The Paradox of Micromanagement

Associates who struggle and fail to fit into an organization’s culture and strategic system will often complain that they were micromanaged and not allowed to do their jobs.

Having found myself more than occasionally on the receiving end of that parting shot, I made it a point, with the objectivity of organizational psychologists, to learn more.

Was it true or an excuse, and why was it was perceived that way?

Over the years I perpetually honed my management style as well as the cultures of the organizations I managed.

We had always hired based on various characteristics including as much technical know-how as we could afford.  But many people we hired failed to understand that technical know-how is only a start of being a good employee.

It take time to develop alignment and paradoxically, often what feels like micromanagement is actually not being managed and coached closely enough.

This is especially true in small, high-performance, strategically aligned entrepreneurial enterprises such as the community destination marketing organizations I led.

People in these settings must not only work independently but at the same time synchronizing with others within a culture and strategic direction as though they were all one.

There is little margin for error so whenever possible mistakes and learning best take place within the organization.  By that I mean inside the four walls…not out in the community or with visitors.

Reputation management is crucial to sustaining credibility and relevance with external audiences, but far too many organizations either seem to play fast and loose or redirect their energies into looking good rather than doing or being good.

To paraphrase an old law school meme, more than technical understanding, success takes good judgment which comes from experience which in turn comes from bad judgment.

In other words, learning from failure.

In a classic 2011 article in Harvard Business Review, organization behavior researcher Dr. Amy Edmundson broke failure down into a spectrum.

At the blameworthy end were failures due to deviance, inattention and lack of ability while failures due to uncertainty about the future, hypothesis testing and exploratory testing fall at the praiseworthy end.

Process inadequacy and task challenge fell in the middle.

Unfortunately, people quick to complain about “micromanagement” are often still on a steep learning curve and/or don’t see failure and coaching as a pivotal part of learning.

Worse, they don’t take responsibility for their failures.

Researchers such as Dr. Carol Dweck have found that the ability to view failure as just a part of learning is a mindset gleaned by the third grade.

Regrettably, many people come into the workforce with a fixed mentality, resistant to not only critical thinking and teaching, but going so far as to view questions as criticism.

They contribute to the 51% of the workforce who are “not engaged” in their work (just putting in time,) according to Gallup, as well a fair proportion of the 18% who are “actively disengaged” and working to undermine workplace.

Last year, researchers at Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard found that when we take personal ownership of our failures we are much more likely to learn from them and work harder.

Last January, in a speech to the students there, the president of Brigham Young University argued that any quest for perfection should place the emphasis more on “quest” than on perfection.

The ability to learn from mistakes and failure as well as soak up feedback and make adjustments are propensities similar to character, all of which are best inculcated between birth and the age of 8.

Non-cognitive factors, such as perseverance, motivation and grit are tough to teach or learn in school, let alone the workplace.

This is true even when reading and applying science in books such as John Medina’s Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School.

Hint: men learn best when given the gist, women want details.

As with so many issues such as poverty and academic achievement, things such as this get gridlocked in the “chicken and egg” divide between those who argue that it is an issue of capacity and those who view it as individual responsibility.

In my experience, the solutions are both/and with far to little emphasis in society, it seems, on the latter.

Corruption Rarely Begins As Corruption And Other Lessons

I have a friend who just completed his 24 months as a resident of TROSA in Durham, a best practice treatment center for substance abuse.

Now he is a post grad for a month or two before he walks the stage in their next quarterly graduation ceremony.  As is true for many graduates, the program has had a profound impact on the life of this individual.

I’ve known about TROSA and been friends with its founder from its inception, but I’ve observed even more about why the program has been so successful as I have participated in some events over the past two years.

It takes two years, not just to kick bad habits, but to drill down to the triggers behind them, and most of all, to inculcate values and coping mechanisms including not just work ethic but how to work with others.

These include techniques for conflict resolution and emotional control.  One that is particularly important in the program is zero tolerance for failing to disclose something that is awry, even if you weren’t involved, even if was for a good reason.

TROSA understands that corruption rarely begins as corruption.

It may even be a means to a good end as United Airlines executives recently learned the hard way.

As Dr. Dan Ariely who also calls Durham home, along with his colleagues including Harvard’s Dr. Francesca Gino have shown, “simply seeing another person cheat can lead us to cheat, even if we care about being honest.”

TROSA understands that even omission of acknowledgment is contagious and leads to a slippery slope.

The organization is famous for its entrepreneurial approach.  It’s is too bad one of them isn’t offering workforce and leadership training to businesses and agencies on accountability and the importance of speaking up.

But as Dr. Gino notes in a Harvard Business Review post this week, “Behavior can be contagious even when it’s simply described in a story.”

Stories of people, especially low-level employees, who uphold organizational values is a particularly effective means of “onboarding” new hires especially when it comes to orientations regarding ethics.

In my former life, I saw otherwise good people in each of the communities I represented who always seemed to be dogged by stories of corruption.

What they had in common was the way they made decisions, usually based on “who was asking” for something rather than a strategy of fairness and consistency.

I never felt this shadow on their reputation was deserved but the behaviors that brought it about often made it difficult to work with them as strategic partners because they were always asking me to subtly cross the line.

They never saw themselves that way.

But really, none of us do.

As Dr. Gino wrote in here excellent book entitled, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, we all have “a rose-colored view of who we are and what we do, and we aim to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image as capable, competent, helpful, and honest individuals.”

The book deals with forces from within, forces from our relationships and forces from the outside, “factors that characterize the context in which we operate and make decisions.

It’s a good book, as is Ariely’s entitled, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

I always found myself considered a pariah by the “who’s asking” types who would in each of the communities I represented, ultimately make it their objective to recruit as many others around me to their way of thinking, hoping that the isolation would make me give in, or at the very least get me fired.

While holding firm to strategic decision-making about what was best for these communities, I always made doubly certain that our organization gave them every service we were capable of giving while remaining authentic.

But I also owe becoming a better and better leader over the years to these people.  Just because they were wrong doesn’t make them stupid or wrong about everything.

I became the CEO of a destination marketing organization at a very young age, twenty-six, so until the day I retired I viewed myself as a work in progress.

Trying to be rigidly authentic or true to yourself can, if you are not careful, also keep you from evolving.

This all made more sense to me looking back as I read an article a few months ago by Dr. Herminia Ibarra, formerly of Harvard, now professor of organizational behavior at Instead, The Business School for the World, entitled The Authenticity Paradox.

The reputation I earned over four decades was all about change.  I may have led three DMOs but they literally evolved weekly - if not daily - so in essence I led about 1,700 different organizations.

My personal “authenticity paradox” was learning that building consensus for ideas and values among stakeholders in a community can feel, well, more than a bit slimy and political but it can still be data-driven and strategic.

During my career I was intrigued when I was frequently credited with grit, resilience and perseverance so when I come across research into those traits, I try to read carefully.

Based on recent research at The Ohio State University, grit and perseverance in the face of repeated obstacles and even failure arise when an individual is able to generalize from successful past success while still learning from failures.

People who can learn to do this stand out from those who have the appearance of grit but are betrayed by perpetually needing to self aggrandize, making them particularly vulnerable to “who’s asking” decision makers.

The latter may have learned grit but their perseverance masks an otherwise negative self-image, thus the self aggrandizement.

Researchers have found that losing is actually good for us.  People who self aggrandize are put off or threatened by participating in “post mortems” after a projects, something which I adapted from EST training or a Ken Blanchard seminar in the early 1980s.

During post mortems, some people literally can’t or won’t shift gears from “what worked” to “what didn’t work,” no matter how safe and blameless you make them.

Often this is because they have issues with accountability or accepting responsibility but it can also be because they have never learned the values of introspection and curiosity which research by the authors of The Innovator’s DNA found are indicative of a rare blend of humility and confidence.

Possibly this is due to the stories they were told as children, which in the words of Seth Godin, “matter far more than we imagine.”

Values imprint by observation or patterning from birth to age 7, then from modeling or identification until age 13, including making our own value decisions, then from socialization with peers until we’re age 20.

People who can’t admit, let alone learn from failure or even admit “what didn’t work” in an otherwise successful transaction were probably told stories along the way that led them to believe that success came from fixed states, making them vulnerable to “who’s asking.”

Learning from failure and even success, on the other hand, are investments in continuing and never ending improvement rather than chalking it up to fixed states.

The difference is between looking good and actually being good, the essence of authenticity.

These are things TROSA understands – teaches and applies – so beautifully.

New values can be learned after the age of 20 but it is very hard and usually occurs with a significant emotional crisis such as facing up to addiction.

Design Thinking As A Means of Staying Relevant

Some people, when they read a recent post that “design” would be a prominent competency, even for CEOs, for community marketing organizations of the future mistook my comment to mean “graphic” design.

Maybe this is some of my former peers have still not developed in-house capacity for that aspect, even though leading-edge DMOs did  three or four decades ago, not only to be more efficient but to keep better control of the graphical representation of their community’s brand.

But I was actually referring to process design or the capacity to design things like systems, project management, processes, new product launches as well as mothballing those that are obsolete.

This way of viewing design includes the ability to morph or scale organization design, business models and even things such as strategy and especially customer service.

Going forward what is called “design thinking” will be more and more essential to preserving and leveraging a community’s unique sense of place, the primary role of a DMO.

My forecast really wasn’t a reach for anyone keeping up with best practices or readers of excellent books such as Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

It was penned just as I retired nearly six years ago by former Rotman Dean Tim Brown, the founder of IDEO who blogs at Design Thinking.

But Brown reinforces my belief that you “see into the future by looking back” when he reminds us that design thinking dates at least to the early 1800s when Isambard Kingdom Brunel applied design thinking to transportation systems.

Community marketing is about differentiation at its strategic core and according to Brown, design thinking is essentially about developing divergent approaches to solving problems.

Many organizations often fail because of poor leadership, especially when run by volunteers where leadership positions are passed from one member to another without regard for engagement or leadership ability.

But instead of addressing the lack of engaged leadership, as they lose steam these organizations often but futilely try to fuse with an earlier but obsolete organization.

Rather than closely examine intrinsic factors such as leadership strength or morphing design to address obvious changes in the ecosystem in which they operate, they superficially restructure hoping that fusing two organizations will restoke one while bringing the other back to life.

This doesn’t solve the problem, it instead merely leads to a bigger organization lacking leadership and usually the obsolete organization sinks the still relevant one too and a new organization is formed.

It is how we end up with scores of organizations on life support and draining resources away from those that are relevant.

Examination of this extrinsic vs. intrinsic approach suggests this approach is inevitably doomed to failure.  It definitely not “change by design.”

Organizations, especially when volunteer-driven, just aren’t very good at introspection or design thinking, and nowhere is that truer than when it comes to governing boards, leaving them vulnerable to regressive but well meaning “humpty-dumpty” thinkers.

The annual Stanford survey of nonprofit boards of directors shows that many are in desperate need of redesign, even when executive led.

Too often members are appointed without ensuring they have or are willing to learn critical skills such as leadership.  Even leading an organization of their own is no guarantee that an appointee will be able to lead a volunteer board.

In the current survey, over a quarter say their fellow board members lacked a strong understanding of the organization’s mission and strategy.

A third of the respondents were not satisfied with the board’s ability to evaluate the organization’s performance and over a third said the boards to which they belong never evaluate the board’s effectiveness.

Nearly 7-in-10 organizations have no leadership succession plan let alone require qualifications for leaders and nearly 60% had no benchmarks to measure performance to a peer group of similar organizations.

Only 15% believe their boards stay on top of strategy more than once annually and 41% only do this most essential board role every two years or less.

Half do not believe their fellow board members are very engaged making those that have a “you’re next” form of rotating leadership especially vulnerable to decline.

Nearly 7-in-10 say their boards have faced one or more serious governance-related problems in the past 10 years and 16% say they have extreme difficulty attracting qualified new board members.

The results are worse for those that are volunteer-driven and even more dismal when budgets are around $500,000 give or take.

Equivalent to a Management MBA

I have a good friend who is weeks away from successfully matriculating a two-year residential substance abuse treatment program in Durham, North Carolina.  The program is called TROSA, which stands for Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers.

As an aside, he will have also learned the equivalent of an MBA when it comes to managing people, every type imaginable in the workforce.

In addition to hours of therapy, TROSA teaches residents, who are willing, everything one needs to know to succeed in the workplace including how to work, how to adapt to organizational culture, how to resolve conflict, and how to be accountable.

But the organization also has an eye for identifying and nurturing people who have a talent for managing other people.

It isn’t based on tenure or non-managerial success in one of the many enterprises it uses to help fund the program and instill values.  They have learned what Gallup researchers have proven.

Those elements, while important overall, only count for so much when developing managers.

Much more predictive of management success, according to Gallup’s research is talent.

It is the natural capacity one-in-ten people have for management, which they have found enables people to “learn a role faster” and “adapt to variance in a role more quickly” than those without it.

Another two-in-ten have what they call “functioning managerial talent.”

Tenure and success as an individual contributor, which is how most are promoted to management, don’t lend themselves to being in a management role.

As TROSA has learned as well, talent to become a manager has five dimensions as outlined in Gallup’s State of the American Manager Report:

Motivator – they perpetually challenge themselves and their teams to improve and perform.

Assertiveness – they overcome challenges, adversities and resistance.

Accountability – they ultimately assume responsibility for their teams’ success and create the structure and processes to help deliver on expectations.

Relationships – they build a positive, engaging work environment and shield it from infiltrators who aren’t engaged.

Decision-Making - They solve complex issues and problems inherent to the role of thinking ahead, planning for contingencies, balancing competing interests and taking an analytical approach.

Gallup quantifies the percentage of the American workforce that is engaged or just putting in time or actually working to undermine others or the organization.

But it also surveys to determine the proportion of managers who fall in those categories.

Managers overall are only slightly more prone to be engaged, which contributes, along with personal traits, to employees who are not engaged.

But the report finds that high-talent managers are twice as likely to be engaged as those with limited talent and engagement in a workforce, not just putting in time, is closely linked to a slew of positive business outcomes.

Engaged employees thrive under high-talent managers who are open and approachable, who manage performance continually rather than just with performance reviews, who help them  set priorities and goals and who focus on strengths.

One of the most corrosive things an organization can do is to promote managers with limited talent for it and then tolerate those who are not engaged or even actively disengaged themselves.

Gallup has found that managers who work for highly engaged leaders are 39% more likely to be engaged themselves.  Employees who work for engaged managers are 59% more likely to also be engaged.

One of the cruel hoaxes perpetrated on people in most careers or organizations is to make being a manager a stepping stone from tenure or being a good individual contributor.

The former should never be a consideration and the latter is where many people can continue to thrive and showcase their talents in other areas.

Subjecting them to managers who lack talent in the five dimensions Gallup research has identified is negligent.  Leaving them trapped once a mistaken promotion has been discovered is near criminal.

I was rated highly as a leader, but guilty of both.