alt Hacker News> dysfunctional middle-management
I thought about this a lot while working at a high-growth company recently.
Decided that regular (quarterly) manager rankings (HR-supported, anonymous) by 2-3 levels of subordinates is the only way to solve this at scale.
The central problem is: assuming a CEO accidentally promoted a bad middle manager, then how do they ever find out?
Most companies (top-down rankings-only) use project success as their primary manager performance signal.
Unfortunately, this has 3 problems: (1) project success doesn't prove a manager isn't bad, (2) above-managers only hear from managers, and (3) it incentivizes managers to hack project success metrics / definitions.
Adding a servant/leader skip-level metric is a critical piece of information on "On, this person is toxic and everyone thinks poorly of them, despite the fact that they say everyone loves them."
Sounds a like a great solution, adding random skip connections so that information flows from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy.
Certainly, few companies have managed to avoid this trap. It's largely an unsolved problem.
I've often met managers and execs two levels above me that had a completely delusional view of what was going on below them due to lies spread by middle-management.