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Opening Salvo
Every senior leader I've worked with runs a “work” version of themselves. The performance of evenness, the calibrated opinion, the face that comes out for the quarterly, all of it maintained on top of the actual job.
Turns out it's most of us. A new Harris Poll has 63% saying the person they are at work isn't the person they are outside it, 86% calling the management of that gap a core professional skill, and half saying their employer offers no guidance on how to do it.
So everybody's rated on it and nobody's been handed the standard. A gap that wide is what people build from watching what gets rewarded and what doesn't.
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The Fact Pattern
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Talent Management 101 (TM101)
Leader-Member Exchange: The Average Hides Who Got Cut
Leader-member exchange describes the quality of the relationship a manager holds with each person reporting to them, and it differentiates rather than averages. As span widens, four or five people keep the manager they had. Everyone else gets the version that approves things and asks how’s it is going, though nobody is told which group they’re in.
A team average conceals that split. The people on the transactional side are the ones whose decisions wait and whose development stops, inside a number that still looks acceptable.
Why It Happens
A span model divides people, not hours: The math assigns reports without assigning the time that made the relationship work, so the manager rations what was never counted.
The visible half wins every collision: Decisions carry dates, escalation paths, and people asking. Feedback carries none of those and yields whenever the two want the same hour.
Feedback is what makes delegation survivable: Pushing a decision down requires trusting the judgment underneath, and that trust was built in the conversations just cut.
The cost arrives as two unrelated problems: A missed date and a resignation surface months apart, and nothing connects either to the span change that produced both.
The Question Organizations Avoid
Which of your managers has a team the average describes, and which has two teams inside it?
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance improvement consultancy. We help organizations close the gap between what leadership intends and what actually gets executed by fixing the misalignment in people, systems, and structure that stalls results.
We work through consulting engagements and coaching. If your organization is producing effort without outcomes, let's talk.
Visit astutedge.com or share this with a leader who feels the drag.