Competent Manager, Helpless Employees
In the novel Today will be different from Maria Semple, there is a wonderful paragraph where the protagonist explains the nature of her relationship with her husband:
There’s a phenomenon I call the Helpless Traveler. If you’re traveling with someone who’s confident, organized and decisive you become the Helpless Traveler: “Are we there yet?” “My bags are too heavy.” “My feet are getting blisters.” “This isn’t what I ordered.” We’ve all been that person. But if the person you’re traveling with is helpless, then you become the one able to decipher train schedules, spend five hours walking on marble museum floors without complaint, order fearlessly from foreign menus, and haggle with crooked cabdrivers. Every person has it in him to be either the Competent Traveler or the Helpless Traveler. Because Joe is so clearheaded and sharp, I’ve been able to go through life as the Helpless Traveler. Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a good thing.
I loved that paragraph and the comparison because I too have been the Competent or Helpless Traveler many times, when traveling and in many other contexts as well.
It made me think about management and how easy it is as a manager to get into the Competent Traveller role, dictating to the members of your team how to go about any and all things.
I have the good fortune at CARTO of working with a team that knows more about everything than I do (and I’m not being coy — this is true!), so my opportunities to dictate stuff are few and far between. But even with a highly specialised team, I still fall in that trap sometimes. And I see this happening a lot to others as well and at all levels of management.
In the spirit of getting things done, in the name of achievement, in trying to ensure a particular outcome or in trying to get there faster, it is very easy to become the dictator.
And sometimes it might be necessary and it might work for a time, but it is not sustainable. Here’s, in my experience, why:
Passivity
If you consistently tell people what to do and how, you are essentially training your team to wait for your instructions. And that’s what they’ll do. “Let’s wait and see what he says…” will become their modus operandi. They will essentially become those Helpless Travelers, always waiting for you to sort out the tickets for them and to tell them what train to get on, instead of starting to work on problems and coming up with potentially exciting alternatives; because, why would they if in the end is going to be what you say no matter what?
Demotivation
Everyone has their own ideas and opinions and, even if you are the expert and the person you are managing recognises you as so, there will come a time when their own experience and ideas don’t match yours; if they can never see their own ideas realised, eventually they will want to go somewhere where they’ll let them.
Unaccountability
Not their fault, right? If things go wrong but they have limited themselves to following your orders to the letter, they won’t feel responsible if the initiative fails or things turn out badly.
Mediocrity
No matter how much you know about a given subject or how sure you are about the way forward, it is impossible to know how your team would fare on their own unless you let them.
And in not letting them, you will be limiting yourself (and your company) to the solutions you are able to conjure up on your own. You will be missing out on the combined creativity locked-up within the brains of your team members. Their likely different, potentially surprising and maybe better approach to tackling whatever problems you are trying to solve will never see the light of day.
None of the above means that you need to abdicate your responsibilities and let your team do whatever they want. Your expertise is probably essential and it should not be wasted! On the contrary, you have to leverage it; but it is probably better to use it to guide people, not to drag them around; to illustrate important points and ask difficult questions, not to work through the whole problem; you should use it to try to edit their work and provide feedback to make sure it is all that it can be, rather than trying to lay it all out for them.
Most importantly, use your expertise to explain why certain things are important, why you are asking them to do one particular thing or other, why it is important for the company to go in a certain direction.
Because if you succeed in conveying the why of things, their ideas should start matching yours, or at least, aligning perfectly with yours; and that’s when things start to flow, when people feel free and encouraged to suggest ideas, when projects seem to breeze without needing constant oversight and when the outcome of their work is as good or better than you expect.
And if you are not an expert on the subject? Well, all the more reason to listen and let them show the way…
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
Is the old quote attributed to General Patton, that although somewhat abused, perfectly captures this.
But let’s be honest too: all of this is easier said than done. Unfortunately one doesn’t turn into General Patton overnight, inspiring action through eloquently described visions of product and company, gaining respect through flawless and steady-handed leadership; and one often doesn’t have (well, never really) teams of military trained operatives to carry out one’s orders, but rather diverse members with wildly different seniority, background and skills.
So knowing what to delegate and how much and when and to whom is a key part of getting all of this right¹. People have different skills, seniority and motivations and you can’t delegate equally with each of them.
Just like you wouldn’t tell your 7 year old daughter “We need to get to Brugge, kid: go sort it out for the whole family!” you probably shouldn’t ask your newly hired junior developer to rethink your whole infrastructure so that you can better scale horizontally. Mind you, they might figure it out! But it could be you find your way in Brugge via Sidney, or that you find a big Google Cloud bill in your inbox.
However, I do ask my 7 year old to help us figure out what our boarding gate is when at the airport; and to guide the whole family there. Just like anybody else she loves a challenge, and I encourage her to be the Competent Traveller even though it would be much easier to have her follow me. It works wonders, just like it does at work.
- This post started as a humongous one that also included practical tips as to how and when to delegate, but I decided to split it in two. Those practical tips on delegation are coming in my next post. Follow me here or on twitter if you are interested in reading that one too.
