I remember the first time I threw a hand grenade.
It was a clay hole in Fort Benning, Georgia. There was a Staff Sergeant standing right next to me, and he walked me through every piece of it: how to hold it, when to throw it, what to say, what to do after. I was nervous. I threw it. He grabbed the back of my vest and yanked me down into that hole.
I was glad he was there, helping make sure I didn't go boom.
That's the thing about micromanagement. Whether it's help or not depends on why it's happening.
Sometimes it's because your boss doesn't trust you. That's mostly a you problem, not them. They haven't seen you do the thing they consider important, and if it goes wrong it lands on other people. Insecure bosses worry about it landing on them personally. Secure bosses worry about it landing on the team.
Sometimes it's you're just the new guy. New in the role, or haven't done something before. Having someone ride alongside is welcome. That was me in the hole.
And sometimes they say they trust you, but don't really. The voices in their head are too loud. Too much fear to let go. Maybe their job is on the line and the stakes are high for them personally. It doesn't excuse it. It's just worth knowing, because you might find yourself doing it.
Leaders like to talk about delegation. If you've worked with me you've heard me say "delegate and elevate." I think that's right, and I'm also working to not use that buzzwordy phrase again.
But delegating does elevate. It takes something you are accountable for and gives it to someone else. It pushes them to do something new. That something used to be your job. Now it's theirs. That's how you train someone to take your job. Which is what we should all be doing.
That's the healthy form. There's another one.
The professional delegator. They delegate everything. Somewhere along the line they went from someone who does the work to someone who shuffles the work around. And with that went understanding.
You can delegate accountability, but you can never delegate understanding.
The micromanager can't let go of the work. The professional delegator lets go of the work and the understanding with it. Different ends of the same problem. Both break trust.
I've done this. And whether I got lazy or overwhelmed, same result. There's so much to know, so much to try to understand, and you start going so fast that you rationalize away what you truly need to know. There are always more emails. Always more meetings. So you start to delegate understanding. First it's the small items. Get those wrong and it can be fixed easily. Do this long enough, you wave at the big ones as they go by. Suddenly you don't understand the things that matter.
“If you lose your voracious curiosity about tactical details, if you lose passionate interest in people and how they are feeling, if you insulate yourself in the protective cocoon of executive comforts, you may well wake up one day to discover your company has already entered a doom loop of decline.”
Jim Collins, BE 2.0
Sometimes the best use of your time is to slow down and dig in. Not to do someone's job. To understand what they're wrestling with. What's hard about it. What could work. What might not.
Good leaders are trying to understand the truth. That's empathy. Walking around in someone's skin. Seeing reality through their lens. It doesn't mean they are right, but it is how they see the world.
If you sit on high and move work around and make decisions without understanding, that's when things break. Most importantly, you break trust. Then things go boom.
So for you micromanagers out there, take a look. Why do you do it? Because someone needs you to and welcomes it? Because you're afraid of what happens to you when it goes wrong?
Micromanaging done for the right reasons has a name. It's called help. If you're holding the grenade for the first time, someone standing next to you who understands the mechanics of that little baseball of death is helpful. Done for the wrong reasons, it destroys trust.
Almost no one wants to be managed. People want to be supported, helped, loved, listened to, led and understood. I know that's what I want. And that's what I'm trying to do. Sometimes well, sometimes not.
Take care. Be good.
-kv
