have a good conversation with anyone translate well to the office.
Here’s a simple way in: open your next one-on-one with “What’s on your list today?” and wait. Don’t fill the silence.
5. Have one meaningful conversation a week with each person
Frequency matters. So does substance. Gallup’s 2026 data shows what happens when you get both right.
In a January 2026 analysis of team size, Gallup pooled seven studies with 44,025 responses collected between 2022 and 2024. Employees who strongly agreed they had received meaningful feedback in the past week were highly engaged about seven times in ten (67% to 70%), whether their team had four people or forty. Those who didn’t strongly agree hovered between 22% and 26%. The conversations don’t need to be long. Gallup’s guidance is 15 to 30 minutes, covering recent work worth recognizing, how the person is collaborating, current priorities and their strengths.
The catch is how rarely this happens. In a separate study of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16% described their last conversation with their manager as extremely meaningful. You can also make it a two-way street by sharing this guide on how to ask for feedback from your manager with your team, so they come to these talks with questions of their own.
Put a recurring 20-minute slot in the diary for each direct report, and cover at least one of those four topics every time you meet.
6. Listen more than you talk
Managers are paid, in part, to have answers. That habit makes listening strangely hard.
The strongest evidence here comes from a 2024 meta-analysis in the Journal of Business and Psychology by Avraham Kluger, Herman Aguinis, Guy Itzchakov and colleagues. They pooled 664 effect sizes and 400,020 observations from 144 studies. Feeling listened to was linked to better work outcomes overall (a correlation of 0.39), with the strongest link to relationship quality (0.51). Even after the authors removed studies that relied on a single questionnaire for everything, listening still correlated with job performance at 0.21. That puts it roughly level with conscientiousness, the best personality predictor of performance. Two caveats matter: most of the underlying studies are correlational, and the authors themselves warn that some listening measures overlap with general relationship quality.
Good listening is closely tied to emotional awareness, which you can build on purpose. This piece on how to improve your emotional intelligence covers the basics.
A quick experiment: in your next three conversations, put your phone face down, and before responding, summarize what you heard in one sentence. Notice how often your summary gets corrected.
7. Make it safe for people to speak up
Some teams are full of smart people and still miss obvious problems. Usually it’s because nobody felt safe saying so.
Google’s Project Aristotle, published on its re:Work site in 2015, studied 180 teams (115 in engineering and 65 in sales) to find out what made some work better than others. The researchers tested more than 250 survey items and over 35 statistical models. What mattered most was not who was on the team. It was how the team worked together, and psychological safety came first. Teams with a stronger culture of safety had members who were less likely to leave, brought in more revenue and were rated effective twice as often by executives. Factors many people assume matter, such as team size, seniority or how extroverted members were, did not predict effectiveness at Google.
The term itself comes from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who uses it for the sense, shared across a team, that taking an interpersonal risk won’t be punished. Safety is not the same as niceness, though. People can feel safe and still be held to high standards.
Disagreement is where safety gets tested. If you find opposing views hard to sit with, these ideas on how to be tolerant of people’s opinions can help.
Next time, do this: when someone raises a concern in a meeting, thank them first, out loud, before you respond to the substance.
8. Aim your feedback at the work itself
Feedback feels like the most obvious tool a manager has. It is also one of the riskiest.
The foundational study here is old but still cited for good reason. In 1996, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi published a meta-analysis of feedback interventions and found that in 38% of cases, feedback actually made performance worse. The damage happened mostly when feedback threatened how people saw themselves, rather than focusing on the task. Kluger’s 2024 listening meta-analysis returned to that figure and offered a contrast: of 30 experimental effects of listening, only one was negative, and only slightly.
None of this means you should stop giving feedback. It means feedback lands better when it is specific, tied to the task and follows real listening.
Give it a go: before your next piece of critical feedback, rewrite it so it describes the work (“the report skipped the cost section”) rather than the person (“you’re not thorough”).
9. Recognize specific work, often
Praise is cheap. Specific, well-timed recognition is worth a great deal more, and the data suggests it keeps people around.
In September 2024, Gallup and the HR software company Workhuman released research that followed more than 3,400 workers over two years. Employees who received high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to have left their job between 2022 and 2024. Meisha-ann Martin, Workhuman’s senior director of people analytics, explained to NPR that recognition changes how people perceive their situation, even when nothing objective has changed. Gallup’s own engagement survey still includes a pointed item: whether someone has received recognition or praise in the last seven days. The study is observational, so it can’t rule out that people who were already happier were also recognized more. And Workhuman sells recognition software, which is worth keeping in mind.
Silence is often how disengagement starts. If you’re worried someone on your team is fading quietly, this piece on quiet cracking describes the warning signs.
Every Friday, write one short note to one person naming exactly what they did and why it mattered. Rotate through the whole team.
10. Admit your mistakes out loud
Many new managers believe they have to look certain. In practice, the opposite tends to build trust.
A 2025 meta-analysis in Personality and Individual Differences by Anthony Silard, Chao Miao, Arménio Rego and colleagues pulled together the research on leader-expressed humility: admitting limits, crediting others and staying open to learning. As summarized on the ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon record of the meta-analysis, the authors found that leader humility explained follower outcomes beyond what transformational leadership already explained. It overlapped with authentic leadership but still added predictive power. They also found that the effects varied with culture, depending on how individualist or collectivist a society is and on its level of religiosity. The data are mostly correlational, so humility is linked with better outcomes rather than proven to cause them.
Picture this: a project has slipped because you underestimated the timeline. You open the team meeting with, “I called that deadline wrong, here’s what I’m changing.” That one sentence gives everyone else permission to flag their own problems early.
Start small: once this month, tell your team about a decision you got wrong and what you learned from it.
11. Ask more questions than you answer
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety (see item 7) comes with practical advice, and Google’s re:Work team passed it on to its own managers. In her TEDx talk, Edmondson recommends three things: frame the work as a learning problem rather than an execution problem, acknowledge your own fallibility, and model curiosity by asking lots of questions.
Questions do something statements can’t. They signal that you don’t have every answer, and they invite people to contribute what they know. A team that hears its manager ask “What am I missing?” learns that missing things is normal and fixable. One honest caution: this is expert advice built on Edmondson’s research, not a tested intervention with its own effect size, and the re:Work material dates back to 2015.
Your move: in your next team meeting, count how many questions you ask compared with how many statements you make. Aim to tip the ratio toward questions.
12. Delegate the outcome, not the steps
Micromanagement often comes from good intentions. You care about the result, so you hover. Unfortunately, hovering tends to drain the very motivation you need.
A 2018 meta-analysis in Motivation and Emotion by Gavin Slemp, Margaret Kern, Kent Patrick and Richard Ryan pooled 72 studies covering 32,870 employees. Leaders who supported autonomy (giving choices, explaining reasons, acknowledging feelings) were strongly linked to employees’ self-driven motivation, and the pattern held across countries. The link to performance itself was smaller, in the small-to-moderate range. A separate 2018 meta-analysis of 105 samples by Allan Lee, Sara Willis and Amy Wei Tian in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found positive effects of empowering leadership on performance, citizenship behavior and creativity, partly through trust in the leader. Both are now several years old, and no newer meta-analysis turned up that replaces them.
Think of it like giving someone a destination instead of turn-by-turn directions. They’ll take a route you might not have chosen, and they’ll learn the roads. The comparison breaks down when the stakes are very high or the person is brand new: then you agree on checkpoints along the way.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of hovering, you’ll recognize the patterns in this piece on working with a controlling person.
Test it this week: hand off one task by describing only the goal, the deadline and the constraints. Then agree on one check-in point and stay out of it until then.
13. Play fair, and let people see you doing it
Favoritism rarely announces itself. Most managers who show it don’t realize they’re doing it.
The damage spreads in a predictable way. Someone notices that the same person always gets the interesting projects. They start to suspect the process isn’t fair. Once they believe that, effort feels pointless, because outcomes seem to depend on who you are rather than what you do. Trust in the manager drops, and people hold back the discretionary effort that good teams run on.
A 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Management Studies by Elizabeth Karam and colleagues, covering 166 samples and 46,034 people, supports the first part of that chain. Leader behavior shaped how fairly employees felt they were treated, and those justice perceptions together with leader behavior helped explain the quality of the manager relationship, task performance and job satisfaction. The data are correlational and the study is now seven years old, so read it as strong support for the mechanism rather than a precise measure of it.
Seeing your team through each person’s eyes makes blind spots easier to catch. This guide on how to see things from different points of view is a good place to begin.
Look back at the last three stretch assignments you handed out, write down who got them, and ask yourself honestly whether the same people keep coming up.
14. Care about the person behind the work
People don’t leave jobs only for money. Often, they leave because they stopped feeling like anyone noticed them.
Gallup’s January 2026 analysis found that feeling cared about as a person had the second-largest decline of any engagement item among U.S. employees since 2020, down eight points overall. Among Gen Z and younger millennials, the share who strongly agreed that a supervisor or someone at work cared about them fell from 54% in 2020 to 41% in 2025. When Gallup asked what would help, 34% mentioned supportive relationships, communication and respect, while 23% mentioned pay, benefits and security. Both matter. But the relationship answer came first.
Caring doesn’t mean prying. It means noticing. If you’d like more on how to show it without overstepping, read this guide on how to show empathy to someone.
Here’s a simple way in: at the start of each one-on-one, ask one question that has nothing to do with deadlines, and remember the answer next time.
15. Help people build their careers
Your team’s growth is part of your job, even when it doesn’t show up in this quarter’s numbers.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that only 15% of employees said their manager had helped them build a career plan in the previous six months, five points lower than a year earlier. Only 36% of organizations qualified as what LinkedIn calls “career development champions,” meaning they used several tactics to support growth. These figures come from published summaries of the report rather than the full LinkedIn document, so treat the exact percentages with some caution. Gallup’s 2026 data points the same way: among Gen Z and younger millennials, agreement that they’d had chances to learn and grow fell from 48% in 2020 to 37% in 2025.
Some of your quieter team members may undersell what they can do. This piece on how to stop underestimating yourself is worth passing along.
A quick experiment: once a quarter, ask each person, “What do you want to be able to do a year from now that you can’t do today?” Then find one project that moves them toward it.
16. Remember that your people skills decide who stays
This finding should make every manager sit up. How you treat your team may matter most for whether they stay.
Mitchell Hoffman of the University of Toronto and Steven Tadelis of UC Berkeley studied personnel data from a large high-tech firm and published the results in the Journal of Political Economy in 2021. Managers whose teams rated them highly on people-management skills had much lower employee turnover. The authors used research designs built around new hires and workers switching managers, which strengthens the case that the link is causal rather than coincidental. Interestingly, those skills did not consistently improve other measurable outcomes, such as patents or promotions for the employees. But the better people managers were themselves rewarded with higher ratings, more promotions and larger raises. As Tadelis put it in a Berkeley Haas interview, “Losing good people is really painful.”
The study is from one company and is now five years old. Its strength lies in the design, not the date.
Try this: ask your team, anonymously if needed, one question each quarter: “What’s one thing I could do differently that would make your work easier?” Act on at least one answer.
17. Make decisions, then explain why
Uncertainty is exhausting. Managers who delay decisions or announce them without reasons leave people to fill the gap themselves, usually with the worst story available.
The chain works like this. A decision arrives without context. People can’t tell whether it was careful or arbitrary. They start guessing, and guesses tend to drift toward suspicion. Over time, they stop investing effort in plans that might be reversed without warning. Explaining the reasoning breaks that chain, because it lets people predict how future decisions will be made, even when they disagree with this one.
Gallup’s January 2026 qualitative data supports the employee side of that mechanism. When asked what would clarify expectations, many workers asked for more transparency from management about strategy, goals and how decisions get made. Some wanted something simpler: regular, consistent communication from their own manager.
Following through on what you announce matters just as much as the announcement. If that’s a weak spot, these strategies on how to keep a promise apply to managers too.
Next time, do this: when you share a decision, add three short lines, covering what you decided, what you considered and why you chose this option.
18. Take the lead on AI with your team
AI tools are arriving in most workplaces, and your team is watching how you handle them.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, based here on a Q1 2026 survey of U.S. workers, found that the top two drivers of frequent AI use were how well the tools fit existing systems and whether managers actively led adoption. When managers actively supported their team’s use of AI, 79% of employees used it frequently, compared with 46% when they didn’t. Employees with that support were 8.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI had transformed how work gets done, and 7.4 times as likely to say it gave them more chances to do what they do best. Yet fewer than a third of U.S. employees in AI-adopting organizations said their manager actively supported their team’s use of it. Meanwhile, 18% of U.S. employees said it was likely their job would be eliminated by technology within five years.
Fear and opportunity are sitting side by side on your team. Ignoring the topic doesn’t make the fear go away.
Give it a go: run a 30-minute session where each person shows one way they’ve used an AI tool this month, and one place where it let them down.
19. Connect daily work to the people it helps
When people can’t see who benefits from their work, effort starts to feel arbitrary. Arbitrary effort is hard to sustain.
The mechanism is fairly simple. Work that feels disconnected from any result gives people nothing to aim at except the deadline. When they can see that a report helped a colleague win a contract, or a fix saved a customer an afternoon of frustration, the same task carries meaning. Meaning raises motivation, and motivation shows up as care in the details.
Gallup’s 2026 global report points the same way. New analysis, conducted with the Wellbeing for Planet Earth Foundation and PERSOL, found that employees reported stronger wellbeing and higher engagement when they enjoyed their work, believed it improved other people’s lives and felt they had choices in what they did. That’s correlational survey data, but it lines up with the logic above. Your job is to keep that line of sight open, especially for people far from customers.
Once a month, share one concrete example of how someone outside the team benefited from the team’s work, and name the people who made it happen.
20. Get proper training, and keep getting it
Too many managers are expected to learn the job by trial and error, mostly error. Formal development helps more than most people expect.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, released in spring 2025, called for organizations to make sure all managers receive training. It reported that participants in courses focused on management best practices saw up to 22% higher engagement than non-participants, and that their teams’ engagement rose by up to 18%. Training also lifted managers’ own thriving from 28% to 34%. The figures appear to come from Gallup’s 2022 meta-analysis of its own manager programs, which means two things: they’re based on real business-unit data, and Gallup sells those programs. Read them as encouraging rather than neutral.
You don’t need a corporate program to start. Peer groups, a mentor two levels up or a structured book club with other managers all count.
One thing to do today: ask HR or your own manager what development budget or programs exist for people managers, and book one session before the end of the month.
21. Escape the player-coach trap
Almost every manager still does some hands-on work. The trouble starts when that work quietly eats the time you’d otherwise spend leading.
The loop usually runs like this. You’re busy, so you handle the urgent tasks yourself because it’s faster. That leaves less time for check-ins and coaching. Your team gets less feedback, makes more avoidable mistakes and brings more problems back to you. So you end up doing even more yourself. The loop tightens.
Gallup’s January 2026 study of U.S. managers puts numbers on it. Some 97% of managers reported doing individual contributor work, with a median of 40% of their time spent on it. Managers above that 40% line had lower engagement, and the gap widened as their teams grew: 32% engaged for those with 25 or more reports, against 37% for those below the line. Average team size also rose, from 10.9 direct reports in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. More people, same hours.
If your calendar has become the bottleneck, these tips on how to be more organized at work can free up a surprising amount of time.
Before Friday: list everything you did last week, mark each item “only I can do this” or “someone else could learn this,” and hand off one item from the second list.
22. Look after yourself, because your team can tell
Leadership is often described as rewarding. The daily experience can be rougher than that.
Gallup’s 2026 global report compared leaders with individual contributors and found a mixed picture. Leaders reported higher engagement and life evaluations, but they were also more likely to have experienced a lot of stress (7 points higher), anger (12 points higher), sadness (11 points higher) and loneliness (10 points higher) the previous day. Among leaders, 46% reported a lot of daily stress and 31% reported loneliness. There’s a hopeful note too: engaged managers reported negative emotions at lower rates than individual contributors and were 14 points more likely to be thriving than the average leader.
Your mood leaks into every meeting. A stressed manager tends to communicate in shorter, sharper bursts, and teams notice. When the pressure spikes, these techniques on how to calm your nervous system work in a five-minute gap between calls.
Find two or three peers at your level and set up a monthly hour to talk honestly about what’s hard. Loneliness at the top shrinks fast when you’re not the only one admitting it.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. Everyone does. You’ll snap at someone on a bad day, cancel a one-on-one three weeks running, or take credit you shouldn’t have. What matters is the repair.
Research on leader apologies offers practical guidance. A 2024 study in the SA Journal of Industrial Psychology by Claudia Coustas and Gavin Price, based on 311 employees who had been wronged by a leader, found that apologies were seen as more authentic, and relationships recovered better, when the apology had real content (acknowledging the harm, expressing regret and committing to a remedy), came promptly, felt fair and was delivered through a suitable channel. Wrongdoing that people saw as preventable was harder to repair. And, sobering but honest, relationships were on average still weaker after the apology than before the wrongdoing. An earlier study by Steven Grover and colleagues in the Journal of Business Ethics (2019) found that apologies restored trust most clearly for violations of moderate severity. Both studies rely on surveys and recalled incidents, so they show patterns rather than guarantees.
A practical repair sequence looks like this:
- Apologize soon. A day later beats a month later.
- Name what you did and its effect, without padding it with excuses.
- Say what you’ll do differently, then do it consistently. One apology repairs less than ten weeks of changed behavior.
- If the other person is upset, let them be. This guide on how to deal with angry people has useful ideas for staying steady.
- Restart the habit you dropped the very next week. Don’t wait for a fresh month or quarter.
Picture this: you’ve skipped a direct report’s last three one-on-ones. Instead of quietly rescheduling, you say, “I’ve cancelled on you three times. That’s on me, and it sends the wrong message. Can we lock in Thursday mornings?” Then you show up every Thursday.
Conclusion
Good management comes down to small habits repeated week after week: clear expectations, real conversations, honest recognition, fair treatment and the humility to fix your own mistakes. The research behind these habits keeps pointing in the same direction. People do their best work for managers who make them feel seen, informed and trusted.
Don’t try all 22 at once. Choose the two that made you wince, put them in your calendar this week, and check back in a month. For more practical guides on leading, working and growing your career, browse the Work section of Perfect 24 Hours.
