It captures what your managers did last quarter: the project shipped, the conflict resolved, the number hit. That’s history. Useful for compensation. Not useful for knowing whether your management layer is sharp right now.
Management quality lives in real time. It’s the call made in a 30-minute meeting when the team is stuck and something has to give. The feedback framed well enough that someone actually hears it. The decision made at 10 PM when the data is incomplete and waiting isn’t an option.
Your managers are making hundreds of these calls every month. You have no visibility into whether they’re making them well.
That gap between what you measure and what actually determines performance gets harder to close as you scale. At 100 people, you sense it. At 500, you’re flying blind.
This isn’t a training problem. You can’t fix a real-time decision quality gap with a quarterly workshop. By the time a development program runs, the decision is already made, and so is its impact.
The only real answer is support that’s present when the decision is being made. Not in the review. Not in the debrief. In the moment itself.
That’s a different model than what most companies are running.