The average American manager oversaw eight people in 2013. Today it is just over twelve, a nearly 50 percent jump in twelve years, according to Gallup's ongoing span of control research. Spans keep growing, yet most companies still evaluate and promote managers the way they did when teams were half the size: by gut feel, tenure, or whichever high performer was next in line. A new Gallup report on CliftonStrengths and team experiences, drawn from two large recontact surveys of people who have completed the CliftonStrengths assessment, puts a hard number on why that habit is expensive. Perceptions of what makes a manager great or terrible were strikingly consistent across people with completely different natural strengths profiles. In plain terms, effective management is not a personality type. It is a set of repeatable behaviors, which means it can be selected for, coached, and built into a system rather than left to hope. This article breaks down what the data says separates a great manager from a damaging one, and what that means for how senior leaders develop the managers now running larger teams than ever.
The Myth of the Natural-Born Manager
Gallup's research team compared how people who lead with different CliftonStrengths domains, Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking, described their best and worst managers ever. If management effectiveness were mostly about personality fit, respondents with different natural talents should have described great managers in very different terms. They did not. Gallup found that perceptions of what makes a manager great versus ineffective were strikingly similar across strengths profiles, and concluded that great management is not defined by a manager's personality, but by how consistently they show up for their team.
That finding should change how senior leaders think about manager selection. Promoting the person with the most charisma, or the person whose natural style most resembles a favorite mentor, is a bet on personality fit. The data says the better bet is a behavioral one. Does this person communicate honestly and early, protect their team's time, and treat credit and blame fairly, regardless of whether they lead with Command or Empathy in their top strengths. Building that behavioral standard into how an organization interviews, promotes, and reviews managers turns a subjective judgment call into a repeatable process, which is the same logic behind a structured Leadership OS: the goal is to make good management a system output, not an accident of who got promoted first.
What Employees Actually Mean by "My Manager Is Great"
When Gallup asked respondents in its 2025 fourth quarter CliftonStrengths recontact survey to describe, in their own words, the best manager they ever had, the answers clustered into eight themes. Support and encouragement led the list, meaning managers who actively backed their team with coaching, resources, and advocacy while building confidence. Close behind was trust and autonomy, a manager who set clear goals and guardrails and then let people own the work instead of hovering. Respondents also named empathy and care, communication and transparency, leadership and inspiration, integrity and fairness, recognition and appreciation, and a willingness to approach problems with curiosity and invite new ideas.
None of these are personality traits. They are choices a manager makes every week: whether to explain a decision or simply announce it, whether to notice good work out loud, whether to protect a direct report's growth even when it is inconvenient. For a senior leader building out a management bench, this list works as a coaching rubric. Instead of asking whether a candidate for a management role seems like a natural leader, ask which of these eight behaviors they already practice consistently, and which ones need direct coaching before the promotion, not after.
The Behaviors That Quietly Break Teams
The worst-manager themes were just as consistent, and just as behavioral. Micromanagement topped the list, describing managers who over-control through constant monitoring and second-guessing, stripping away the autonomy that best managers grant freely. Arrogance and self-centeredness followed, describing managers who dismiss ideas, hoard credit, deflect blame, and use their position to protect their own ego rather than their team's interests. Respondents also pointed to a lack of empathy and support, poor leadership and manager skills, lack of communication, unavailability and disengagement, favoritism and bias, and a basic lack of trust that shows up as assuming incompetence and restricting decision-making.
The most useful thing about this list is how ordinary it sounds. None of these are dramatic failures. They are small, repeated choices that compound over a year into a manager nobody wants to work for. That is exactly why they are hard to catch in a standard performance review, which tends to measure output rather than how a manager treats the people producing it. Senior leaders who want to catch this early should build a direct channel, whether a skip-level check-in, an anonymous pulse survey, or a structured exit interview process, that specifically asks whether a manager exhibits any of these eight patterns, rather than relying on whether their team hit its numbers.
Why Strengths Awareness Beats Strengths Composition
It is tempting to assume the fix for team dysfunction is assembling the right mix of strengths on a roster. Gallup's research says otherwise. In a study of more than 11,000 teams across six industries, strengths awareness, meaning how well team members understand their own and each other's natural talents, had roughly twice the influence on team performance that the composition of strengths on the team did. Teams in which 90 percent or more of employees know their strengths showed substantially higher engagement than teams without that shared awareness.
This tracks with Gallup's broader meta-analysis of strengths-based development, which reviewed 43 studies covering 1.2 million employees and nearly 50,000 business units across 45 countries and seven industries. Organizations that applied a strengths-based approach saw profit increase 14.4 to 29.4 percent, sales increase 10.3 to 19.3 percent, employee engagement increase 9.0 to 15.0 percent, and safety incidents fall 22.0 to 59.0 percent, with an even larger effect on turnover in historically high-turnover organizations. For senior leaders, the implication is direct. Spending a training budget on assessments nobody discusses afterward wastes the investment. The return comes from making strengths part of the everyday vocabulary of how the team plans work, gives feedback, and resolves conflict, not from optimizing who sits on which team.
The Span-of-Control Problem Making This Urgent
This all matters more now because managers are running bigger teams with less room for error. The average number of direct reports per U.S. manager grew from 8.2 in 2013 to 12.1 in 2025, a nearly 50 percent increase, even as the median team size held steady at five to six people, meaning the largest teams are the ones getting even larger. Gallup's span-of-control research also found that manager behavior matters more than team size in determining whether people stay engaged. Employees who received meaningful feedback from their manager were engaged about seven in ten of the time, regardless of team size, compared with only about one in four when that feedback was missing, nearly tripling engagement.
AI adoption adds a further complication rather than a shortcut. Gallup's data shows more than half of U.S. employees now use AI in their role at least a few times a year, but most teams have not agreed on how to integrate it into shared workflows and expectations, which means the coordination burden is landing on managers who are already stretched across larger teams. None of this is solved by hiring more layers of management or buying another tool. It is solved by treating manager development as an operating discipline with a defined set of behaviors to hire for, coach toward, and screen out, which is precisely the structural work a Leadership OS review is built to do.
Conclusion
The uncomfortable finding in Gallup's research is that most organizations already know what makes a manager great or terrible. Employees describe both in remarkably consistent terms regardless of the manager's personality or the team's strengths mix. The gap is not information. It is that too few companies turn that knowledge into how they hire, promote, coach, and remove managers. With the average team now roughly 50 percent larger than it was in 2013, and AI adding a new coordination challenge on top of that, the cost of leaving manager quality to chance keeps rising.
Building the eight best-manager behaviors into promotion criteria, screening actively for the eight worst-manager patterns, and making strengths a shared team language rather than a one-time assessment are not culture projects. They are execution projects, and burnout is usually the bill that comes due when they are skipped. My book, Burnout Proof, covers how unmanaged team dysfunction turns into leadership burnout, and Workplace Culture goes deeper into building the conditions this research points to. More research-backed guidance is on the Breakfast Leadership blog.
If you want help turning this research into a manager development system for your own company, schedule an intake call with me directly.
Eight behaviors make a manager great. Eight different behaviors quietly make one the reason people quit. Neither list has anything to do with personality.
Everything above is learnable: the eight behaviors to hire for, the eight to screen out, strengths made into a shared team language, and a plan for spans of control that keep growing. The trouble is that none of it survives being left to instinct. Without a defined standard, promotions default back to charisma, coaching becomes reactive, and the next disengaged team gets blamed on personality clashes instead of the manager behaviors that were never coached in the first place.
Leadership Operating System
If your promotion criteria cannot name which of these sixteen behaviors a candidate already shows, the gap is structural, not a hiring instinct problem. See how a Leadership OS review works.
AI Adoption Advisory
AI is adding a coordination burden to managers who are already running teams 50 percent larger than a decade ago, with no agreed process for absorbing it. See how fractional AI adoption advisory works.
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Michael D. Levitt is the founder of Breakfast Leadership Network and the author of Burnout Proof and Workplace Culture. More writing at the Breakfast Leadership blog.
Additional Resources
Sources
Gallup, "CliftonStrengths and Team Experiences: Insights on Trust, Collaboration and Manager Impact" (2026 report; provided directly to Breakfast Leadership, no independent public URL located as of this writing): https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253832/cliftonstrengths-for-teams.aspx
Gallup, "Span of Control: What's the Optimal Team Size for Managers?": https://www.gallup.com/workplace/700718/span-control-optimal-team-size-managers.aspx
Gallup, CliftonStrengths meta-analysis on strengths-based development and business outcomes: https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/269615/strengths-meta-analysis-2015.aspx
