On the recognize and learn from great managers section: I apologise in advance for the negativity, which is total on these points, but it's just my genuine opi

On the recognize and learn from great managers section: I apologise in advance for the negativity, which is total on these points, but it's just my genuine opinion from experience that there are some truly bad ideas here. > Having identified eight behaviors of great managers at Google, the research team wanted to recognize the role models who demonstrated these behaviors and helped define what great management looks like. In my opinion this is a really, really flawed way of viewing and evaluating management. Management is about human relationships, and every team of humans and their interconnected web of relationships is completely different in myriad ways from every other team of humans. This applies even when you change a single member of a team: the new team now usually functions and interacts in a very different way from the old one, assuming the new member is actually embraced and included. I know this from experience of managing teams with frequent turnover (both intra and inter company) - the way you manage the team and even your relationships with people you already know changes every time a member joins or leaves, or even when people get promotions or slightly change their job focus, sometimes in very unpredictable ways. Sure, there are commonalities between good managers, just as there are commonalities between great athletes. You can intuit these and copy them, try new things and see what works in different situations. But trying to strictly categorise these behaviours across a massive, constantly changing organisation and build a quantitative analysis framework on top of these categorisations is a huge mistake and will never work. Humans are humans, and trying to map human behaviour and relationships to aggregate models is an approach now widely discredited by research in behavioral economics and psychology. Don't try to do it. > Who better to identify those great managers than the Googlers they manage? In 2009, the annual Great Managers Award (GMA) program was created to recognize some of the best managers across the company. Any Googler can nominate any manager for the award. Yes, this sounds like a great idea in theory, but see above - humans are not homo economici - I've seen schemes like this have the opposite from intended effect in previous companies where the votes and subsequent prizes break down and become basically a mix of an enforcement of the (often disliked) politics of the organisation and a popularity contest, as opposed to the meritocratic, democratic recognition mechanism they are intended to be. Everyone likes the theory, 80% of people in the organisation will probably be disgruntled by the reality of the implementation. Again, knowing how humans and organisations behave by default, it may be a huge mistake to even attempt this kind of thing.