Managers as lifeguards

In "The Real Competition is the Water", Ravi Gupta wrote:

James Astill wrote a piece that I think about all the time. In the article, he wonders why American children are so good at swimming and so bad at math. He comes to the conclusion that schools are too busy teaching kids to feel good about their math performance rather than actually teaching them how to do math. At the same time, he notices that his children’s swim instructors are similarly supportive to the math teachers, but with completely different results. He observes that the swim instructors have an advantage over the math teachers. They have been blessed with an unforgiving standard: the water. Here’s the closing sentence from his piece: “If their instructors had focused on making them feel good about swimming, instead of on making them swim, they could have drowned.”

As a manager, I've realized cultivating career growth is the job of a lifeguard. Reports will often struggle in the middle of the pool – your job as a manager is to determine whether they're drowning or they want to be rescued because swimming is hard. Helping reports too often will stunt their ability to get better at swimming (career growth, promotions), although not recognizing that reports are drowning can be worse (low morale, burnout).

I've observed attentive managers are good at detecting drowning, but less good at determining when they should let their reports struggle. Although solving your reports' problems may keep them happy in the short-term, it'll prevent them from building long-term resilience by figuring it out themselves. This cycle also leads to more work for managers – reports will continue asking for help in situations when they don't fully need it.

Letting reports struggle doesn't mean reports feel unsupported. Managers should be lifeguards: providing encouragement on the sidelines, and ready to intervene if their reports start to drown.