Leadership template

Manager Effectiveness Survey Template

An upward-feedback survey covering the behaviours that separate effective managers from popular ones: clarity, feedback quality, fairness, development, workload protection, decision-making and psychological safety. Written for aggregate coaching, not performance policing.

15 questions 4 min to complete Twice a year All employees, about their direct manager

Use this template free

When to use it

Run it twice a year, at least a month away from any performance or compensation cycle. Manager quality is consistently the strongest single predictor of engagement and regretted attrition, and it is one of the few things you can genuinely coach.

The full question set

Copy these as they are, or adapt the wording to your organisation — just keep it identical between waves, because changing a question resets its trend line.

Clarity

1.My manager sets clear expectations about what good work looks like.1–5 scale

Feedback

1.My manager gives me feedback that is specific and useful.1–5 scale
2.My manager gives me difficult feedback directly rather than avoiding it.1–5 scale

Recognition

1.My manager recognises good work when it happens.1–5 scale

Fairness

1.My manager treats everyone on the team fairly.1–5 scale

Decisions

1.My manager makes decisions in a way I can understand, even when I disagree.1–5 scale

Workload

1.My manager protects the team from unreasonable workload.1–5 scale

Development

1.My manager actively supports my development and career goals.1–5 scale

Psychological safety

1.I can disagree with my manager without it being held against me.1–5 scale

Cadence

1.My manager holds regular, useful one-to-ones with me.1–5 scale

Enablement

1.My manager removes blockers when I raise them.1–5 scale

Autonomy

1.My manager gives me appropriate autonomy over how I do my work.1–5 scale

Retention

1.My manager is a reason I want to stay at this company.1–5 scale

Open

1.What should your manager keep doing?Open text
2.What is one thing your manager could do differently to help you?Open text

How to run it well

State clearly up front that results go to the manager as aggregates, never as individual responses.
Suppress results entirely for any manager with fewer than five direct reports responding.
Give managers their results with a coach or HR partner present — a raw score with no conversation does more harm than good.
Ask each manager to pick one behaviour to work on and to tell their team what it is.
Re-run in six months and look at movement, not absolute rank.

Questions people ask

Should manager feedback be anonymous?

Always. Upward feedback carries obvious career risk, and people adjust their answers to match that risk. Anonymity is the entire mechanism by which this survey produces truth rather than compliments — which is why the reporting threshold matters as much as the anonymity itself.

What if a manager has fewer than five direct reports?

Do not report their results at all. Roll them up into the next level of the organisation instead. With three respondents, a manager can often infer who said what, and once that happens the whole programme loses credibility across the company.

Should manager scores feed into performance reviews?

Not directly, and not in the first two cycles. The moment scores become a performance input, managers start managing the score — lobbying, pre-framing, avoiding hard conversations before the survey window. Use them for coaching, and let sustained patterns inform performance conversations separately.

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The 15-question monthly pulse

Culture

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Development

Structured feedback from every direction

Send this template in five minutes

Load it into TruePulse, import your team, and let automatic reminders and anonymity thresholds do the rest. Free — every feature, every seat.

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