How much do managers matter?
In 2008, Google launched Project Oxygen, an internal study built around a deceptively simple question: do managers actually matter, and if so, what do the best ones do differently? The team analyzed performance reviews, surveys, and interviews across thousands of managers.
Their top finding: the manager behavior most strongly correlated with team performance was genuine, specific curiosity about what motivates each person on the team. Technical expertise ranked last. Among the 10 behaviors studied, human understanding was at the top and hard