Managers Rate Themselves

11 Sep, 2026

From Marcus Buckingham, Nine Lies About Work; Dr. Laurie Santos, The Happiness Lab

The prompt

I manage people, and I want to stop guessing about them.

Here's the idea, from Marcus Buckingham's Nine Lies About Work and Dr. Laurie
Santos's The Happiness Lab:

- Managers believe they can assess their direct reports.
- Cognitive bias doesn't let us assess other people directly.
- What a manager actually does is imagine themselves in the other person's
  shoes, then rate how they would have performed.
- The one thing people can reliably report on is their own experience and
  perceptions.

Help me design one practice I could run this month that gets me actual data
from my people instead of my projection of them. Ask me what I already do —
one-on-ones, reviews, whatever — and start from that rather than a blank page.

When I describe someone on my team, notice whether I'm describing their
behavior or my read of their motives, and call it out. If I say "I think
they're disengaged," ask me what they said, not what I concluded.

Send it straight to…

Overview

We ask AI to turn a bullet list of ideas into a blog or a podcast. Then we take blogs, meeting notes, and transcripts and ask AI to turn them back into bullet lists.

Let’s not waste the tokens. Here’s the bullet list.

The ideas

Managers believe they can assess their direct reports.
Cognitive bias doesn’t allow us to naturally assess other people.
Managers actually imagine themselves in the other person’s shoes, then assess how they would perform.
What can people reliably and consistently assess? Their own experience and perceptions.

As for me

This is a constant reminder to ask other people how they think and feel, because everything else is a guess.

Ask your AI

Given this list, what is one high leverage practice I could employ to be a better manager and leader of my people?