In early 2009, a small team in Google’s people analytics group took on a question that had dogged the company since its founding: do managers matter?
Most Google engineers, by Harvard Business Review’s account, already had an answer. Management was a distraction from real work. The analysts knew their audience. “Google has high standards of proof,” said Neal Patel, one of the project’s leads. “Simple correlations weren’t going to be enough.” So they set out to prove the opposite, that managers don’t matter.
They started where anyone would. When people quit, is it the boss? Exit interviews showed some link between leaving and low satisfaction with managers, but turnover at Google was low overall, and nothing showed the managers had caused it. Next they compared the best- and worst-rated managers. “At first,” Patel said, “the numbers were not encouraging. Even the low-scoring managers were doing pretty well.”
The case for managers was coming apart.
Then sharper statistics turned it around. In 2008, teams under high-scoring managers had less turnover, and whether people stayed tracked the quality of their manager more closely than their own seniority, performance, tenure or promotions.
“Luckily, we failed,” Patel said.
The slogan and the small print
Google had found, in its own numbers, support for a line managers have been hearing for a quarter of a century: people leave managers, not companies. The idea is often credited to First, Break All the Rules, a 1999 book by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman of Gallup, built on a Gallup study of more than 80,000 managers. “The front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees,” says its publisher’s description. A Gallup article in 2017 opened with the slogan word for word, and reported that one in two employees have left a job at some point in their career “to get away from a manager.”
Read closely, the numbers say less than the slogan. Gallup’s much-quoted figure, that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores across business units, is Gallup’s own estimate, and it is about engagement, not quitting. “One in two” means half of people have fled a boss at least once in a working life. It does not mean half of all resignations are about the boss.
Ask people why they left one particular job, and other answers crowd in. In a Pew Research Center survey of Americans who quit a job in 2021, the most common reasons were low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%) and feeling disrespected at work (57%). None of the three names the boss outright, though a boss can easily stand behind the last two.
The honest version of the saying is narrower.
People don’t only quit managers. But a good one helps keep the people you’d hate to lose.
Who the good ones keep
The sharpest test of that narrower claim comes from the economists Mitchell Hoffman and Steven Tadelis, who studied the personnel records of one large high-tech company. Employees there rated their managers every year, on questions such as whether the manager was trustworthy or gave enough coaching. To separate cause from coincidence, the researchers followed new hires and managers who moved between teams.
Moving from a manager at the 10th percentile of these people skills to one at the 90th predicted roughly 60% less turnover. The link was even stronger for quits the company counted as “regretted,” the people it most wanted to keep. Yet on most other outcomes the authors could observe, such as patents or performance ratings, the study found no evidence that better people managers reliably improved them, and those measures don’t capture all of productivity. In this data, what good managers clearly did was keep people.
Some of the reason sits in what a manager decides. A manager may have no say over the pay band. But who hears about an opening first, and whether a cutting remark in a meeting gets dealt with: those decisions come from the boss, week after week. The authors of First, Break All the Rules put it this way, in Wharton’s summary of the book: a company has as many cultures as it has managers.
The company is the building on the job ad. The manager is the room you spend your days in. People move out over the rent, too. The room is what they live with every day.
The form that says “career growth”
Say a team lead gets a resignation from her best analyst. The exit form says “career growth,” and her first thought is that it’s an HR matter: titles and budgets she doesn’t control. Then she scrolls back through their one-on-ones. Since spring, every one of them was about deadlines.
She is in large company. In a 2019 Gallup analysis, 51% of people who left a job voluntarily said that in the three months before they went, neither their manager nor any other leader had talked with them about their job satisfaction or their future at the organization. Fifty-two percent said their manager or organization could have done something to keep them.
A talk would not have created a promotion budget. If the analyst was underpaid by a wide margin, she might have left anyway, and the Pew numbers say plenty of people do. But “career growth” covers a lot that a manager does control, from a stretch assignment to a straight answer about where the next step is.
The form goes into a folder. The reason on it reads “career growth.” Nothing in the file mentions the one-on-ones.