Google tried to prove managers don't matter. Instead, it discovered 10 traits of the very best ones

Google set out to prove that it didn't need managers with Project Oxygen, but it was a failure.

In the process, however, the company realized the value of managers who guide their team to success.

Here are the 10 characteristics Google found essential to make a great manager, including being inclusive and having the confidence to make decisions.

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It's not every day you learn of a really smart company setting out to prove that managers don't matter. But that's exactly what Google did with Project Oxygen.

The hypothesis was that the quality of a manager doesn't matter and that managers are at best a necessary evil, and at worst a useless layer of bureaucracy. The early work of Project Oxygen, in 2002, included a radical experiment — a move to a flat organization without any managers.

The experiment was a disaster, lasting only a few months as the search giant found employees were left without direction and guidance on their most basic questions and needs.

Never daunted, Google pivoted to extensively study the opposite question — what are the common behaviors of their very best managers？ It came up with a list of eight attributes, verified quantitatively and qualitatively in multiple ways. It then rolled out those findings in 2010 to its organization to ingest and use.

The results were remarkable.

Laszlo Bock (at the time Google's VP of people operations) told The New York Times, “We had a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75% of our worst-performing managers.” Since then, further analysis has added two more attributes to the list.

So what follows are the 10 characteristics Google believes make for the best managers (and that it expects from managers), blended with my perspective on each trait. According to Google, the best managers know how to ...