Whether you are a small business hiring your first manager, or a larger corporation where leadership and management selections decisions are being made every day, this will always be one of the most important decisions you make.
Having spent 30 years helping organisations of all sizes, and across every industry to make better hiring decisions, I made this guide to address a few of the factors I recommend considering in the managerial recruitment and selection process.
While there’s no shortage of guides available on this subject, many are too broad to be practically helpful for most businesses.
For example, while finding someone who is a “good cultural fit” or “has emotional intelligence” may be important, it isn’t always obvious what specifically makes someone a good fit with your organisation, or how you can assess emotional intelligence, or what factors of emotional intelligence are actually relevant to the role.
This resource is intended to help answer many of these questions, so you can confidently hire effective managers and great leaders who grow your business.
Key Takeaways
- Don’t confuse task management skills with people management skills
- Confidence and charisma aren’t the same as good people skills
- Experience is a weaker predictor of success than most hiring processes assume
- Define your culture (and the one you actually want) before hiring for “fit”
- Get specific about what success looks like in the role before you start assessing candidates
- Use multiple selection methods
Common Mistakes Organisations Make When Hiring Managers
There are several common mistakes I’ve seen organisations make when hiring managers and leaders. These can often also create a lot of uncertainty later about why a manager might be struggling in the role: was the person the wrong fit for the role, have they not been supported correctly, or are they simply struggling because the job is genuinely challenging?
Too often, this uncertainty also leads to underperforming or bad managers staying in the role for too long, creating frustration for their teams and causing wider damage to the organisation.
The most common mistakes I’ve seen are:
- Confusing task management with people management. Hiring often focuses on tasks someone will do, not outcomes they need to achieve through others.
- Mistaking charisma and sociability for good people skills (which are far more complex – more on this below).
- Assuming experience guarantees success. A strong track record and confident interview don’t mean what worked before will work here.
- Misjudging company culture and culture fit.
- Focusing on the wrong leadership traits and their importance in context (e.g. assertiveness).
- Forgetting to treat employees as assets (early wins can mask a team falling apart months later).
- Measuring the wrong things, or relying on a single method, in selection.
- Promoting someone into leadership just because they’re excellent at their current job.
These are often the reason organisations feel blindsided when the new manager is actually in the job.
I’ll often hear organisations complain, “They seemed like a completely different person after we hired them.”
This is not necessarily because the person was dishonest during the hiring process. More often, it’s because the real-world demands, pressures, and expectations of the role were not fully considered when assessing the candidate.
This is why seeing someone actually perform the job before hiring them is often considered one of the most effective selection methods. It provides a much clearer picture of how they operate in the environment they will actually be working in. The challenge however, is that this is not always practical or possible.
Below are a few of the strategies I’ve seen the strongest organisations implement for hiring managers and leaders.
1. Assess Good People Management vs Task Management
A lot of management roles are a combination of two very different skill sets:
- Task management: organising work, setting priorities, solving problems, meeting deadlines, maintaining standards, and ensuring outcomes are delivered.
- People management: influencing behaviour, building trust, coaching performance, handling conflict, motivating others, and adapting communication to different individuals.
Many organisations promote or hire people based on their ability to manage themselves and their own workload. These people are often highly organised, reliable, knowledgeable, and capable of producing excellent results independently. However, those same strengths do not always translate into the ability to get results through other people.
This is why someone can be highly successful in one management role and struggle in another. A manager overseeing technical processes, projects, or experienced specialists may rely heavily on task management skills. A manager leading a disengaged team or developing underperformers requires much stronger people management capability.
The People Skills That Define the Best Managers
It’s easy to mistake confidence, charisma, or being naturally sociable for strong people skills. However, effective communication is much more complex.
It involves a combination of factors: cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning and problem-solving, behavioural tendencies and personality traits that bring different strengths and limitations in different situations, and emotional intelligence — the ability to understand, manage, and respond effectively to your own and others’ emotions.
Different management roles require different combinations of these skills.
Someone may be excellent at building relationships but struggle with or avoid having difficult conversations. Someone else may communicate clearly and confidently but struggle to understand how their approach affects different people.
The most effective managers are those that have skills closely aligned with the job’s unique demands. They are also usually comfortable with adapting their approach, adjusting how they communicate, provide feedback, and motivate people based on the individual and the situation.
2. Use Multiple Selection Methods in the Hiring Process
No single interview, reference check, or assessment can tell you everything you need to know about a potential manager. Strong hiring decisions combine multiple sources of information to build a more complete picture of how someone is likely to perform in the role.
This might include a structured interview process, input from multiple interviewers, feedback from the teams they will lead, work samples, and relevant psychometric or skills assessments.
For example, emotional intelligence can provide insight into how someone manages relationships and emotions, while cognitive ability, aptitude, situational judgement, or behavioural assessments may be more relevant for roles with specific technical or decision-making demands.
The goal is not to find someone who is perfect in every area — that person rarely exists. It’s to understand the person from different angles, identify potential strengths and risks, and make better decisions about where they are likely to succeed and where they may need support.
3. Measure the Specific Traits That Matter for the Right Manager
Some characteristics are valuable in almost every management role, but others become more or less important depending on the demands of the position.
Emotional intelligence, again, is a great example. It’s not a single skill, but a combination of different capabilities including empathy, emotional regulation, stress management, adaptability, assertiveness, impulse control, social awareness, and relationship management.
I’ve seen managers high in assertiveness be a fantastic fit for some roles, or in other cases really damage the productivity and motivation of a team (especially if paired with a lower social awareness).
Always consider the work environment or the team, and be specific about what the manager needs to be able to achieve to be successful.
4. Don't Over Rely on Experience
Experience is valuable, but it is often given more weight than its ability to predict future performance justifies. Research comparing selection methods has found that years of job experience is a relatively weak predictor of performance compared with methods such as structured interviews, work samples, and cognitive assessments.
The key question is not just “Have they done this before?” but “What did they demonstrate, and does that align with what this role requires?”
5. Understand Your Company Culture
Culture fit is often treated as a simple question of whether someone “fits in”, but this can create problems if it is not clearly defined.
Organisations need to understand the culture they currently have, while also being honest about whether that culture is helping or limiting future success.
Hiring someone who fits the existing culture may reinforce strengths, but it can also reinforce existing problems.
The best organisations consider both: Will this person work effectively within our current environment, and do they have the qualities needed to help us move towards the culture we want to build?
6. Be Specific About What a Manager Needs to be Successful
Before hiring a manager, organisations need to be clear about what success in the role actually means. It is easy to focus on one visible outcome, such as increased revenue, improved productivity, or hitting targets, while overlooking the impact on the team, culture, or long-term performance.
The same mistake happens during hiring. A strong achievement on a resume, impressive interview response, or one standout quality can create a positive impression that overshadows a lot of other important factors.
Without a clear understanding of what success really requires, organisations are more likely to hire based on what stands out rather than what actually matters and more likely to overlook problems when they appear later.
Conclusion - How Hiring the Right Managers Impacts Your Organisation
The people you select for leadership positions will have an enormous impact on your workplace. Poor managers are still one of the most commonly cited reasons for employees leaving. Gallup’s data has frequently shown that they account for up to 70% of the variance in employee engagement. In a nutshell, good managers keep people motivated and performing at their best.
Two other independent studies, reached the same conclusion: manager quality is one of the most powerful and most controllable levers a business has.
Google set out to test whether managers actually mattered and couldn’t disprove it. Teams with higher-scoring managers saw meaningfully less turnover — an effect tied more closely to manager quality than to seniority, tenure, or promotions.
Economists studying two multibillion-dollar retail chains found that individual managers accounted for 25–35% of the variation in store-level productivity. Bringing an underperforming manager to top-quartile level would lift sales per employee by 25% or more. The same study found strong managers were routinely stationed at weak stores and vice versa, correcting that mismatch alone would have raised sales per employee by 3–6% across both chains, with no other changes at all.
Engagement, retention, revenue: three separate measures with one recurring pattern. A good manager measurably raises what a team produces and how long people stay to produce it.
Chris has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager and entrepreneur in Human Capital and people management. He has worked extensively with psychometric assessments and pre-employment testing, helping organisations hire the right people and build strong teams.