Are Managers Killing Team Ownership?
“Why do my people lack initiative?” a manager once asked me.
“You killed it.” I replied.
“Not because the team was lazy. Not because they lacked training. Not necessarily because they were unmotivated.”
“You were micromanaging them.” I added.
When leaders constantly over-direct, scrutinize every detail, provide all the answers and require approval for decisions that should sit lower in the organization, something happens gradually:
People stop thinking for themselves. They wait to be told what to do and they become reluctant to make decisions independently. Ultimately staff avoid taking risks. What this does, organizations enter a state of stagnation. Employees default to the safest possible choices to avoid blame.
Eventually, accountability becomes blurred because everyone is waiting for someone else to approve the next step. Opportunities are missed and if not checked, faster and bolder competitors quickly outpace your business.
Let me share a personal story from many years ago.
I was part of a team working on a major project that required collaboration across several functions. IT was responsible for system configuration. Communications was involved in client engagement, Marketing involved in getting the branding right and Customer Service was responsible for seamlessly aligning the back-end processes. Ultimately, the different teams reported to the Country Manager.
What surprised and later frustrated me was the level of operational involvement from Country Manager.
The Country Manager would attend all the operational meetings between the cross-functional teams and want to see the exact SMS messages going to customers, including the grammar and all manner of small nitty-gritty. We would discuss where on the website the information would be placed. What image was being used, Where was it appearing? How many messages each customer would receive, and so forth. For a strategic leader, I found this rather odd.
I thought to myself, I think this is a sensitive project, hence the top management involvement. A few months later, came the end-of-year loyalty gifts. Annually, we honored our loyal customers and key stakeholders with special gifts. The team had identified the stakeholders, proposed the gifts and worked within the prior approved loyalty budget.
But the country manager wanted to see everything. The actual gifts. The packaging. Who was receiving what. The cost of each item. The supplier. Even the Christmas messaging.
There were multiple rounds of back-and-forth to get everything exactly the way he wanted it. Nothing seemed to get closed.
And there was another problem: the people making the decisions did not necessarily know all the stakeholders as well as the team working directly with them.
In the long run, approvals for final concept required as many as eight different signatures.
At the time, as a relatively junior person, I remember thinking:
Is this really accountability, or are we simply creating more people to sign off in case something goes wrong? Covering all our bases.
Now years later, I realise when eight people sign a document for a relatively simple concept it creates the appearance of shared accountability while making individual accountability less clear.
The biggest cost, however, was not the number of signatures. It was time lost.
The project kick off took longer than necessary because decisions that could have been made by the people closest to the work kept moving upwards. Some days, the Country Manager was not in the office or was otherwise occupied, so the team simply waited.
And while management was busy examining the details, the bigger picture was getting lost. The million dollar question to ask then was?
Is my input even required at this stage?
What are the risks if I stay quiet and only do as told? What are the risks?
By the time the project was finally launched, we had lost valuable time and had to rush the execution.
That experience taught me something about micromanagement. Micromanagement does not only frustrate employees. It changes how people behave.
When people know that every decision will be questioned, they become less willing to make decisions. When every idea requires approval, people stop bringing ideas.
When leaders always have the answer, employees stop developing their own judgement.
When responsibility is pushed upwards, accountability eventually follows.
And perhaps most damaging of all, micromanagement creates the very lack of initiative that leaders later complain about.
A manager says, “My team doesn’t take ownership.”
But the team may have learned, over time:
“Don’t take responsibility. Someone senior will change it anyway.”
This does not mean leaders should become hands-off. Good leadership still requires oversight, quality control, clear standards and accountability.
The difference is knowing what to control and what to delegate.
Senior leaders should be spending more time on direction, priorities, risk, resources and outcomes and less time deciding the font, the wording of an SMS, the packaging of a gift or every operational step in between.
The irony is that sometimes the initiative we want from our people is the initiative our management style has trained out of them.
The leadership lesson:
Delegate the outcome NOT the process.
If your team constantly waits for instructions, before concluding that they lack initiative, ask yourself:
Have I created an environment where they are actually allowed to use it?
Reflection: What are you controlling today that your team should be trusted to own?
