The Talent Who Needed a Different Manager
Performance as a System
Performance is typically attributed to the person performing. When someone delivers well, we credit their capability. When someone underperforms, we identify a deficiency in them. This individual attribution is intuitive and sometimes correct. But it systematically underestimates the contribution of context — and specifically of management — to the performance that results.
Management is not a neutral backdrop to performance. It creates conditions that either amplify or suppress what people are capable of. A specific management approach creates conditions for a specific kind of talent to flourish — and conditions that work against a different kind of talent. The person who thrives with directive, structured management may struggle profoundly with the autonomy-heavy approach of a different manager. The person who needs space to think and develop may be crushed by the micromanagement that a more structured person would find clarifying. Neither person is intrinsically underperforming. They are performing in conditions that do not match their operating style.
What Gets Attributed to the Wrong Source
Organisations consistently misattribute performance outcomes that originate in the manager to the person being managed. The high performer who declines after a manager change is often understood as someone who "hit their ceiling." The person who underperforms with one manager and excels with another is a surprise rather than an expected outcome of a system mismatch. The person who leaves citing vague cultural reasons after a specific manager change is understood as a retention failure rather than a management failure.
These misattributions are expensive because they lead to wrong interventions. Development plans are written for people who do not have a development problem. Departures are accepted as normal attrition that are actually management casualties. Hiring decisions are made to replace people who were not actually deficient but who were managed in ways incompatible with their operating style. The talent the organisation needed was present. The conditions for it to express were not.
What Managers Miss About the People They Manage
Managers miss things about the people they manage primarily because they are projecting their own operating style as the norm. The manager who processes information quickly assumes that everyone processes information quickly. The manager who thrives in high-pressure environments assumes that pressure universally generates performance. The manager who values visible hustle looks for visible hustle and misses the quiet, contained delivery style that produces the same results in different ways.
This projection is not malicious. It is the natural consequence of using one's own experience as the reference point for what good looks like. The solution is not to eliminate the projection — that is not possible — but to develop enough self-awareness to notice it, and enough genuine curiosity about each person on the team to seek out what works for them specifically rather than applying the same approach to everyone and calling the variation that results a statement about who is capable.
The Manager's Responsibility to Know
A manager's responsibility includes knowing what kind of management each person on their team needs. Not in a theoretical way — in a practical, specific, and regularly updated way. What conditions does this person need to do their best work? What kind of feedback do they receive most effectively? How much autonomy do they need, and how much structure? What does pressure do to them — does it sharpen or freeze? What recognition means something to them and what feels hollow?
These are not questions that can be answered from a distance or from general impressions. They require genuine relationship and genuine curiosity. Managers who develop this knowledge about each person they lead are significantly more likely to extract the actual capability present than managers who apply a single approach regardless of the variation in the people it encounters.
The Talent That Was Never Discovered
In most organisations, there is talent that has never been properly expressed because the conditions for it were never created. Not because the talent was absent, but because the management approach it encountered was incompatible with how it operates. This talent is often written off as underperformance. It sometimes leaves and flourishes elsewhere. It occasionally finds a different manager within the same organisation and becomes the person no one expected. The ones who find that different manager are the lucky ones. The rest are a cost that organisations pay without ever knowing they are paying it.
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