Some secrets aren’t kept well. Take Putin’s secret missions, for example. Somehow his campaigns to assassinate political opponents always end up as front page news, with his agents leaving radioactive polonium-210 or Novichok residue throughout England, spraying these exclusively-produced-in-Cold-War-Soviet-labs toxins around like they’re using Glade in a bus station bathroom. Boris and Natasha were stealthy ninja warriors compared to these clowns.

Likewise, good management practices are not a well-kept secret. We all know that great managers do a few simple things:

1. Hire talented people
2. Treat them respectfully and trust them to do their work
3. Encourage a culture of transparency and integrity
4. Reward those who do the best work and make the whole team better

There’s no secret to great management because we all have been managed by others. We know how we want to be treated and we know what kind of environment allows us to be our best. It’s the corporate manifestation of the Golden Rule.

So why are we constantly assaulted with self-help business books and LinkedIn articles proclaiming that the author has discovered the secret to good management? Because even though we all know how to be good managers, few of us actually do it. We’re like dieters attending a frosted donut convention. We know we’re not supposed to be eating the samples at each booth, but we can’t help but succumb to the temptation.

I believe the reasons we fail to be great managers can be sorted into four categories:

Because We Are Afraid

We are afraid of not knowing all the answers.  Steve Levitt (the economist and co-author of Freakonomics) once told me that all business managers are loath to admit that they don’t know the answer to any question. When he first said this, I thought it was an unfair characterization—a smear, almost. But then I started watching and listening. I now think he is right.

Managers seem to believe that it’s their job to know everything about their area, whether it’s the technical dimensions of their function’s operations, or the most minute details of their team’s accomplishments. If they don’t, they feel like they’re not doing their jobs and, to be fair, they may actually face that accusation from their boss.

Steve noticed this I-know-all-the-answers phenomenon because it’s the opposite of an academic environment, where the unknown is celebrated as an opportunity to learn.  Let’s all take a moment to be thankful that business leaders weren’t tasked with fueling the Enlightenment.

Let’s all take a moment to be thankful that business leaders weren’t tasked with fueling the Enlightenment.

It is ridiculous, of course, to pretend one knows all the answers, but in the case of management behaviors, it’s also very destructive. It creates enormous pressure for managers to micromanage their employees instead of trusting them to do their job. Micromanagement is like Novichok to any high-performing employee.

We are afraid that we will be displaced.  Few people will admit it, but almost everyone fears this at some point in their career. In the olden days, you were relatively insulated from this threat when you reached the top, but now even CEOs are tossed out as if they were a carton of last week’s Chinese takeout.

What does this have to do with bad management? It’s as simple and as disturbing as this: Managers know, at least sub-consciously, that their bosses will view them as being more expendable if the team below them is strong.

This means that obscuring your team’s virtues and suppressing your reports’ development, though morally repugnant, may be an economically rational decision (for the manager, not the firm.)

Great managers won’t do this, of course, because they will be constrained by their moral code and they will understand how a great team contributes to their own success. But many other managers, especially those who aren’t confident they have the support of their boss, will stray faster than a Russian oligarch buys up Kensington real estate.

Because We Aren’t Humble

Humility usually wanes with success, unfortunately. With each promotion and the accolades that come with it, the temptation to think highly of ourselves grows.

This fading humility shows up in two important ways with managers. First, we tend to believe that our position in an organization is complete and permanent validation of our judgment. This is silly, of course, but it’s very real and it’s exacerbated by the modern mythology that holds that we live in a perfect meritocracy.

Second, we don’t understand or remember that with each promotion, our access to information about what’s really going on is reduced. The farther we get away from the coal face, the less we see and hear.

These two effects combine to ensure that many managers are overly confident about their judgment and mistakenly believe that they have a clear view of all the relevant information. With this skewed perspective, managers often feel compelled to overrule their teams’ decisions. To a high-performing team, this feels like gargling with a cup full of radioactive polonium.

Because We Are Rewarded For Bad Behavior

Our managers often don’t see how we lead. They usually only see the end product.

This is especially true as we get more senior. Boards often have little idea how the CEO is leading, CEOs have little understanding of how their EVPs are leading, EVPs have little . . . etc. And if we’re being really honest, even if they did know, they often wouldn’t much care. They value most the financial results that happen under a manager’s watch, regardless of how those results are achieved.

Laziness drives some of this. It’s easy to see the short-term results, especially if they can be reduced to a number on a financial statement. Understanding how well someone is leading a team, however, often requires a lot of homework.

Few things are more dispiriting to great employees than seeing a bad manager get promoted. It’s like being forced to look at a picture of a shirtless Putin with some kind of Clockwork-Orange-like-contraption holding your eyelids open.

 Because We Aren’t Self-Aware

Some managers are missing a gene or a set of developmental experiences that would allow them to accurately perceive how their behaviors are affecting others. There’s no malice or ill intent of any kind. They’re just bumbling along, thinking they’re doing a great job.

This should be uncommon, but it’s not—we’ve all seen it many times. It is a testament to how poorly organizations identify and address bad managers.

How Do We Fix This?

If I knew that, my friends, I would be a very rich man, able to buy yachts and dachas as big as any Russian bureaucrat’s. But I do have some ideas, and I have tried to keep them relatively free of platitudes.

Any senior leader who is serious about improving the quality of management throughout her organization should try to address the human failures enumerated here. She should be asking herself questions like:

How can I demonstrate that not knowing the answer is not only OK, it’s to be expected? 

How can I publicly reward managers who most effectively develop our next generation of leaders?

How can I model humility? How often can I admit that I don’t know what’s really going on in this organization, that my only chance of knowing is through my team?

How can I reduce incentives that reward bad management behavior? Should I insist on 360 degree feedback before anyone is promoted?  Should we have internal, anonymous employee ratings for senior managers (like student ratings for professors at college?)

How can I root out people who are not self-aware? Should we have psychological assessments performed on anyone who is about to be crowned a vice president? 

If someone can discover how to do these things well, that will be a secret worth keeping.