Leading Greats #170

A manager who cannot give honest feedback is not a bad manager. This is how that looks:

Author

Ronnie Kinsey, MBA
June 23, 2026

Your managers are capable. That is not the whole picture.

Think about the last time one of your managers had to tell a direct report that their work was falling short, or that their approach was creating problems for the team.

Not a formal review. A real conversation, the kind that requires sitting across from someone and saying something that might land hard.

Most managers have never been shown how to do that well.

They learned their craft by doing the work. Nobody sat with them afterward and taught them how to develop the people doing it.

I have sat with managers who were some of the sharpest people I have worked with and watched them go completely quiet when a direct report needed real direction.

They saw the problem. But nobody had ever sat with them and walked them through how to handle it.

Capability gets people promoted. It does not automatically teach them how to lead the people around them.

Middle managers are absorbing direction from above, managing friction from below, and trying to hold performance together in the middle of all of it.

When they do not have the feedback skills or the development to grow their people, that weight shows up in attrition, in stalled teams, in performance that never quite gets where it needs to go.

The answer is not to find better managers. It is to build the ones you have.

Find one manager on your team and ask about a conversation they have been putting off. Not to evaluate them. To understand what is in the way.

What you learn will tell you more than any report on your desk.

If you are leading a team of capable managers who are not developing their people the way you need them to, let's talk.

I have been there. I can help.

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Founder | CEO | Executive & Leadership Coach, MBA, PCC

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