I still remember my first one-on-one with someone who’d been in the industry for well over 10 years. I’d been in the industry for maybe 4-5 years at that point and was now leading a team.
I sat down with my carefully prepared agenda. Questions about their current projects. Ideas for their development. Suggestions for how they might approach a client challenge.
It didn’t take long before I realised how ridiculous this was. I was essentially asking someone who’d forgotten more about the work than I currently knew whether they’d considered… basic things they’d probably done hundreds of times before.
They were polite about it. But I could see it in their face. This wasn’t useful. This was box-ticking.
Here’s the thing that nobody prepares you for: You spend years learning to manage. You get decent at giving feedback, setting objectives, developing people, holding them accountable. You build a whole way of doing things.
Then you get senior people on your team who have seen it all before and literally none of it works for them. Again, it’s not that they’re bad people or are being difficult. It’s just that they don’t need you in the same way that more junior people need you.
- They don’t need your feedback on their work.
- They don’t need you to teach them anything.
- They don’t need development plans focused on fundamentals.
And treating them like you’d treat a mid-level team member feels insulting to both of you. It’s not that they know it all – they are still learning like everyone else, but it’s not where you’re going to have a big impact with them in the same way that you would with a newbie.
But you’re still their manager. You still have one-on-ones. You’re still supposed to add value somehow.
So what do seniors really need from a manager? And how do you add value when the traditional management approach doesn’t apply?
Why your normal management approach falls flat
Let’s start with why your usual approach doesn’t work. Because understanding this helps you figure out what to do instead.
The feedback mismatch
Your typical feedback framework assumes the person needs your input on quality. “Here’s what went well, here’s what could be better” only works if you’re in a position to evaluate whether their work is actually good.
With senior people, you’re not.
They know what good looks like. They’ve been doing it longer than you. They’ve seen more variations, handled more edge cases, developed better instincts.
In cases like this, your feedback isn’t just unnecessary, it’s noise.
The development conversation problem
“What do you want to learn?” is a great question for someone early or mid-career.
For someone senior, it often feels hollow. Again, it’s not that they know everything, it’s more that they’ve seen a lot and learned a lot, so this may not be an area of big improvement for them.
They’re not trying to get better at the fundamentals. They’re operating at a level where learning is subtle, self-directed and often about breadth rather than depth. Learning a new technique, exploring an adjacent discipline, understanding a different business model.
The development they need isn’t something you can put in a plan with quarterly check-ins. It’s usually more about exposure to different situations which you can’t always manufacture or provide to them immediately.
The checking-in trap
Your weekly “how’s everything going?” meetings feel like you’re checking up on them, not supporting them.
And they can tell. Especially if you haven’t yet developed a good level of trust with each other.
Senior people don’t need you to track their progress. They’re self-directed. They know what needs doing and they’re doing it. When you ask “how are things going?” what they hear is “I need to justify having this meeting.”
I fell into this trap badly. I had weekly one-on-ones with senior team members where I’d ask about their projects and they’d give me updates, and I’d nod and say “great, let me know if you need anything.”
One of them eventually said to me: “I’m not sure these meetings are the best use of either of our time. I can just send you updates by email if you need them.”
They were right. I was treating them like someone who needed monitoring. What they actually needed was something completely different.
What senior people actually need from you
Right, so if they don’t need traditional management, what do they need?
After years of managing senior people (and learning from plenty of mistakes), here’s what I’ve learned.
Air cover and context
Senior people don’t need you to check their work. They need you to shield them from organisational chaos to enable them to do their best work.
They need you to provide strategic context for why decisions are being made. They need you to translate leadership priorities into meaningful information. They need you to fight battles they can’t fight themselves.
This isn’t management in the traditional sense. It’s protection and translation.
I had a senior account director who could handle any client situation you threw at her. Difficult stakeholders? No problem. Budget cuts? She’d navigate it. Scope creep? She’d manage it.
But when the leadership team suddenly decided we were pivoting strategy mid-year, she was lost. Not because she couldn’t do her job, but because she didn’t understand why we were making decisions that seemed to contradict what we’d said three months earlier.
My job wasn’t to tell her how to manage her accounts. It was to explain what was happening at the leadership level, why it was happening and what it meant for her work. She needed me to tell her when something mattered and when they could ignore it.
That’s air cover. That’s the context. That’s what I could give her that she couldn’t get herself. It was valuable to her.
Intellectual sparring
Here’s what I got wrong for a long time: I thought senior people didn’t need my input because I wasn’t as experienced as them.
Actually, they do need input. Just not the kind I was trying to give.
They don’t need feedback on what they’re doing. They need someone who can challenge their thinking on why and whether. Or someone to sense check a big decision they’re about to make.
This requires you to understand their work deeply enough to ask non-obvious questions. Not “have you considered…” questions that assume they’ve missed something basic. But “help me understand…” questions that make them articulate their thinking.
That’s intellectual sparring. And senior people need it because they’re often the most experienced person in the room. Nobody challenges their thinking. You can, if you do it right.
Removal of obstacles
We touched on this earlier and this is probably the most important thing senior people need from you: clear the path so they can do their best work.
Your value isn’t in making their work better. It’s in removing the things that stop them doing it at all.
- Budget approvals they’re not senior enough to request.
- Stakeholder alignment they can’t force.
- Resource allocation they can’t control.
- Political navigation they don’t have access to.
They can do the work. They need you to create the conditions for them to do it.
The skills you need to develop to manage senior people
Managing senior people requires a different skill set than managing junior or mid-level people. Here’s what you need to get good at.
Strategic translation
You need to get much better at taking organisational strategy and translating it into meaningful context for their work.
Seniors don’t just need to know what we’re doing. They need to understand why, what trade-offs we’re making and what it means for how they prioritise.
This means you need to actually understand strategy yourself, not just pass down messages.
I used to just relay information: “Leadership wants us to focus on closing bigger clients.” That’s not useful.
What’s useful is: “Leadership wants us to focus on closing bigger clients because our margin on small clients is unsustainable and we’re trying to prove we can compete at the enterprise level.. For your work, that means we’re probably going to let some smaller clients churn if they’re high-maintenance and we need case studies that show enterprise-scale impact.”
That’s a translation of strategy into something that makes sense. That’s the context that they need. That’s what senior people can actually use.
Question-asking without undermining
You need to learn how to probe their decisions and thinking without implying you know better.
This is harder than it sounds.
The wrong version: “Have you considered doing it this way instead?”
The right version: “Walk me through how you decided on this approach.”
The wrong version: “I’m not sure that’s the right call.”
The right version: “Help me understand the trade-offs you’re weighing here.”
The difference is subtle but important. You’re genuinely trying to understand their thinking, not disguising suggestions as questions.
I got this feedback directly from a senior team member once. They said: “When you ask me questions, it sometimes feels like you’ve already decided I’m wrong and you’re waiting for me to realise it.”
That stung. But they were right. I may have argued a little before I accepted that they were right!
I had to learn to ask questions because I actually wanted to understand, not because I wanted to lead them to my own conclusion.
Political navigation
Senior people are good at their craft. They’re often not good at (or interested in) organisational politics.
You need to be if you’re going to effectively lead a team, especially at larger organisations.
This means understanding how to represent their interests up the chain. How to fight for resources. How to position their work so leadership understands its value. How to manage stakeholders who don’t appreciate what they do.
Political navigation isn’t about the work itself. It’s about making sure the work gets the support it needs.
I’ll be honest, this transition is uncomfortable. You’re used to being the person with answers. Now you’re managing people who have more answers than you do. That’s supposed to feel weird.
But here’s what I’ve learned: Your value to senior people isn’t in managing them better. It’s in removing the things that prevent them from doing their best work. Once you understand that, the whole dynamic gets easier – and they’ll appreciate you for it.
Managing senior people for the first time? Hit reply and tell me what you’re finding hardest about it.
