What Do Managers of Managers Do? (The Crank Call From Kim) 4 | 16

When you manage individual contributors, you focus on functional expertise, work output, and team dynamics directly. When you become a manager of managers, you must also become a thought partner on how your direct reports manage their own teams. You're no longer just guiding the work — you're guiding the people who guide other people, which means letting go of detailed control and trusting a layer of leadership between you and the frontline.

Managers of managers must ensure that no single person — including themselves — has unilateral decision-making power over who gets hired, promoted, or fired. These decisions should be made as a team. This helps prevent authority from going to anyone's head and keeps the process fair and transparent. Building that check into your team culture protects both the people on your team and the integrity of your organization.

It's not enough to simply ask for feedback — you have to make yourself open to public criticism and actively design systems that help people speak truth to power. As a manager of managers, you're setting the tone for every layer beneath you. If people see you accepting candid feedback gracefully and transparently, it signals that honest communication is safe throughout the organization. Structural tools like speak-truth-to-power meetings can help make this a reliable practice rather than a one-off gesture.

A bottoms-up OKR (Objectives and Key Results) process is a goal-setting approach where team members help define the goals rather than having them handed down from the top. For managers of managers, this is critical because you can't be close to every decision being made. When people at every level participate in setting goals, everyone is more aligned, more invested, and clearer on priorities — reducing the need for constant top-down oversight.

When hiring managers, make management skills an explicit part of the process from the start — include them in the job description, the interview questions, and especially the reference checks. The best tip from the Radical Candor team: call people who have previously reported to the candidate and ask what they really think of them as a manager. Past direct reports give you the most honest, ground-level view of someone's management abilities that you simply can't get from a standard interview.

Several challenges emerge when you make this transition: you won't know every decision being made, you won't know every problem being solved, and you may not even know everyone's name. You also have to accept that people may start to see you differently — as an intimidating authority figure rather than a peer. The key is letting go of control, trusting the managers beneath you, and focusing your energy on coaching them rather than doing the work yourself.