The manager your new hire reports to impacts their job experience more than the role or their day-to-day work. The relationship an employee has with their manager determines how much effort they bring, how safe they feel flagging a problem, and how long they stay. The same skilled hire can be a high performer doing the best work of their career or a mediocre employee doing the bare minimum, and the manager is what tips performance one way or the other.
Gallup’s analysis of managers across thousands of business units found they account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, which is why the same company can run hot or cold from one team to the next depending on who’s in charge. Retention depends on the manager, too. In DDI’s research, 57% of employees said they left a job because of a manager, and another 32% said they seriously considered it.
When a manager and a direct report clash, the manager usually takes the blame, but the friction almost always comes down to fit, the match between how a manager leads and how a specific person is wired.
Most managers miss this misalignment through no fault of their own. They earned the job by being great at the work and then inherited a team with no training and no read on the people in it. The Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of people who step into management get no formal training, and managing for fit relies on tools most companies never provide.
A manager’s default leadership style doesn’t fit every direct report
A manager’s default leadership style reflects their own Motivations outward.
A manager driven by results runs the team on targets and metrics and assumes everyone else keeps score the same way. A manager who runs on autonomy gives everyone room to operate, including the report who’s privately hoping for more direction. To most managers, their approach to work feels like the sensible way to work, so they manage everyone the same way — the way they prefer to be managed. Their management style works great for employees wired the same way, but for those who aren’t, it misses the mark, leaving them feeling misunderstood and frustrated.
The catch is that it’s incredibly difficult for a manager to see their own default leadership style in play and understand its impact across a team. And without that perspective, it’s nearly impossible to adapt their approach and personalize management to each team member, so the gap between how the manager leads and what the employee needs keeps growing. Over time, the employee starts to look like a bad hire, when the problem is actually a leadership style that never fit them in the first place.
Companies try to close the gap with training, but in an Unmind survey, 40% of managers said their company doesn’t give them enough training to manage their team well.
Knowing that a specific employee needs a weekly check-in while another does their best work when left alone goes beyond what general leadership training can teach, because it depends on understanding how they’re motivated and knowing what fuels their best work — and most companies don’t give their managers access to that motivational intelligence.
So the guidance stays general, the meetings stay one-size-fits-all, managers keep running on best guesses with the people they can’t figure out, and employees suffer the consequences. McKinsey reports that 52% of employees who left a job pointed to not feeling valued by their manager. At scale, that’s what capable managers produce when they lead people the company never equipped them to understand.
The MCode Job Fit Report scores manager-candidate pairings
The MCode Job Fit Report identifies manager-candidate compatibility — how a candidate will collaborate and clash with the hiring manager — before an offer goes out.
Here’s how the Job Fit Report works:
- The hiring manager takes the same motivation-based pre-hire assessment that your candidates do. It reveals their MCode, a ranking of 32 Motivations mapped across 8 Motivational Dimensions that tells you what energizes and drains them.
- Their results are then paired with the job description for the open role and run through an AI-powered analysis of fit across three facets: Job fit, manager fit, and environment fit.
- The Job Fit Report opens with the hiring manager’s profile, detailing their leadership style and the pros and cons associated with managing this specific role.
- Then, for every candidate, you get a full motivational alignment profile, scoring manager compatibility as just one of its three facets, so you can see which candidates will click with the manager and where potential clashes might occur.
- Finally, the Job Fit Report surfaces custom interview questions for each candidate, so you can investigate potential friction, challenges, or misalignment early.
Because the MCode motivation assessment draws on the achievements people describe from their own experiences and what they found satisfying, it’s much harder to game than a typical multiple-choice self-reporting tool. And a proprietary AI-powered algorithm does the Job Fit Report scoring, so a call that’s easy to get wrong on instinct stays free of personal bias.
Even better? The Job Fit Report keeps paying off after the hire.
The manager comes away with an understanding of their own leadership approach and the new hire’s MCode results and Job Fit Report profile, which show how that specific person is wired, what energizes and drains them, what will cause them to struggle, what they need to succeed, and where the two of them might encounter friction. With both, the manager can adapt how they set direction, make assignments, give feedback, and communicate from week one, and skip the months of trial and error it usually takes to figure a new hire out.
The right manager-employee pairings makes managers the reason people stay
For any one person, the workplace culture and environment they experience is heavily impacted by their manager. SHRM reports that 76% of employees say their manager sets the culture they work in, which makes that relationship the biggest influence on how the job feels day to day.
That’s why the manager relationship carries so much weight in whether someone stays or leaves. When it goes wrong, people walk. Among employees who quit over culture, 58% pointed straight at their manager, and Pew found that 57% of people who left a job cited feeling disrespected, the kind of resentment that builds when a manager and a report keep talking past each other.
The same relationship produces the opposite results when the pairing fits.
A manager who understands what drives someone can give them exactly what they need to connect with the team, do their best work, and feel fulfilled in their role. Employees who have great managers stay, grow, and give more to the company because of their managers.
Every manager has it in them to be a great leader, and most just need their company to hand them a clear picture of the people they lead. That’s what turns the manager relationship into your strongest driver of engagement and retention.
Understand compatibility before your next hire starts
The employee-manager relationship decides how much of a skilled hire’s talent and drive the company ever sees. Equip your managers to lead each person the way that person is wired, and you give every hire their best shot at doing great work and staying to do more of it.
When companies add motivation intelligence into their hiring process:
- Managers become more effective, adapting their management approach to fit new hires and ensuring they feel seen, valued, and understood on day one and in the weeks, months, and years that follow.
- New hires show up more engaged, more invested, more driven, and far more likely to build a long career with your company.
With the right hiring data and the motivational intelligence Motivation Code’s Job Fit Report provides, every hire can be a successful hire. It starts with knowing how a candidate and their future manager fit before you put them together.
Take the MCode assessment today to discover your MCode and see the different motivation makes, learn more about MCode’s Job Fit Report, or book a no-pressure demo, and we’ll show you how it works and walk you through a sample Job Fit Report.
