Yaniv Preiss

Most directors were never taught how to manage managers, so I wrote the book I wish had existed when I first started leading managers.

While my previous book, Fixing Management, focused on frontline managers, Leading Managers is about the next level: leading those frontline managers.

When you managed a team, the problems were visible. Someone missed a deadline, a production issue appeared or a conflict surfaced directly in front of you.

As a director, the problems become systemic. You often do not realize something is broken until it has already slowed the organization down or damaged trust between teams.

You are thinking about things like:

Resignation fear: your most reliable manager looks burnt out. If they leave, seven people lose their lead at once, and you are pulled back into day-to-day firefighting.

Execution gap: you told everyone the priority is Project X. A month later, you discover three teams are still spending most of their time on Project Y. Why is the message not getting through?

Friction: two of your managers no longer trust each other. Their teams are starting to work in silos, and more of your week is spent mediating tension instead of leading strategically.

The Director Trap

You are no longer responsible for the work itself. You are responsible for the people managing the work.

Many directors secretly know they are still operating like senior managers. They stay close to every detail because letting go feels dangerous. If the layer below them fails, they are accountable for the outcome anyway.

So they attend too many meetings, review too many decisions, stay involved in too many Slack threads and approve too many things personally.

From the outside, this often looks responsible – the director is involved, responsive, hardworking, and informed. But underneath, decision-making slows down, managers stop developing judgment and escalations increase. The organization becomes dependent on one exhausted person.

If every meaningful decision must go through you, you are not scaling the organization – you are becoming the bottleneck.

I wrote Leading Managers because I kept seeing this pattern in very different environments, from small startups to AWS. Strong managers were promoted into director roles and suddenly expected to lead managers without clear guidance on how to actually do it.

Why This Chapter First

The PDF chapter I am sharing focuses on one of the most common failure patterns in director-level leadership: accidentally training managers to stop leading independently.

The chapter opens with João, a newly promoted group manager who did what felt natural: he attended every team meeting, commented in every Slack channel, reviewed deliverables, asked for constant updates and stayed involved in nearly every decision.

He worked twelve-hour days, he was online on weekends and he believed he was helping his managers succeed.

What he actually built was a system where managers became information pipes instead of leaders. Nothing moved without him. And if he was off for a week, the system stalled.

The dangerous part is that this leadership style often looks effective in the short term: problems get caught early, decisions stay aligned and communication flows.

But over time, managers stop exercising judgment because the director keeps replacing it with their own.

The chapter breaks down how this pattern develops in practice, and how to reverse it without losing visibility or accountability.

Stop Building an Organization That Depends on You

Many directors believe they are protecting quality by staying deeply involved in everything. Often, they are protecting themselves from uncertainty. Organizations do not scale when every important decision requires one exhausted person in the middle.

If João’s story feels familiar, the problem is probably already larger than it looks.

The chapter is for directors who want to build managers capable of leading without constant supervision.

You can download the chapter PDF here.

Leading Managers is available now on Amazon.