Trust Issues
Among the most common barriers to talent retention and the expansion of organizational bandwidth is the inability of CEOs and managers to defeat the micromanagement dragon. The dragon is the enemy of talent attraction and retention, great corporate culture, professional growth and innovation. Its fiery breath destroys confidence, trust and empowerment and it must be tamed! When the dragon strikes, causing leaders to fail to demonstrate confidence in the abilities of their teams, destructive trust issues are born.
Consider the example of Kim, the very high functioning, very high motor CEO of a small but very busy company. Kim was struggling with trust issues. She had been very successful throughout her career and had quickly risen through the corporate ranks by developing a reputation for delivering results.
As too many of her mentors had done before her, Kim had learned to use micromanagement as a tool for achieving the results she wanted as a manager. She did not use that tool discriminately based on competency, skill level, or seniority. Everyone that she supervised was micromanaged at some level. Ever present, Kim spent a lot of time with her team in this mode. As a leader, Kim saw herself as a caring although sometimes tough, results driven leader who wanted her employees to succeed as high achievers. She would never have considered herself a micromanager. However, feedback to us from every executive in her direct line of sight suggested a very different leader - someone who did not appear to trust them to execute in their highly responsible roles --independently of her direct and very real-time influence. To them, Kim did not believe in them or their teams, and was a micromanager of the highest order.
When polled, Kim’s direct reports complained that she did not provide them or their teams the space to innovate or creatively solve problems due to her highly prescriptive and intimate management style. Surprisingly, when informed of her team’s feedback, Kim did not immediately recoil or vigorously challenge her team’s assessment of her style. When asked why they might feel this way about her style, she confidently said “Because I know exactly what outcome I want, and I also have been around long enough to usually know exactly how best to deliver that outcome.” She continued, “If I were to leave it solely to others, it may not be executed as it should be, and I will become frustrated by that. The whole point is for things to be done right, right?” Our translation of Kim’s statement is this: “It may not be done as I would do it, therefore it’s not really the best outcome.” Does any of this sound familiar to you?
Insight into Kim’s own leadership journey offered a likely answer on why she employed this style of management. In working her way up the ladder over the years, she had already performed most of the functions of her executive team and possessed strong expertise or experience in almost every key area of the business – she did know her stuff. She also had extremely high standards relative to quality of work.
With this style, Kim tended to get the results that she was happy with, but in the process, managed to slowly smother the creativity, drive and confidence of more than a few of her talented team members – several of whom she herself had recruited to the company precisely because of their demonstrated, creativity, drive, and confidence. The quality of work life as defined by job satisfaction and sense of purpose was flatlining among Kim’s top leaders, and innovation stalled. Her highly qualified, and also highly compensated executives were in effect just waiting around for Kim to tell them not only what to deliver, by also exactly how to deliver it.
As frustrated executives complained, disengaged, or departed, the common message was that while they loved the company and its mission, they had come to believe that their CEO did not have confidence in their abilities or in their promise. This was the last thing Kim wanted because she did in reality, believe in her team. She was just yet to slay the micromanagement dragon. Her company’s board leadership had even begun to notice that Kim’s executives seemed to lack empowerment and became concerned, as they were impatiently imploring her to dedicate more of her attention to externally matters like analyzing new markets for growth, and to strengthening customer relationships.
As Kim spent more time processing some of the more direct feedback from her executives and from her board members, she began to recognize a familiar sentiment – one that she herself had felt and expressed over the years relative to those above her on the org chart.
Kim had actually become a victim of the micromanagement paradox, where she had actually become the micromanager that she had complained about throughout her own career. Her transformation into micromanager in chief had been so gradual however, that she did not recognize it in herself.
Kim now realized that while rightly driving for big results-based performance from her team, she was managing in a way that too often conflated The What, with The How. Take the company’s sales and marketing leadership team. For them, The What, as articulated by Kim, was the desired result, say a 15% increase in gross sales revenue for an underperforming product line. The How was the strategy that they would execute to achieve that goal. Instinctively, Kim would have exhaustively outlined both The What and The How for those executives responsible for the company’s sales and marketing. They would have effectively been reduced to executive drones, not using their smarts, experiences and creativity to map out the best path to success, but by following Kim’s paint by numbers model.
With this realization, what was Kim to do now? In order for free both herself and her team from this unhealthy management practice, she began slaying the micromanagement dragon by exercising four key management muscles:
1. Establishing Clear Expectations and Accountability. While never abandoning her high expectations on quality, which everyone on her team respected and shared, Kim worked more closely with them to remove any ambiguity on what success looked like -- in terms of both quality of process and quality of work. She also began checking and double checking for her team’s understanding of the objectives that she had established. For the big goals though, Kim also committed to developing them much more collaboratively. No more command and control.
2. Creating Space and Respecting Expertise and Intellect. Kim began giving her team the room to design and execute strategies, and to innovate. Both she and her team found this to be most productive when done iteratively. Kim, as do most CEOs and managers, has strong insights and counsel to share that should inform her team’s strategy. Her executives embraced this precious new empowerment granted by Kim, but were also savvy enough not develop their strategy in a vacuum. They sought her coaching and counsel, offering her a clear window into the development of their recommended strategy. So, when the strategy (The How) was ready for Kim’s final sign-off, she was far surprised, for she had contributed to it and shared both ownership and confidence in its chances to yield results.
3. Coaching and Teaching. Recognizing that all of her executives come to the job with varying levels of experience, ability and expertise, Kim still spends lots of time with them, but now it’s at a higher altitude. She does not leave them to fend for themselves on the development island. Time formally spent micromanaging or co-leading with executives is now committed to coaching or providing coaching resources in the areas that they have jointly identified as gaps - especially in those areas that naturally create anxiety for Kim as CEO when it comes to quality of process and quality of work.
4. Trusting and Respecting Expertise and Intellect. Kim is learning to trust that the team she has surrounded herself with, while not clones of herself, are capable of delivering results that she, her board members, investors, employees and customers would all be proud of. This is now the case, even when the strategies that her team designs, executes and draws results from, significantly differ from what her approach might have been.
Because Kim ultimately recognized and then faithfully committed to working on her trust issues, she and her leadership team are much more aligned today than at any point since she became CEO. Not surprisingly, in addition to obviously feeling more empowered and utilized, most of the company’s executives report feeling more energized, professionally challenged, respected and appreciated for their gifts. The seeds of innovation are now fertilized and sprouting in previously stagnant areas of the business, there is a new and exciting sense of what is possible company-wide, and Kim’s board is enjoying having more of her time and talent dedicated to mapping the future. Those are the type of results Kim and leaders like you can embrace!