🖤 Open Works #029 Increasing Manager Proactivity—With Extreme Clarity

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 450+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 26: How to co-create values so they don’t just end up as “words on a wall” – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Define exactly what ‘good management’ looks like for your company—no room for ambiguity. If you cannot get the exec to agree on this, do not pass go.

• Build a data source and a feedback loop—something that managers can use to drive action and track the impact they are having on team performance.

• Drive action through structured working practices—no ad-hoc interventions.

• Report on it at the highest level—transparency drives accountability and sustains change.

⚡️ The Problem

Your managers are not raising issues and solving problems early enough. This means problems escalate, slow teams down, and make your People team stuck in reactive mode–firefighting issues that could have been nipped in the bud months earlier.

Why is this happening? A few possibilities:

1. They don’t know their role. What does “good” look like? When should they step in? When should they escalate?

2. Their boss doesn’t care about their role. Exec misalignment on people management responsibilities means they won’t support or prioritise time spent ‘doing the role’.

3. They don’t have a data source to work with and measure the impact of their role. No clear signals on team health → no action taken.

4. There’s no accountability loop way. They aren’t being held accountable for problem-solving or improving the system of work.

Instead of layering on more process (forums, surveys, etc.), first anchor everything in extreme clarity.

🔑 The Approach: Clarity → Data → Action → Accountability

To build a successful management capability we need some fundamentals in place and a structured solution. Here’s how we tackle this:

1. Extreme manager role clarity + measures of success (for managers)

2. A data source and collection method that links directly to those measures of success

3. Working practices that drive improvements against that data source

4. A transparent reporting loop that places weight on this and drives accountability.  

1️⃣ Role Clarity: What Does a Manager At Your Company Actually Do?

Most “proactivity” problems aren’t process problems—they’re expectation problems. Fix that first.

💡 [Example] Manager Accountability - Aligning On Principle Accountabilities Of The Role

📌 Action: Update the Manager Playbook to explicitly outline how and when Managers should surface, solve, and escalate issues. If you cannot get leadership team support on this definition, then focus on that battle first and only that battle. Shout if that's you, happy to soundboard 🙏  

2️⃣ Data: Measuring Manager Impact on Team Performance

Instead of just tracking manager activity, give them a way to measure their impact.

📊 Key metrics to track:

📌 Action: Co-create a team health check retro or survey with your manager community. Use the data to flag red spots → Guide manager interventions based on those.

3️⃣ Structured Working Practices: Driving Improvement

Once we have clear expectations and a data source, then we can talk working practices. What ‘problem-solving support system’ do managers need to improve their capability?

💡 Our favourite lite version blueprint:

🚀 Why this works:

• Community of practice forums = shared knowledge & accountability.

• 1:1s = personalised support.

• Retros = continuous learning loop.

📌 Action: Ensure every forum includes a problem-solving exercise → Not just discussion, but action.

✅ Do This:

🙅‍♀️ Don’t Do This:

4️⃣ Transparency & Accountability: Making This Stick

If you want managers, their managers and other stakeholders to take their role seriously, make their impact visible.

📊 Transparent reporting structure:

🔎 How this drives change:

• Managers see their own progress & gaps → They know where to improve.

• Leadership sees where teams are struggling → No surprises, just solutions.

• Problem-solving is a core performance metric → Not just an expectation, but a measured outcome.

🛠️ The Pragmatic Takeaway

To drive real proactivity:
✔️ Get explicit about what’s expected (Role clarity).
✔️ Measure manager impact, not just activity (Data).
✔️ Give managers structured ways to improve (Working practices).
✔️ Make it transparent & accountable (Reporting loop).

💡 Big picture: If you want managers to own problem-solving, it has to be measurable, structured, and visible. Otherwise, it’s just another initiative that fades out.

📌 Next Steps

1️⃣ Update Your Manager Playbook → Extreme clarity on role, measures of success and problem-solving expectations. Get exec subscription.
2️⃣ Co-create your feedback loop (survey/team health check/retro) → Use it as a data source to assess proactivity.
3️⃣ Implement problem-solving forums & People Team support system→ Drive skill-building and get early visibility on risks instead of firefighting issues.
4️⃣ Create a transparent reporting loop → Drive accountability for solving, not just escalating.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

🔍️ Team health check [Miro template]

📗 Creating a community of practice from scratch [Paid Playbook]

📕 Team health checks: an alternative to survey fatigue [Paid Playbook]

📖 People Manager Handbook, built by Open Org Community

🔨 TeamRetro (async team health check software)

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🖤 John & Adam

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