How to Stop Micromanaging and Rise to Leadership
| 17 | Jul |
| 2013 |
As a leader, do you find yourself micromanaging employees?
In the debut of our Change
Agent interview series, Christine Comaford, author of SmartTribes: How
Teams Become Brilliant Together, described a client with exactly that
problem:
Just yesterday, I was coaching a C-level executive
who keeps doing tactical work, who keeps getting pulled into the weeds, as
opposed to into the glorious cool strategy stuff, because he gets so much
emotional food, if you will, from people saying, “Oh thank you for
rescuing me.” He feels safe doing tactics as opposed to strategy. He has forged
this belief that it’s safer and more comfortable to do tactics even though it’s
draining and depressing.
As a result, that executive found himself running a company full of
order-takers, when what he needed was more leaders and employees that are
intrinsically motivated to find and follow through on the very best solutions.
Christine offered a recipe to turn things around. Spoiler alert: First,
you have to stop giving orders.
Intrinsic motivation comes from inquiry. So here’s
your recpe: five inquiries per advocacy. Advocacy is giving an order and inquiry
is asking a question. So “George” comes to you and says, “Hey Keith, how should
I process this order?” And you say, “Well, gosh, you know, what would you do?
Okay, what else? Who should we loop in? What could go right? What could go
wrong?”
I find if you ask that person five questions,
you’ll probably have to do that three times. They’ll come to you another time,
you’ll take them through five questions, [and then] they come to you another
time. It’s a magic number. After three inquiry sessions, they’re then going to
get it; they’re going to start to forge a new pathway, and they’re going to go,
“Wow, whenever I go and ask Keith for orders, he actually asks me what I
would do.” ... He’ll come to you for one or two more validation sessions – then
he’s off and running. He’s owning it. This is how we get leaders five to
15 more hours per week, because we get them out of the order-giving
business.
So is your default advocacy or inquiry?
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