Great managers are catalysts: at their best, great managers speed up the reaction between each employee's talents and the company's goals. The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, or to ensure customer service, or to set standards, or to build high-performance teams. Each of these is a valuable outcome, and great managers may well use these outcomes to measure their success. But these outcomes are the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is each employee's talents. The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance. This is the job of the great manager.

One objection to this, of course, is that the manager is not the employee's agent; he is the company's agent. Although he may be interested in each employee's success, what happens when the goals of the employee and the goals of the company don't coincide? When push comes to shove, shouldn't the company's goals come first? Shouldn't the company's goals trump the employee's? The inherent conflict of the manager's role is—should he serve the company or the employee?.

Although this conflict has preoccupied business theorists and workplace lawmakers for decades, none of the great managers have much time for it. They seem confused at this question. In their eyes, there is no conflict. Sure, they are aware that as managers they exist to serve the ends of the company, as all employees do. But they know instinctively that the only way for a manager to serve the company is to serve the employee first.

Here's their logic: The manager's unique contribution is to make other people more productive. He may be charged with other responsibilities, such as selling or designing or leading, but, when it comes to the managing aspect of his job, he will succeed or fail based on his ability to make his employees more productive working with him than they would be working with someone else. And the only way to pull this off, they say, is to make your employees believe, genuinely believe, that their success is your primary goal.

Pause for a moment and recall the best manager you have ever worked for. What did she want from you? What did she want for you? What were most of your conversations about? Try to identify her main motives toward you and your achieve­ments.

If this person was indeed a great manager, I bet that, over time, you became convinced that she was deeply preoccupied with the challenge of making you as successful as possible. Of course, on some level you knew that she was being paid to serve the company's agenda, but somehow this agenda receded into the background and was replaced by the feeling that you and your success were her primary focus.

Secure in this belief, you were prepared to give her your very best. When you could have quit for the day, you reached down for that extra hour of effort. When you could have joined a group of naysayers, you offered her your loyalty and support. When, during times of uncertainty, you could have jumped ship, you gave her the benefit of the doubt and stuck around.

None of this means that she was soft on you. In fact she was probably tougher on you than some of your more mediocre managers. She had confidence in your talents and so she pushed you hard, harder than you would have pushed yourself. She challenged you to set your standards higher and showed you how to reach these standards. She painted a vivid picture of excellence in your role and coached or cajoled you to embody this picture. She may even have disagreed with you when you sought a promotion and told you that, given her understanding of your talents, you would be crazy to take that job.

So she was tough, expectant, demanding, but through it all, you never doubted that your success was the North Star, the guiding light around which all decisions were made. Even though, rationally, you were aware that you were a means to an end, emotionally, she never made you feel this way.

This, then, is how great managers resolve the dilemma of being caught in the middle between the company and the employee. They know that they are paid by the company to make you want to give your all, but they also know that you will give your all only if you feel supported, challenged, understood, and stretched to be as successful as your talents will allow. As a result, great managers know they have no choice. To do their job, they must start with your feelings. They must convince you that, in their eyes, your success is paramount.

In interviews, their commitment to each employee's success appears to be driven less by logic than by intuition and instinct. This is because one of the talents most characteristic of great managers is an ability to derive satisfaction from seeing tiny increments of growth in someone else. Psychologically speaking, they really don't have\a choice. They can't help but focus on helping you succeed because, given the way their brains are wired, they are immediately intrigued by you, and by the challenge of figuring out how to arrange the world so that you can experience the greatest success possible. This talent is commonly known as the coaching instinct.

  For what research confirms employees would tell bosses - if asked, send an email to lb@FutureVisions.org with "MWS research on bosses" in the subject and nothing in the body