The Effective Manager

by Mark Horstman

The study was scheduled to run for 30 months. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, we had to stop the test after only 19 months. The reason was that because 18 months into our test, unrelated to the test, a corporate document was distributed, showing which managers had been promoted to which roles in the past 12 months. Of the 43 managers promoted, 42 of them came from the test group, and only one came from the control group. Although you might think this was a validation of our effort and justification for continuing or even expanding the effort, a month later we had to shut down the study. Why? Because the managers in the control group, who also wanted to get promoted, started doing O3s as well, which ruined the science involved in our study. However, 18 months was long enough to capture some of the outcomes we had hoped to track. Results and retention among managers in the test group rose by 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Results and retention among the control group rose slightly, by 1 percent.