What Makes a Good Manager

A good manager has two fundamental capabilities.

The world model

The first is creating and maintaining an accurate, high-resolution model of the world. The more detailed and accurate this model, the more likely they are to be effective.

This model is a series of nested layers, each influencing the others. At the broadest level, we have culture - the political, social, and technological forces that shape everything.

Within that is the market you operate in. There are broad market forces informed by culture, competitors both direct and indirect, and the customers you hope to serve.

Within the market is your organization. Your mission, goals, and strategy on the one hand, and your team on the other. These combine to both shape each other, and shape your offering.

At the most granular level is the work. The projects and processes where strategy turns into action, determining who works on what and when, resulting in an offering to customers and delivery of that offering.

A skilled manager maintains a clear mental map of all these interconnected layers, ready for instant recall. A manager in one function will naturally have a higher resolution model of their team, their work, and the market and cultural forces impacting their function directly. The best managers will have the highest fidelity model across the most functions, and across the broadest view of both the market and the world.

Meta-rationality

The second capability is meta-rationality, a concept from David Chapman.

Meta-rationality is rarer than rationality, and has more leverage, but it is so rarely recognized that I had to invent the word for it. It is an invisible power.

-David Chapman

You should read him, but not yet, because a good manager first finishes the task at hand. I’ll give my condensed version.

While rationality helps us see the world in systems and understand how pieces connect, meta-rationality takes us a step further. It recognizes that systems are abstractions on reality - they draw boxes and arrows when reality is clouds and gusts of wind. It is the ability to step back from any given system, recognize its limitations, and choose different perspectives. It’s about understanding where models break down and where they’re useful, applying the right frame to the right problem at the right time, and adjusting systems from above instead of working from within them.

If you realized that I described a particular model of the world in the first section, and while reading this section you immediately started a background process in your mind questioning that model, congratulations, you may be meta-rational.

Superpowers

Having a high resolution model of reality seems necessary but not sufficient for being meta-rational. Being meta-rational seems useful on its own terms, but importantly hampered if your model is inaccurate in important ways.

But having an accurate and high fidelity model, and the ability to choose an appropriate lens to view it, is a superpower.

On People

People management flows naturally from these two capabilities. Your world model must include a deep understanding of the people around you - their internal states, emotional needs, and motivations. Meta-rationality helps you know when to prioritize different perspectives, whether business-focused or personal.

This approach serves both the business and its people. When your team is happy, fulfilled, and operating at their peak, the business thrives. Success requires both objective understanding of markets, customers, and offerings, but also the ability to motivate your team to execute on objectives. While people management might seem like a separate skill, it’s really an extension of these two core capabilities.

Bad, Better, Best

Bad managers fail to model the world well, or stay stuck in systems that aren’t serving their goals. Good managers may excel in one area but are underdeveloped in the other.

The best managers excel at both.