Keyword: micro manager

“Sam”

I was involved in a small business for a time.  It wasn’t tiny, with $4+m in revenues and about 30 employees, but it was small in that it was started by a young entrepreneur and still had plenty of headroom for growth.  The young leader was full of passion for the business but had a lot to learn about leading a team.  It was fun (for a while) to watch and help this company and its leader grow.

The young owner, who I’ll call Sam, had never worked for anyone but himself, having literally started the business in his parents’ garage and grown it from there.  As such, he hadn’t experienced what it felt like to be lead by someone he respected, to be mentored and supported, or to win as a member of a team.  He also didn’t know what it feels like to have a jerk, an egotist, and/or a hypocrite for a boss.

Oh, he read a lot, and took great pride in the undergraduate business degree he had earned at the local college, so he thought he knew a lot about running a business.  But having never really seen or felt good leadership put him at a real disadvantage.  And reading the latest hot business book has sent more than a few inexperienced managers down a dark alley.  Sam was no exception.

One of Sam’s worst problems was the “do as I say, not as I do” syndrome.  It’s not uncommon for young people thrust into leadership roles to have this problem, and it certainly is an issue for people without much management experience.  And Sam had it bad.

You see, Sam was a stickler for the clock.  People were supposed to be there from 8:00 to 5:00, and they had better be there.  He instituted grave penalties for being as little as five minutes late without an “excused absence”.  Employees were regularly singled out for punishment even though they had simply been at the mercy of Seattle’s notoriously unpredictable traffic.  One employee even quit after several such episodes because he just couldn’t justify to his family tacking on 20 minutes of cushion to his 90-minute (one way) commute, just to avoid the silly penalties and threat of termination.

Now, I’m all for good and consistent work rules.  And I think that letting some people get away with always coming in late is more than a little unfair, to both the organization and their co-workers.  But the problem here was not with the rule, it was with Sam himself.

The issue is that Sam showed up whenever he wanted to.  Rarely in before 9:00, and not infrequently wandering in at about 10:30, Sam just couldn’t be bothered with setting an example.  He would swoop in long after everyone had been toiling for hours, demand to know when so-and-so showed up, and then fume over “what to do about that guy”.  He never saw the irony in that, even when it was pointed out.  And if he did, he was quick to remind you “who owned the place”, as if that somehow changed things.

Worse however was his end-of-day behavior.  Sam was on a tight leash at home, with strict orders to be there by 5:30.  Perhaps it was revenge for years of growing a business, with its late nights and weekends, or perhaps it was just the newborn at home.  I don’t know the cause.  But he was out of there like a shot before 5:00, even though the business was open until at least 6:00, and many stayed well into the night to catch up.  Woe be the soul who stood in his way before 5:00, as wild horses couldn’t keep Sam in the office late, important company-wide projects notwithstanding.

And to take make it even worse, Sam was a micro-manager.  He saw to it that everything in the company was under his thumb.  So on the ride home, he would call each and every sales person on their cell phone and quiz them about the day’s activities, and to pressure them to do better. “How’s it going out there?” he would ask.  And then poke and prod into every minute detail of the person’s day — until Sam rolled up into his driveway and the conversation would abruptly end.

Everyone dreaded these calls.  Soon they got to be called the “HIGOT” (pronounced hig-gut) calls, for “how’s it going out there”.  It was used as a noun, as in “did you get the higot today?” and “oh, my word, my higot was horrible!”.  It became the talk of the company.

The irony of the higot was completely lost on Sam.  That he would call and micro-manage people who were still hard at work while he was on his way home to his family rubbed people raw.  It was made even worse by his insistence that certain things “get done before I get in there in the morning”, since everyone knew they would be in long before he was (whenever that would be).  And he repeatedly went over the top by promising to stay late or show up on the weekend to work on some critical project, only to fail to show with no warning whatsoever.

The lesson I take from the higot is not that the leader has to be the first in and last out (although that doesn’t hurt), and it’s not even that you shouldn’t micro-manage (although you really shouldn’t).

The lesson is that everything you do as a leader sends a message.  It’s far less about what you say than it is about what you do.  If you want people to treat time as important, you should treat it as important too.  If you want people to behave with integrity, you need to model that behavior.  And if you want peoples’ respect, you have to earn it by what you do, not by what you say.

I’ll have a lot more on this aspect of leadership, but for the time being, simply remember it’s a great deal better to ask how it’s going when you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the team.

The Scene of the Crime

One of the things I hear so often from leaders I’ve worked with is how quickly a casual comment of theirs got blown out of proportion.  It’s almost as if the simple, off-hand remark they made a couple of months ago grew legs and got a life of its own.

They discover someone working on something unexpected and ask “why the heck are you doing that?”  And the junior manager will say “Because you told us to.  Remember back in the bathroom at the conference last May when you said you wished someone would tackle that problem?  Well I built a team of 30 and we’ve been working on it ever since.”

In stunned horror they suddenly realize that a tiny offhand comment became a project.  They can’t be wildly upset, after all, it took a very proactive manager to get wind of a problem and work so hard to resolve it.  But they can’t understand how anyone would interpret that simple, casual remark as a directive.

There are two kinds of common overreactions to this problem: 1) the leader never speaks without written notes ever again, or 2) they implement ridiculous controls on the organization so that it never happens again.  As in most things, however, the best result is somewhere in the middle.  After all, you can’t become the kind of stiff mannequin who never utters a casual comment ever again, that just stifles the whole organization.  And you certainly don’t want to build a culture where everyone is in fear of acting in a proactive way.  That’s the exact opposite of the organization you need to be working toward.

I recommend that you never overreact when you discover these kinds of rogue, skunk-works projects that you inadvertently kicked off.  Do not chastise anyone, especially not in public for this.  People absolutely need to feel empowered to take on organizational issues on their own.  You certainly don’t want to stifle this kind of proactive creativity.  If you must stop the project, pull the manager aside later and quietly explain that, while it may be an issue for the organization, it certainly isn’t a priority right now, and you definitely didn’t mean for them to go off and work on it.  You need to apologize for misleading them (I know you didn’t , but they think you did), and you need to handle the situation with delicacy, and perhaps a little humor.

At the other end of the spectrum, please, please, don’t put in draconian controls to require every tiny little project in the organization to meet with your approval.  This kind of micro-management kills organizations.  Each level of an organization needs to feel like it can work to solve the important issues that fall in its realm.  Putting up hurdles and passing judgment on everything anyone does just makes life miserable for everyone, including you.

More important and more effective than this level of micro-management is a clearly stated vision for the organization.  This vision includes organizational priorities that are so well known as to be second nature to all, including that junior manager in the washroom.  With things that clear and obvious, they will recognize the casual remark as just that, a passing fancy that was never intended to initiate any serious effort or action.

I’ve seen this happen so often, it is easily one of the most common issues for leaders to face, especially new leaders.  I’ll discuss more of this later, but it is extremely common for new leaders to not understand all the power that comes with their position.  Unspoken and unwanted reverence for their every word is just one side effect that new leaders often never knew was coming with the job.

As the old saying goes: be careful what you wish for, you may actually get it.

Boyd Coddington

It’s my guilty pleasure that some reality TV shows draw me like a moth to a flame.  One of my favorites is Discovery Channel’s “American Hot Rod”.  The show ostensibly chronicles Boyd Coddington and his team while they build world-class custom cars.  For anyone who knows much about cars (and I speak as a reformed addict), Boyd’s name is well known.  He was one of the originators of the over-the-top custom car back in the late seventies, and is an icon in the field.  But you don’t have to even care about cars to gain huge insights into team building and management from this show.

I’m sure the creators of the show (including the reknowned Thom Beers who discovered Jesse James) went into it expecting simply a spin off from the world of custom motorcycles that made them, Jesse, Monster Garage, and other shows like it huge hits.  These shows are among the most profitable for DSC.

But they got much more than they bargained for with American Hot Rod.  Boyd and crew are perhaps the most disfunctional team since the Bundys of “Married with Children”.  The show features such teambuilding highlights as:

• A CEO (Boyd) who is gifted, revered, an industry icon, and a teddy bear, but who also micro-manages, sets ridiculous schedules with no input from below, ignores criticism, changes his mind depending on who he last spoke to, won’t admit when he’s wrong, and thinks everyone with a differing opinion “has a problem”.
• A line manager (Duane) who is a worse micro-manager, has little patience for the challenge of managing his team, treats everyone like dirt, curses like a sailor, blames everyone but himself for the problems, and lets Boyd walk all over him.
• Projects that routinely are underscheduled by half, causing the team to have to work 18 hour days seven days a week on a routine basis.
• Line employee turnover that is terrible, with the team going from 20 to 5 in the most recent episodes — with people leaving for lousy reasons, and leaving to no other job (a clear sign of major cultural issues).
• A business model that clearly is bankrupt — the only new customers are Boyd’s old friends, and the shop is always half-full.

I watch on a weekly basis as these factors collide in fantastic displays.  Of course, they always finish the car, and of course the team always is smiling on conclusion, but the show couldn’t be a better teambuilding course without resorting to PowerPoint slides.  I find myself pausing the Tivo about every five minutes: “hmmm, let’s see, can I think of five better ways to have handled that?”  Usually the answer is “yes.”

I watched an episode from a week or two ago last night, and I caught myself screaming at the TV.  The team lost two members, one who actually called Boyd and Duane on their ridiculous behavior, and another long-time, well-respected member left “to freelance”.  Boyd’s response to the former was “he really must have some problems” and to the latter it was “well, he had made up his mind”.  And to top it off, Boyd had to shut down his wheel business due to poor sales.  I was in pain, as I always am when I watch teams disintegrate due to lousy managment.  I wanted to call him up and offer my services for free…  but I guess I’ll wait for him to find me.

Anyway, if you are looking for a guilty pleasure, and some killer lessons on how NOT to run a team, catch Discovery Channel’s “American Hot Rod”.