There is a familiar idea in technical organizations: great people should be left alone to do great work.

Give talented engineers enough freedom, remove unnecessary bureaucracy, and let the best ideas win. Management, in this view, can easily become an obstacle rather than an advantage. Why add layers between smart people and the work they are trying to accomplish?

Google once took that idea seriously enough to test it.

In 2002, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin experimented with removing engineering managers altogether. The goal was to create a flatter organization with fewer barriers between employees and ideas, similar to the collegial environment they had experienced in graduate school.

The experiment lasted only a few months.

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Without managers, employees began going directly to Page with questions about expense reports, interpersonal conflicts, and other everyday organizational problems. More importantly, Google realized that management was doing more than supervising people. Managers helped communicate strategy, prioritize competing projects, facilitate collaboration, support career development, and make sure processes were aligned with company goals.

That realization eventually led Google to ask a much more interesting question: If highly technical employees are skeptical of management, can management itself be improved enough to earn their trust?

The answer became Project Oxygen.

And the lesson reaches far beyond Google. If you work with highly capable people, management cannot simply be about telling them what to do. Your job is to create the conditions in which capable people can do their best work without unnecessary interference while still receiving the direction, feedback, and development they need.

Google's challenge was unusual because its skepticism toward management was deeply connected to the company's identity.

It was, as engineer Eric Flatt described it, a company “built by engineers for engineers.” The people Google hired were generally ambitious, technically capable, independent thinkers who valued problem-solving and autonomy. They did not necessarily want another person hovering over their work.

That culture influenced how authority worked inside the company. Titles and hierarchy carried less weight than strong reasoning, technical expertise, and evidence. A person proposing a major change could not simply rely on organizational rank. The argument needed compelling logic and supporting data.

Even Google's structure reflected this philosophy. Despite having more than 37,000 employees at the time described in the article, the company had roughly 5,000 managers, 1,000 directors, and 100 vice presidents. Some engineering managers had around 30 direct reports, deliberately limiting their ability to micromanage.

That created an important distinction.

A manager did not necessarily need to control the work. The manager needed to create an environment where the people doing the work could succeed.

Tip: If your team is highly skilled, measure your management by how effectively you create clarity, remove obstacles, and develop people—not by how involved you are in every technical decision.

This is where Google's approach becomes particularly useful.

Instead of trying to persuade skeptical engineers with traditional management language, Google used the language its employees already respected: evidence.

In 2006, Laszlo Bock joined Google to lead what the company called People Operations. The organization already had performance reviews, 360-degree assessments, and the Googlegeist employee survey. In 2007, Prasad Setty joined to lead a people analytics group with a mandate to approach people-related questions with the same empirical discipline Google applied elsewhere.

Setty did not want the team to become a reporting function that simply produced dashboards. He wanted it to investigate meaningful organizational questions using data.

One question kept returning:

Do managers actually matter?

That became the foundation of Project Oxygen, a multiyear research initiative designed to understand which management behaviors were associated with better outcomes and then use those findings to improve management across Google.

The team initially tried to prove the opposite.

Rather than beginning with the assumption that managers were valuable, researchers looked at exit interviews, employee surveys, performance information, and manager ratings. They examined differences between higher- and lower-scoring managers and used more sophisticated statistical analysis when simple correlations did not provide enough evidence.

The results became increasingly difficult to dismiss.

In 2008, higher-scoring managers had lower turnover on their teams. Manager quality was more strongly associated with retention than seniority, performance, tenure, or promotions. Employees with higher-scoring managers also reported greater satisfaction with areas such as innovation, work-life balance, and career development.

The point was not that every management decision could be reduced to a number.

The point was that management behavior was observable enough to study, improve, and evaluate.

Tip: When a team is skeptical of a new management practice, do not begin with “this is how management works.” Start with a question, define what evidence would answer it, and let the evidence shape the practice.

Once Google had evidence that managers mattered, the next question became much more practical:

What were effective managers actually doing?

Researchers conducted interviews with high- and low-scoring managers across engineering, global business, and general and administrative functions. They also analyzed thousands of comments from employee surveys, performance reviews, and nominations for Google's Great Manager Award.

The result was a set of eight behaviors associated with effective management.

The article emphasizes behaviors such as developing and motivating employees, communicating strategy, eliminating roadblocks, giving actionable feedback, empowering teams rather than micromanaging them, and supporting career development.

What made the findings powerful was not that these behaviors were revolutionary. Most were fairly intuitive.

What mattered was that they were grounded in Google's own data.

Employees could now discuss management using a shared vocabulary. Managers could receive specific feedback about where they were performing well and where they needed to improve. Training could be built around observable actions rather than vague advice about becoming a “better leader.”

That difference is enormous.

“Be a better manager” is difficult to act on.

“Communicate the team's goals more clearly,” “give actionable feedback regularly,” or “help employees develop their careers” gives you something concrete to practice.

Tip: Turn broad expectations into visible behaviors. The easier it is for someone to recognize what good management looks like in practice, the easier it becomes to improve it.

One of the most interesting findings in Google's experience is that highly capable employees do not necessarily want less management.

They want less unnecessary management.

The distinction matters.

Engineers may strongly dislike being micromanaged on technical decisions while still wanting substantial support with their careers. The article captures this through the observation that engineers can resist close technical supervision while welcoming close attention to career development.

That changes what a manager should spend time doing.

If someone already knows how to solve a technical problem, taking over the solution may only slow them down. But that same person may benefit enormously from a manager who helps identify their next challenge, provides candid feedback, explains organizational context, creates opportunities to grow, and helps them understand how their work connects to larger goals.

Google manager Eric Clayberg described spending a third to half of his time looking for ways to help team members grow after going through Oxygen training.

That is not micromanagement.

It is investment.

The strongest version of management is therefore not about inserting yourself into every decision. It is about knowing where your involvement creates leverage and where it simply creates friction.

Tip: Give people room on the work they are capable of owning, but do not confuse autonomy with abandonment. Career development, feedback, context, and obstacle removal still require active management.

Google also had to be careful about how it measured management.

The company created upward feedback surveys for employees in administrative and global business functions and a separate technology manager survey for engineers. Employees evaluated managers on activities connected to the eight behaviors, including things such as communicating team goals clearly and providing actionable feedback.

Importantly, Google initially kept these surveys separate from formal performance reviews.

The reason was practical. If employees believed the program was simply another top-down evaluation system, resistance would increase. The surveys were positioned as tools for self-improvement, and confidentiality was emphasized.

Managers received numerical scores, employee comments, links to relevant best practices, and suggestions for improvement.

That specificity mattered.

One manager might discover that employees wanted more regular one-on-one meetings. Another might learn that the team's understanding of company strategy was not translating into an understanding of what that strategy meant for their particular work.

These are small distinctions, but they reveal something important about management: being visible is not the same as being effective.

A manager can see an employee every day and still fail to provide meaningful one-on-one interaction. A leader can repeat the company's strategy and still fail to explain what that strategy means for the team's priorities.

Good management closes that gap.

Tip: Ask people whether they are actually receiving the support you believe you are providing. Your intention is not the same thing as their experience.

Project Oxygen was not simply an interesting experiment.

Google reported measurable improvement after the program was introduced.

From 2010 through 2012, median favorability scores on its upward feedback surveys increased from 83% to 88%. The managers who initially scored lowest improved the most, particularly in coaching and career development. Improvements were reported across functions, management levels, spans of control, and geographic regions.

Individual examples made the effect even more tangible.

Sebastien Marotte, who joined Google from Oracle in 2011, initially received very low feedback scores despite strong sales performance. His first upward feedback score was 46%. After reviewing the comments, changing how he communicated with his team, and providing greater visibility into long-term strategy, his score reached 86% within two survey cycles.

The lesson is not that a higher survey score automatically makes someone a great manager.

The more useful lesson is that specific feedback can expose blind spots that traditional performance reviews may miss.

Marotte was successful at delivering business results. That did not necessarily mean his team experienced his management as effective.

The same principle appeared in other examples. A manager could believe that employees understood the company's direction because senior executives communicated it frequently. Employees could still want their direct manager to translate that broader vision into something meaningful for their specific team.

The gap between those two perspectives is exactly where management earns its value.

Tip: Treat feedback as information about the experience your team is actually having, not merely as a judgment about whether you are a good or bad manager.

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There is an understandable fear that once management becomes measurable, people will simply learn how to manipulate the test.

Google tried to account for that problem.

The eight behaviors were based on actions rather than personality, motivation, or personal beliefs. Employees were asked whether managers demonstrated particular behaviors, making it harder to compensate for poor management with charisma or grandstanding.

Google also examined whether managers might receive lower ratings simply because they gave employees negative performance feedback.

After analyzing two quarters of 2011 data, the people analytics team found that changes in employee performance ratings accounted for less than 1% of the variability in corresponding manager ratings across Google's functions.

That finding weakened the argument that managers were simply being punished for holding employees accountable.

There were still limitations.

Google acknowledged that employee satisfaction and perceptions do not automatically prove improvements in sales, productivity, or profitability. Establishing those causal relationships is much harder. The program also faced sustainability questions, including survey fatigue and uncertainty about whether the same management behaviors would matter equally at more senior executive levels.

So Project Oxygen was not a perfect formula.

It was something more useful: a continuous-improvement system built around evidence.

Tip: Use metrics to illuminate behavior, not to pretend that human performance can be reduced to a single number. The measurement should improve the conversation rather than replace judgment.

The deepest lesson from Google's experience is not that every organization needs Google's eight behaviors.

It is that management becomes much easier to defend when it creates value that employees can actually feel.

A manager who simply tracks deadlines, forwards information, attends meetings, and checks whether tasks are complete is vulnerable to becoming administrative overhead.

A manager who helps people prioritize, removes obstacles, translates strategy, gives useful feedback, develops careers, improves collaboration, and creates an environment where talented people can operate independently is doing something much harder to replace.

That distinction becomes especially important when the people being managed are already highly capable.

You do not need someone standing behind you while you write every line of code. You may need someone who can recognize that the project you are working on is no longer the highest-value problem. You may need someone willing to challenge your assumptions, help you navigate an organizational obstacle, connect you with the right people, or push you toward a responsibility you are not yet comfortable taking.

That is management at its best.

It is not about making talented people dependent on a manager.

It is about making talented people more capable, more effective, and better equipped to operate independently.

Google's original experiment suggested that removing managers could create more freedom.

The return to management demonstrated that freedom alone was not enough.

Project Oxygen then showed something more nuanced: management itself could be examined, tested, improved, and adapted to the needs of a highly technical workforce.

That may be the most valuable takeaway for you.

You do not need to accept management traditions simply because they are traditional. You also do not need to reject management because bureaucracy can be harmful. Both positions are too simplistic.

The better question is:

What is management actually doing for the people and the work?

If it creates unnecessary approvals, meetings, interference, and hierarchy, remove it.

If it creates clarity, development, useful feedback, better collaboration, stronger decision-making, and fewer obstacles, strengthen it.

And if you are the person responsible for others, remember that your job is not simply to keep everyone busy.

Your job is to help the people around you become better at what they do.

That requires enough distance to let capable people think for themselves and enough involvement to know when they need support. It requires the humility to discover that your intentions may not match your team's experience. And it requires the discipline to look at evidence instead of defending assumptions.

Google did not convince engineers that managers were valuable by telling them to believe.

It convinced them by doing something engineers respect deeply:

It tested the hypothesis.

And perhaps that is the bigger lesson for anyone trying to lead highly capable people: you do not earn trust by claiming that your management is effective.

You earn it by making the people around you better—and being willing to examine whether you actually are.

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