Episode #264: Controlling Without Micromanaging

Getting the balance right

Recently I read an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, titled The Art of Balancing Autonomy and Control, which outlines how to get the best results from the innovation activities your company undertakes. The moral of the story is, nose in, fingers out!

This led me to think more broadly about the concept of autonomy v control, in particular how it relates to optimizing both performance and employee satisfaction.

If you give your people too much autonomy, you risk wasting a lot of effort doing the wrong things… if you exert too much control, you fall into the trap of micromanaging, which introduces inefficiencies and demotivates your people in the process.

 I learned throughout my career that balancing autonomy and control isn’t just an esoteric discussion: understanding and executing the principle is a critical leadership imperative that will either enhance or degrade the results you achieve.

In this episode, I look at the fundamental trade-offs between autonomy and control; I share a little about my journey to increasing control, without becoming a micromanager; and I give some really practical tips for striking the right balance with each individual in your team.

Controlling Without Micromanaging

EPISODE #264 TRANSCRIPT

nose in, fingers out

Can you believe that, for the second week in a row, I'm going to mention The Sloan School of Management at MIT? This time, it's in the context of an article I read in The MIT Sloan Management Review. The article, titled The Art of Balancing Autonomy and Control, deals specifically with how to get the best results from innovation activities in your business.

It's definitely worth reading the article, but to summarize it in a single phrase, the moral of the story is: nose in, fingers out.

This led me to think more broadly about the concept of autonomy versus control, specifically in how it relates to optimizing both performance and employee satisfaction. Too much autonomy, and you risk wasting a lot of effort doing the wrong things… too much control and you can fall into the trap of micromanaging, introducing inefficiencies, and demotivating your people in the process.

I learned throughout my career that balancing autonomy and control isn't just an esoteric discussion. The ability to understand and execute on these principles is a critical leadership imperative that's either going to enhance or degrade the results you achieve. In fact, these principles go to the very heart of what makes people want to stretch to do their best work.

I'll begin today with a look at the fundamental trade-offs between autonomy and control; I'm then going to share a little bit about my journey in learning how to get this balance right; and I'll finish with some really practical guidance for how to give your people the right amount of autonomy, while still ensuring you stretch them to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

The MIT Findings

The MIT article I mentioned outlines the findings of the research, which will surprise none of us. Autonomy is essential to harness people's innovation and creativity. People need degrees of freedom, not just to enable their unconstrained thinking, but to get their buy-in to the process. This is the playing field for developing a culture of excellence over perfection.

I don't think there's much doubt about this at all. Not only is it intuitively obvious, but we've all had times in our lives and careers where we've experienced this firsthand. Equally, creativity can quickly devolve into nothing more than a fun and interesting talkfest if there's no imperative to turn it into something that's practically useful. In the business environment, pressure comes from management to convert the creativity into productivity.

Once again, no great surprise here–and fair enough, too. Unless this is the first time you've heard my voice, you will know my view that the primary purpose of leadership is to maximize value, so this ecosystem has to be tempered.

Let's say you're running hackathons to give your people freedom to solve the problems that they're closest to. You have to set expectations for pragmatic outcomes so that your people have realistic expectations to focus upon. Equally, you need to temper your own expectations (as a leader) as to what's a realistic outcome.

Any venture capitalist knows and accepts the numbers, which is why they take a portfolio approach to investing. Of 10 investments they know that, all things being equal, one or two will die an agonizing death; a few will tick along and stay alive; a couple will be zombie businesses, neither alive nor dead; and one or two are going to go off like a frog in a sock.

And, that's why they're there!

Knowing the numbers and conveying those expectations to your people is a great place to start. So, for example, have an idea of what percentage of R&D investments you expect to make it to commercialization. Provide the environment to enable people's creativity to be liberated. Give them guide rails and set your expectations for outcomes. Then, let them get on with it.

The Core concepts of autonomy and control

These are fairly simple, but implementing them is incredibly nuanced.

1. The first principle is that people need and love autonomy. And you want them to have autonomy. They will get better results. They're more likely to give their discretionary effort. Not to mention the fact that you’re paying them to deliver in the area of their expertise, and make any decisions that are relevant to their role.

2. The second principle is that without autonomy there can be no true accountability. People need to drive their own fate. You can't make someone accountable for an outcome and then stymie their autonomy. That will just make them cynical and disengaged, and you'll end up with a culture of fear and distrust, rather than creativity and performance.

3. Our third principle is all important. Just as is the case with innovation, in anything your people do, some level of control is absolutely essential. You need your people to apply themselves to the things that are genuinely going to create the most value for the team and the company. Letting them run off and do whatever the hell they want is most unlikely to get you the right outcomes--and measuring the outcomes is critical. Otherwise, there's no understanding of performance and there's no imperative to perform. Your team's going to become fat, dumb, and happy in no time at all.

How do you get the balance right as a leader?

I just want to talk a little bit about my journey to getting this balance right. I used to think I was so good at this! Over a bunch of years, I'd managed to develop a fairly unique style of leadership. I didn't micromanage my people at all. I was supportive and I was available. I was pretty clear on the outcomes I required, and I was convinced that I was getting the best out of every individual who reported to me.

I knew that setting up this culture was the key to driving individual and team performance, but I had a massive blind spot in how I managed individual autonomy. I simply didn't inspect outputs critically enough. I hadn't worked out how to implement the trust, but verify principle to make it foolproof.

With my great people, my approach worked brilliantly. They got on with it. I didn't get in their way. I helped them when they needed it, and I gave them consistent targeted feedback.

For my less capable people (all of whom talked a good game, incidentally), the results were unpredictable, to say the least.

A classic example was a project manager, who reported to me many years ago. He was managing a critical set of deliverables for the company. I used to see the reports each week and he would tell me that everything was on track. Boy, did he talk a good game:

• Every traffic light was green

• Every risk was managed

• And everything was going exactly to plan.

Except… it wasn't.

And my bullsh!t detector wasn't finely tuned enough to see it. When it came to the crunch point and the talk would no longer cover up the massive issues the project was having, he tried to talk his way out of it with a litany of semi-plausible excuses, thinking that this would be enough to save him.

But I was in no mood for it.

Unfortunately, it cost the company a huge amount of money, reputation, and lost opportunity. And, guess what? It was my fault.

That was one of the incidents that pushed me to look more critically at the signposts along the way. I went from a posture of, "Tell me how it's going," to, "Show me how it's going." I became much more diligent at making sure things were actually on track to the extent I was being told they were. I got really good at sniffing out issues before they became visible.

Hiring people is still an imprecise science. You're never going to get a 100% hit rate, so you’d better work out how to get the best from your less capable people as well, and you better get really good at working out which is which.

Everyone's going to take autonomy if you give it to them. Some will use it for good, and some will use it for evil, so get really good at inspecting outputs. I had to overcome my natural tendency to let people get on with it, and just hold them accountable for results. My distant early warning radar just needed to be set up better.

How to deliver results without micromanaging

As you might imagine, this is very nuanced!

The reason it’s so hard is because it's different for every individual. You have to apply your judgment to determine how much autonomy each person in your team can handle. How do you test them to work this out? That's the $64,000 question.

With some people, as you will have worked out already, you give them very little guidance and just let them go. You know they're going to come back to you if they have any problems or questions, and they turn up on or before the delivery date with the outcomes you expected, exactly as you might have imagined them.

Other people need a lot more support. You have to check in with them frequently and really drill into their progress whenever you get the opportunity. You have to ask much more specific and targeted questions about how they're going.

For a few people, you may have to implement what I call short interval control. You can't leave them alone for too long, because things tend to go south when they're left unattended. Now, you may wonder why you'd even keep someone like this on your team, and the answer is, “Well, you wouldn't if that was a long-term proposition”. This would only be a temporary situation for someone while they were getting up to speed in a new role.

These anecdotal differences are fairly obvious, but it's worth looking at them through the lens of Situational Leadership Theory (SLT). This model was first developed by Hersey and Blanchard over 50 years ago. Ken Blanchard is best known for his iconic book, The One Minute Manager.

According to the SLT model, you need to adapt your leadership style based on the capability and maturity of your followers. The four levels of maturity allow progressively greater degrees of freedom in how you lead them:

• For the least mature people, you have to adopt the directive style of telling: you're very prescriptive about what they need to do

• For those who are a little more mature, you support their performance through selling: you still provide some pretty clear direction, but at the same time you try to tap into their own individual motivation and capability by selling them on the value of the task

• The third level of maturity is participating: in this case you share some of the decision-making and problem-solving. People are quite autonomous, but you still keep a good handle on what's going on, and you can direct them as necessary.

• Finally, the ideal state is that you manage people by delegating: this is your ultimate objective and it's where you want to move everyone to eventually. This is where high performance begins.

I think this is a really good mental model to just think about how to factor in people's individual differences when you're choosing how much autonomy to give them.

So, how do you maintain control without slipping into micromanagement?

Let's have a look at the toughest part of this whole autonomy versus control question.

Once I worked out how to do this really well, I used to find it helpful to think in terms of the front-end, the in-progress, and the back-end phases.

The front end is all about setting people up the right way, and if you get this piece right, you're going to massively reduce the likelihood that you'll need to micromanage them down the track:

• Give your people clarity of objectives--this is something you continually test and reinforce on the way through, because you've always got to come back to test the basic objective: are you clear on what you're trying to achieve here? Remind people.

• Make sure that individual capability and resourcing are sufficient right from the get-go: that people have the training, the expertise, the environment, and the resources to deliver what you're asking them to.

• Then, it's all about setting expectations: expectations for quality, for speed, for the standard of work, and for the delivery itself.

• Most importantly in the setup phase is to have defined milestones. Where will the checkpoints be that enable us to interrogate progress and determine whether or not we're actually on track? This was second nature to me, fortunately, because of my background in project management.

So, let's assume you've done this the right way. The danger area for micromanagement is on the way through the process, when people are mid-task and you're trying to make sure that they're doing all the right things to be successful. But you can cross a line here very, very easily.

Assuming you've done the setup right, and you've got good milestones in place, that's going to help you out enormously. But the most important thing here on the way through is make sure you stay in touch. That was something I had to learn the hard way.

Look at any measures that give you confidence of progress. There’s a couple of keys here in your interactions, so that you're not a micromanager.

This is probably the most important four points you're going to get out of this episode, so please pay attention to this:

1. Don't give your people directions. Instead, ask them questions

2. Make sure those questions are about outcomes, not details and process. Interrogate the what rather than the how

3. Help your people to solve problems, don't solve their problems for them

4. Finally, look at results, not effort

You've got to demonstrate your flexibility as circumstances change, too. Don't be afraid to shift deadlines and other parameters as you learn more about the tasks. But equally, if you do need to adjust, it's important to know why the team didn't anticipate these shifts in advance.

You constantly need to be making a mental note: are you stretching this person too far, or not far enough?

The trick to getting all of this done properly is to stand back, monitor, assist, and support… without actually diving in and rolling the sleeves up yourself: nose in, fingers out! If you get this right, the back end is pretty easy. It's just about inspecting outputs to make sure they turn up the way you expect, so make sure the results are consistent with the original agreement you had for delivery.

You need to be comfortable, not just with the fact that something's being delivered, but how it's being delivered. Your goal is to achieve sustainable, repeatable performance. You don't want results to be one-off outcomes that rely on shortcuts, poor behavior, excessive intervention, or unsustainable workloads to get it done. It's got to be more predictable than that.

Critical final thoughts

Wrapping this all together, if you want to get the best results from people, they need to have a level of autonomy over what they do. That's what motivates them, and they'll be much happier and more productive that way. But it's your job to make sure they're applying themselves to the right things.

Equally, if you let go of control too much, you can end up in all sorts of trouble, and find it's too late to rectify the issues. So make sure you have enough touchpoints on the way through to satisfy yourself that things are genuinely on track. If you get blindsided, as I did a few times in the past, you've got no one to blame but yourself.

The constant quest to find the right balance between autonomy and control is something you need to pay attention to. People should be given the expectation of becoming more autonomous over time. Then, and only then, can you give them the accountability that really drives superior performance!