Most owner-led agencies have some management machinery in place. There’s an annual review form, a KPIs document that got filled out at some point, a project management board, and maybe a 360 process somebody recommended at a conference.
None of it tells you whether anyone is actually being managed well.
Performance management changes what somebody does next week. Performative management produces a record that management happened.
Both take time, both look responsible, but only one of them drives real results.
The test is whether anything changes
I’ve made this point about project management tools, and it applies to every other management ritual too. You can have a beautiful Asana board, but is it actually making a difference in outcomes?
Tools don’t matter, objectives do.
So take any management process and ask what changed because of it the last time, not what got documented.
If you can’t name something specific, you’re doing the performative version, and you’re paying for it with the most valuable resource your agency has: your own time.
And that’s the least of your problems. An employee who isn’t really being managed keeps underperforming, which shows up first in your margin and eventually in the client work.
The good team members notice before you do, and they leave. People quit managers, not businesses.
The less obvious cost is the one nobody complains about. Somebody who could have been running accounts in two years never gets there, because nobody ever told them plainly what was standing in the way.
This isn’t an argument for lighter management. Most owner-led agencies I look at are over-supervised and under-managed at the same time, which sounds like a contradiction until you look under the hood.
A manager is a mentor first, then a coach, an advocate, a facilitator, and an educator. Supervisor comes last, and most owners have it backwards.
The rituals most likely to be performative
One reliable route to a record instead of a result is avoidance. When you know somebody’s work is falling short and you don’t want to say so, a rating system will say it for you, and a form is easier to fill out than a conversation is to have.
You end up letting the form deliver the message, and it delivers it poorly.
The annual review is the usual suspect. I’ve called annual reviews dumb, though they’re a necessary evil because employees expect them, so the goal is to make yours do something useful.
A review should summarize conversations you’ve already had. If anything in it surprises either of you, your one-on-ones failed, and the review is now doing damage control instead of coaching.
The worst version turns into Festivus, where the manager opens the folder of accumulated grievances and everybody sits there for the airing.
I consider 360s performance theater. The feedback comes back either too mild to be useful or as a single ax-grinding outlier, because very few people are candid in writing about the person who signs the paycheck.
If you want an honest read on your own management, have an outside advisor ask verbally, and even then it’s a coin toss as to whether you get the truth.
Hyper-specific individual numeric targets fail in a way that looks like success, because people hit them. Tell somebody they need three client mentions a week and you will probably get three client mentions a week, at whatever quality it took to get there.
You’ve managed the number rather than the performance.
Then there’s the performance improvement plan. In more than 30 years of managing and consulting, I can’t recall a single employee who went on a PIP and turned it around, because they mostly postpone a decision that’s already been made.
The legitimate uses are establishing legal groundwork, buying time to recruit a replacement, and soothing your own conscience. Talk to an HR advisor or employment attorney before any termination and let them tell you whether you need the paperwork.
What actually changes performance
Weekly one-on-ones with every direct report, held without fail, are where nearly all of the real management gets done. Very few agencies hold them consistently, and that gap is most of the distance between the two kinds of management.
The one-on-one is employee-driven. Share your big news first, then get out of the way and listen for what’s said and what isn’t.
Include one question every time: what do you need from me? That’s how you find out what you’ve been blocking.
Coaching happens in the moment, not in the review. I spent years training high school baseball umpires, and what worked was picking one or two things for someone to work on rather than handing them a list of everything they got wrong.
A long list is demoralizing, and nothing on it sticks, while one or two things produce visible improvement.
On written work, leave comments instead of rewriting. Teams whose output keeps getting rewritten stop trying as hard, because they know you’re going to redo it anyway.
Different is not always worse, and the work has to meet the client’s need rather than match what you would have produced.
Accountability without authority is the most common performative move
This is the one I run into most, and it’s the most obvious example of the appearance of management without the substance. The employee has been told they own something they aren’t actually able to control.
Five words matter here: leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority. Leadership is vision, management is making the work happen, and most owners are noticeably stronger at one than the other.
The last three are inseparable. You can’t hold someone accountable for something you never told them was their responsibility, and you can’t hold them responsible if you never gave them the authority to act.
Plenty of us demand accountability while keeping every approval to ourselves. We chafe against the restrictions our clients put on us, then don’t think twice about putting the same handcuffs on our own people.
The related fix is single ownership. Name one person for each project or key activity, because if you ask a manager who’s responsible for something and you get two names, you don’t have an answer yet.
None of which means every problem is yours. Some people won’t succeed in a role no matter how well you manage them, and eventually you change the role or you part ways.
Before you get there, answer three questions honestly. Did they understand what a good outcome looked like? Did they hear about the problem early enough to do something about it? Did they have the resources to succeed?
None of that excuses underperformance, but it tells you whether you’re evaluating an employee or your own management.
The form should record the management, not replace it
None of this is a case for throwing out job descriptions, goals, or documentation.
A goal is doing its job when somebody actually uses it to make a decision, and written expectations are doing theirs when they settle an argument about who was supposed to do what. Keep the ones that work like that.
All of them become performative the moment finishing the process becomes the objective.
Your managers learned this from you
Managers at agencies have often never managed anyone before, and most have had no formal training. They got promoted because they were good at the work, and then they copy whatever management they can see.
If the visible parts of your management are the review form and the status meeting, that’s what they’ll run. Your managers mirror you, all the way down the chain.
If you don’t have managers yet, this is the part to get right before you promote your first one, because whatever you’re doing now is the template they’ll inherit.
So support them rather than assuming they’ll work it out. Spend part of your one-on-one with each manager on how their people are doing, not just on their own accounts.
When one of them brings you a problem with a team member, the most useful thing you can ask is what they would have done if you’d been out of the office all week. Then let them go do it that way.
Solving it for them teaches everyone involved that the manager doesn’t really have the authority.
The exceptions are the legally fraught firsts. Giving people room to fail doesn’t mean letting a brand new manager run a termination conversation alone.
And ask what decisions are sitting in their queue waiting on you. That answer is usually a list, and every item on it is a place where you’ve asked for accountability without handing over the authority that goes with it.
Turn ideas into action
Check your calendar for the past month. Count how many of your direct reports had a real one-on-one every single week. If it isn’t all of them, that’s your first fix.
Pick your most established management ritual and review it. Look at the last employee appraisal, the last goals document, or the last status meeting series and write down what specifically changed as a result. If the honest answer is nothing, decide whether to fix the ritual or drop it.
Spend 30 minutes with one of your managers on one real employee situation. Ask what they need from you, agree on what they’re going to do next, and resist the urge to take the problem off their hands.
