Don't be a "5 star rating" manager

The idea behind "5 star rating manager" was something I've read online some time ago. But can't recall where exactly. Email me if you know the original source. In the meanwhile, I've shared my own interpretation of it.

A "5-star manager" is someone who is too lenient with their subordinates - that means you are hesitant to push them hard or set high standards. If your goal is to be universally loved by everyone in your team, then you're going to be doing things that might make you and your subordinate feel good in the moment. But in the long term, its going to make things worse for yourself, your subordinate and the company.

Let's imagine the context of a recruitment firm. Where you are managing a team of recruiters that recruit for clients. These clients are assigned to you by the CEO of the recruitment firm.

Now let's say your subordinate complains about how none of the companies being assigned to your team have good hiring budgets. The immediate reaction of a “5 star manager” in this situation would be to join in the rant and say things like “yeah I know, this sucks. I need to speak to the CEO about this, our team needs to be assigned better companies!”. This will make your subordinates feel like they can relate to you and they’ll love you for it and think you understand their issues. But this is a terribly short sighted handling of the situation.

A good manager, on the other hand, would not look to blame things on externalities and instead look inwards to see how they could do things better. In other words, they have a high agency mindset.

They would then work with their subordinate to troubleshoot what is going wrong and figure a game plan for turning things around.

Worth noting that I don't literally mean to say that you shouldn't aim to be a 5-star manager. It's the idea that I'm trying to convey here - that you should balance being well-loved and being firm with doing what’s right rather than what would make you popular. If you end up maintaining this balance and still get 5 stars, then you're likely doing well as a manager.