What separates good managers from truly exceptional ones? As organizations increasingly recognize that their success hinges on effective leadership at all levels, the spotlight on outstanding managers has never been brighter.
Behind every high-performing team is typically a skilled manager who has mastered the delicate balance of driving results while developing people.
In this in-depth exploration, we’ll hear directly from seven recipients of prestigious management awards across different industries. These leaders have not only delivered impressive business outcomes but have also transformed their workplace cultures and nurtured the next generation of talent.
Their insights go beyond management theory—they represent battle-tested approaches that have succeeded in real-world business environments, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, during both calm and turbulent times.
Let’s uncover the strategies, mindsets, and daily practices that set these managers apart and learn how you can apply their wisdom to your own leadership journey.
1. Sarah Chen: Building Trust Through Transparency
When Sarah Chen received the Emerging Leader Excellence Award from the Technology Leadership Council last year, many were surprised that someone with just five years of management experience could edge out seasoned executives. But those who worked with Chen at CloudMatrix Solutions weren’t surprised at all.
“The foundation of everything I do is radical transparency,” explains Chen, who leads a 45-person product development team. “I believe people perform at their best when they understand not just what they’re doing, but why it matters in the bigger picture.”
Chen’s transparency manifests in several concrete practices:
Daily Context-Setting
Chen begins each day with a brief team huddle that connects daily tasks to quarterly objectives and company vision. Team members report understanding their purpose at rates 42% higher than the company average.
“Before making any decision, I ask myself: What information would I want if I were in my team members’ shoes?” Chen shares. “Then I provide that context proactively rather than waiting to be asked.”
Honest Communication About Challenges
Unlike managers who shield their teams from organizational challenges, Chen deliberately shares difficulties and constraints.
“When we had to pivot our product strategy after losing a major client, I walked the team through the exact financial implications and market reasoning,” she recalls. “This didn’t just prepare them for change—it engaged them in solving the problem.”
Transparent Decision-Making
Chen has implemented what she calls “decision journals”—shared documents that outline major decisions, the options considered, and the reasoning behind the final choice.
“Even when people disagree with my decisions, they respect them because they can follow my thought process,” she notes. “This has virtually eliminated the ‘management by announcement’ frustration that plagues many organizations.”
The results speak for themselves: Chen’s team boasts a 94% retention rate in an industry averaging 70%, and employee satisfaction scores in the top decile company-wide.
2. Marcus Johnson: Embracing Failure as a Learning Tool
“The biggest misconception about successful teams is that they make fewer mistakes,” says Marcus Johnson, recipient of the Manufacturing Excellence in Leadership Award. “The truth is, they make just as many—but they extract more learning from each one.”
As Plant Manager at Precision Components, Johnson has pioneered a leadership approach that reframes failure as a valuable resource rather than something to hide or punish.
The Monday Morning Misses Meeting
Johnson’s most unconventional practice is a weekly gathering where team members voluntarily share their failures and what they learned.
“I always go first,” Johnson emphasizes. “Last month, I detailed a supplier negotiation where I compromised too quickly and left value on the table. By modeling vulnerability, I make it safe for others.”
The meetings follow a strict protocol:
- No blame language allowed
- Must identify the underlying system issue
- Must propose one improvement
- No interrupting the speaker
Failure Resume Program
Johnson asks each team member to maintain a “failure resume” documenting setbacks alongside traditional achievements.
“During performance reviews, we spend more time discussing the failure resume than the success one,” he explains. “It’s transformed our conversations from justification to genuine development.”
Root Cause Scholarship
Perhaps most impressively, Johnson allocates $2,000 annually per team member for what he calls “root cause scholarship”—learning opportunities directly tied to understanding a failure more deeply.
“When our quality team missed a defect pattern, instead of disciplining them, I sent them to study statistical process control with an industry expert,” Johnson shares. “The return on that investment has been tenfold.”
Since implementing these practices three years ago, Johnson’s facility has reduced recurring error types by 78% while increasing innovation metrics significantly.
“The irony is that by obsessing less about failure prevention and more about failure learning, we actually fail less often,” Johnson concludes.
3. Priya Sharma: The Power of Authentic Recognition
In the high-pressure world of healthcare management, burnout is endemic. That makes Priya Sharma’s achievement at Metropolitan Medical Center all the more remarkable: 96% of her 120-person nursing staff report feeling “energized and fulfilled” by their work—the highest engagement score in the hospital network’s history.
Sharma, who received the Healthcare Management Association’s Leader of the Year Award, attributes this success to her methodical approach to recognition.
“Most managers treat recognition as an afterthought or a generic ‘good job,'” Sharma observes. “But recognition, when done with intention and specificity, is the most powerful tool we have for reinforcing values and building culture.”
Recognition Journaling
Sharma keeps a dedicated notebook where she records specific contributions from team members throughout each week.
“I capture not just what they did, but how their action embodied our values and impacted patients, colleagues, or organizational goals,” she explains. “This ensures my recognition is evidence-based rather than relying on who is most visible.”
The Two-Minute Personalized Video
Instead of generic thank-you emails, Sharma sends brief video messages highlighting specific contributions.
“I record these during my commute home,” she says. “They take just two minutes but have more impact than any formal recognition program we’ve tried. People tell me they save them for tough days.”
Value-Anchored Recognition
Perhaps most distinctively, Sharma ties every recognition moment to a specific organizational value.
“When I recognize someone for staying late to help a colleague, I explicitly connect it to our value of ‘solidarity over silos,'” she notes. “This transforms recognition from personal praise to cultural reinforcement.”
What sets Sharma’s approach apart is its authenticity. “People have radar for fake appreciation,” she cautions. “I only recognize what truly impressed me, and I’m specific about why it mattered.”
The results extend beyond engagement: patient satisfaction scores in Sharma’s units have increased by 37%, and nursing vacancies have dropped to less than half the regional average.
4. James Rodriguez: Creating Psychological Safety
When James Rodriguez took over the struggling innovation division at Global Consumer Products, team members described the environment as “walking on eggshells.” Ideas were hoarded rather than shared, and challenging the status quo was career suicide.
Three years later, Rodriguez’s division has launched four breakthrough products representing 28% of company revenue, and he has received the Innovation Leadership Excellence Award.
“My fundamental belief is that innovation doesn’t come from brilliant individuals but from psychologically safe environments where diverse perspectives collide productively,” Rodriguez explains.
The Pre-Mortem Practice
Before major projects, Rodriguez conducts “pre-mortems” where team members imagine the initiative has failed and identify possible causes.
“In most organizations, raising concerns is seen as negativity,” he notes. “The pre-mortem legitimizes constructive pessimism and surfaces issues when we can still address them.”
Dissent Champions
Rodriguez assigns a rotating “dissent champion” role in meetings—someone explicitly tasked with challenging the emerging consensus.
“This removes the social penalty for disagreement,” he explains. “Over time, constructive disagreement becomes normalized rather than threatening.”
The Learning Review System
Perhaps most distinctively, Rodriguez has replaced traditional performance reviews with “learning reviews” focused on growth rather than evaluation.
“We discuss three questions: What did you learn? How did you apply it? What do you need to learn next?” he shares. “This shifts the power dynamic from judgment to collaboration.”
Rodriguez emphasizes that psychological safety isn’t about being nice—it’s about creating conditions where truth emerges.
“I tell my teams that comfort isn’t the goal—learning is,” he states. “Sometimes that means difficult conversations, but always with respect and purpose.”
5. Amina Osei: Leading with Empathy During Change
As Regional Director at First Financial during its massive digital transformation, Amina Osei was tasked with transitioning 12 branches and 140 employees away from traditional banking models toward a hybrid digital-relationship approach.
While similar transformations elsewhere in the company met fierce resistance, Osei’s region achieved 98% adoption of new systems and retained all but two key staff members—earning her the Change Management Leader Award.
“Change initiatives fail not because of poor strategy but because of insufficient empathy,” Osei asserts. “People don’t resist change—they resist loss. My job was to understand each person’s perceived losses and address them directly.”
Individual Impact Mapping
Osei developed a process called “Individual Impact Mapping” where she personally met with each employee to discuss how changes would affect their daily work, identity, and career path.
“Instead of generic reassurance, I got specific,” she recalls. “For our senior tellers who feared technology would diminish their customer relationships, we co-created new advisory roles that leveraged both their interpersonal skills and new digital tools.”
Emotional Check-Ins
Throughout the transformation, Osei instituted brief weekly “emotional check-ins” where team members rated their energy, clarity, and concern levels.
“This normalized the emotional aspect of change,” she explains. “When we saw concern spike in a particular branch, we could immediately allocate additional support rather than letting anxiety fester.”
The ‘Why Behind the What’ Campaign
Osei invested heavily in helping employees understand the strategic rationale for changes.
“I created a series of ‘Why Behind the What’ lunch sessions where we examined competitive pressures, customer expectations, and industry trends,” she shares. “Understanding the context transformed compliance into commitment.”
Osei’s empathetic approach didn’t mean avoiding difficult decisions.
“Empathy isn’t about making people comfortable—it’s about meeting them where they are so you can move forward together,” she clarifies. “I still had to hold firm on implementation timelines, but I could do it with understanding rather than dictates.”
6. David Park: Developing Future Leaders
When David Park accepted the Mentorship Excellence Award, he opened his speech with a provocative claim: “The only meaningful measure of managerial success is how many future leaders you develop.”
As Senior Operations Director at Logistics International, Park has sent an unprecedented 17 direct reports into executive positions across the industry over his 15-year career.
“Too many managers build dependency rather than capacity,” Park observes. “They solve problems themselves instead of developing problem-solvers.”
The ‘Manager for a Month’ Program
Park’s signature innovation is rotating team members into a “Manager for a Month” role where they assume significant leadership responsibilities while receiving intensive coaching.
“This isn’t shadowing—it’s doing,” Park emphasizes. “They run meetings, make resource allocations, and handle difficult conversations. I’m there as a guide, not a safety net.”
The Decision Journal
Park requires all team members to maintain decision journals documenting key choices, their reasoning, anticipated outcomes, and actual results.
“This accelerates judgment development,” he explains. “Most managers develop judgment slowly through trial and error. The journal compresses that timeline by making the learning explicit.”
The ‘Teach to Learn’ Model
Perhaps most distinctively, Park assigns team members to teach new skills shortly after acquiring them themselves.
“When my logistics coordinator mastered our new routing software, I immediately had her train two other teams,” he shares. “Teaching forces deeper understanding and builds confidence simultaneously.”
Park measures his success not by his team’s current performance but by their career trajectories after leaving his department.
“I tell new hires that my goal is to make them so good they get poached by other departments,” he says with a laugh. “That mindset transforms management from controlling resources to developing talent.”
7. Elena Vasquez: Data-Driven Decision Making with a Human Touch
When Elena Vasquez received the Digital Marketing Excellence Award for transforming her company’s customer acquisition strategy, many assumed her background was in analytics or data science.
In fact, Vasquez began her career in customer service before transitioning to marketing—a background she credits for her distinctive approach combining rigorous analysis with deep customer empathy.
“Data without context is dangerous,” Vasquez asserts. “The most sophisticated analysis still requires human judgment to interpret and apply appropriately.”
The Metrics That Matter Framework
Vasquez developed a “Metrics That Matter” framework that distinguishes between vanity metrics and genuinely actionable indicators.
“We reduced our key performance indicators from 27 to just five,” she explains. “This meant deeper analysis of fewer variables rather than superficial tracking of everything.”
Weekly Data Storytelling Sessions
Perhaps most innovatively, Vasquez instituted weekly “data storytelling” sessions where team members present not just numbers but narratives about customer behavior.
“Every data point represents a human making a choice,” she emphasizes. “We train ourselves to see beyond the spreadsheets to the lives and decisions they represent.”
The Human Verification Loop
Vasquez implemented what she calls a “human verification loop” where data-driven recommendations are tested through direct customer conversations before full implementation.
“When our algorithm suggested shifting our content strategy toward more technical topics, we first convened a customer panel to understand the ‘why’ behind the numbers,” she recalls. “This revealed that customers wanted depth on specific applications rather than technical specifications—a nuance the data alone couldn’t capture.”
Under Vasquez’s leadership, marketing efficiency improved by 64% while customer satisfaction scores simultaneously increased—a rare combination that demonstrates the power of her balanced approach.
“The future belongs to leaders who can marry quantitative rigor with qualitative understanding,” she concludes. “Neither alone is sufficient.”
Common Traits Among Exceptional Managers
Despite their diverse industries and approaches, these seven award-winning managers share several fundamental characteristics:
- Systems Thinking: They focus on creating environments and processes that enable success rather than driving outcomes through force of will.
- Balanced Time Orientation: They maintain simultaneous focus on immediate performance and long-term capability building.
- Intellectual Humility: They openly acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge and actively seek diverse perspectives.
- Comfort with Complexity: They resist simplistic solutions to complex problems and help their teams navigate ambiguity constructively.
- Consistent Values Application: They demonstrate unwavering commitment to core values during both easy and difficult decisions.
The resulting leadership style is neither purely authoritative nor exclusively supportive, but adaptively responsive to each situation’s unique demands.
As management researcher Dr. Carolyn Hayes notes: “These exemplary leaders have transcended the false dichotomy between results and relationships. They achieve exceptional outcomes precisely because of their investment in people, not despite it.”
Frequently Asked Questions
What qualities do companies look for when giving manager awards?
Companies typically evaluate managers on multiple dimensions when considering them for awards. The primary factors include measurable business outcomes (such as productivity, revenue, or cost management), team development metrics (including retention rates and employee growth), innovation contributions, and cultural impact.
Most prestigious management awards now require evidence beyond financial performance. Selection committees increasingly consider employee engagement scores, succession planning success, diversity and inclusion advancement, and the manager’s contribution to organizational learning.
Award-winning managers demonstrate the ability to deliver strong results while simultaneously building organizational capability—proving that excellence in people development and business performance are complementary rather than competing priorities.
How can new managers develop award-winning leadership skills?
Developing award-winning management capabilities requires intentional practice rather than simply accumulating experience. New managers should:
- Seek diverse management experiences that challenge different leadership muscles
- Establish mentorship relationships with exemplary leaders
- Develop self-awareness through regular feedback and reflection
- Study management research and theory to provide frameworks for practical experience
- Join professional communities where leadership approaches can be discussed and refined
Most importantly, aspiring managers should adopt a growth mindset about leadership itself. As award winner Marcus Johnson advises: “Treat management as a discipline to be mastered rather than a position to be attained.”
What’s the difference between managing and leading?
The distinction between managing and leading remains relevant but requires nuance. Traditional definitions frame management as maintaining systems while leadership involves inspiring change. However, award-winning practitioners integrate both:
Management elements include:
- Resource allocation
- Performance monitoring
- Process optimization
- Problem resolution
Leadership elements include:
- Vision articulation
- Culture cultivation
- Innovation encouragement
- Talent development
Excellence requires integrating these responsibilities rather than emphasizing one at the expense of the other. As award recipient Priya Sharma explains: “The either/or framing is misleading. Every interaction with my team requires both management acumen and leadership vision.”
How do award-winning managers handle conflict on their teams?
Exceptional managers view conflict as potentially valuable rather than inherently problematic. Their approach typically includes:
- Establishing clear conflict protocols: Setting expectations for how disagreements should be expressed and addressed before conflicts arise
- Distinguishing types of conflict: Actively promoting cognitive conflict (disagreement about ideas) while minimizing affective conflict (personal tensions)
- Modeling productive disagreement: Demonstrating how to challenge ideas respectfully through their own behavior
- Creating resolution mechanisms: Implementing structured approaches for reaching decisions when consensus isn’t possible
Award winner James Rodriguez notes: “The goal isn’t conflict prevention—it’s conflict utilization. The key is creating conditions where diverse perspectives surface without triggering defensive responses.”
What role does emotional intelligence play in managerial success?
Emotional intelligence (EI) emerges as a critical differentiator among award-winning managers across industries. Research indicates that while IQ and technical expertise establish baseline competence, emotional intelligence more powerfully predicts leadership excellence.
Key emotional intelligence components that distinguished the award winners include:
- Self-awareness: The ability to recognize and understand their own emotional states and triggers
- Self-management: Capacity to regulate emotional responses, especially under pressure
- Social awareness: Skill in accurately perceiving others’ emotions and organizational dynamics
- Relationship management: Proficiency in influencing, developing, and connecting with diverse team members
Award recipient Amina Osei emphasizes that emotional intelligence can be developed: “What separates exceptional managers isn’t innate emotional perception but disciplined emotional practice—creating habits of awareness and response that build these capabilities over time.”
Conclusion
The insights from these seven exceptional managers reveal that managerial excellence isn’t mystical or innate—it’s methodical and learnable. Each has developed specific practices and approaches that can be studied, adapted, and implemented by aspiring leaders.
What distinguishes these award winners isn’t just what they do, but how they think. They’ve moved beyond the false trade-offs that plague average managers: results versus relationships, accountability versus autonomy, strategy versus execution.
Instead, they operate with nuanced thinking that integrates seemingly opposing priorities into coherent leadership approaches that simultaneously deliver current performance while building future capability.
As organizations continue facing unprecedented complexity and change, the lessons from these exemplary managers become increasingly valuable. Their proven strategies for building trust, learning from failure, recognizing contribution, establishing psychological safety, leading through change, developing future leaders, and balancing data with humanity provide a roadmap for managerial excellence applicable across industries and contexts.
The ultimate insight may be that management excellence isn’t about specific techniques but about integrating multiple perspectives—balancing accountability with empowerment, clarity with adaptability, and system focus with individual development. In this integration lies the path to becoming not just a good manager, but a truly exceptional one.
