The SharePoint Health Analyzer reported that “People search relevance is not optimized when the Active Directory has errors in the manager reporting”. So in order to fix this problem I wanted to execute the ‘Add-SPProfileLeader’-command on our CEO.

SharePoint, however, stated that “User ‘domain\ceo’ has a manager.”
But in order to be ‘Profile Leader’ the account must not have a manager!

PS C:\Users\sp_farm> Add-SPProfileLeader $SPSAP -Name domain\ceo

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Performing operation "Add-SPProfileLeader" on Target
"domain\ceo".
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help
(default is "Y"):Y
Failed. User 'domain\ceo' has a manager.

I checked the AD and to my suprise the Manager-attribute was empty. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t fix this issue until I checked what’s going on in SharePoint’s database itself.

So, here is how I fixed the issue:

I logged in to the database with SQL Server Management Studio and executed the following SQL query:

SELECT [NTName], [Manager]
FROM [Profile DB].[dbo].[UserProfile_Full]
WHERE [NTName] = 'domain\ceo'

The query returned this:

I’m not exactly sure why the manager attribute was empty, but I assumed that it should be NULL. I changed the value with this SQL query:

UPDATE [Profile DB].[dbo].[UserProfile_Full]
SET [Manager] = NULL
WHERE [NTName] = 'domain\ceo'

Then I executed the PowerShell-command again and this time it worked.

PS C:\Users\sp_farm> Add-SPProfileLeader $SPSAP -Name domain\ceo

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Performing operation "Add-SPProfileLeader" on Target
"domain\ceo".
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help
(default is "Y"):Y
User 'domain\ceo' added as a leader.

Please note that manual alterations to the database are not supported by Microsoft.

I hope that helps someone!