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Micromanagement is the antithesis of autonomy. You can’t run an autonomous organization and be a micromanager. And yet attention to detail is critical to a leader’s success. Many emerging leaders find it difficult to differentiate between micromanagement and being detail-oriented.
Dee Hock, Visa’s founder/CEO, was a strong proponent of autonomous teams. It was a core tenet of his framework when building Visa into a global payments powerhouse. Since all change starts (or dies) with the individual, he proposed a roadmap for managers to keep their micromanaging instincts at bay. It was critical if the organization were to grow. If the manager didn’t understand how to manage the impulse to control, at the first sign of pressure, their own insecurities would get the better of them and micromanagement would rule.
What follows is Dee’s antidote to micromanagement, to calm what he called the monkey mind.
Step 1: Manage Inward
The first job of a manager is to manage themself, their own “integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts.”
This, Hock says, should take 50% of your time.
Step 2: Manage Upward
The second bucket of time is to manage those above us. This includes bosses, supervisors, directors, and regulators.
There is always someone we’re reporting to, and the higher up the organization a manager is, the more bosses they have. Wouldn’t it be prudent, Dee ponders, to earn their support and trust, so you and your teams achieve constructive results?
Managing upward should take 25% of your time.
Step 3: Manage Sideways
With management comes authority, but effective managers get things done by influence.
A good manager has to spend time managing those critical to their success but over whom they have no authority. This group includes not only your peers but also suppliers, business partners, and customers.
The bigger the project, the more your success is determined by your ability to influence your peers. Managing peers is an important enough test of managerial competence that I’ve made it one of the cornerstones of my self-rating framework.
According to Hock, “Peers can make a small heaven or hell of our life,” and for this reason, we should spend 20% of our time managing them.
Step 4: Manage Downward
Whatever time you have remaining, check in on your team and see how they’re doing.
Hock surmises that by prioritizing yourself, your bosses, and your peers first, you’ll spend what time you have left on your direct reports, and it will be the most impactful. Instead of asking for a PowerPoint deck, you’ll ask for a succinct, pithy update. Instead of long-running status meetings with mind-numbing mundanity, you’ll run a bad-news-first meeting.
Wait . . . What?
So Dee is saying to spend only 5% of your time managing your direct reports?
Yes.
If you didn’t know that Dee was the CEO of Visa from its founding in the 1970s to 1984, you’d think this was advice from someone who hadn’t run a team in their life. If the goal of a startup leader is to create a self-perpetuating organization, Dee had successfully made Visa the global payments leader. And yet, 5% sounds like not enough time, just like 50% on yourself sounds like too much time.
Keep in mind, that Dee wrote this in 2005, twenty years after he had left the Visa organization. While we may never know how he got to those numbers, it is sufficient to assume that in prescribing this time allocation, he was describing the end state. What Dee was really pushing us to do was to let go of our need for certainty.
Insecurity unchecked creates the need for certainty. The need for certainty breeds the need for control, and that control creates work-for-work-sake paper pushing, which kills culture and destroys organizations.
The best way to prevent our demons from getting the best of us is to work on ourselves first. And it doesn’t have to be attending a Tony Robbins seminar (though that’s not a bad thing either), but keep yourself updated on the latest trends and news in the industry. How much of a status meeting is spent in getting “management up to speed” on topics? If you’ve been in any of those meetings, you know much of those meetings is spent either educating, reminding management of background information, or giving no-update updates to make the most of airtime. The actual decision takes maybe 10% of the meeting time. And yet, between Google Docs, AirTable, Notion, JIRA, and Confluence, the knowledge base of an organization seems to grow exponentially.
What if, as a manager, you did your homework? Took the time to read up on the topic before the meeting? No one expects you to know everything, but there is no excuse for being unprepared. You have to make the time. I know of one C-level leader who blocked chunks of his calendar as “executive time” (his calendar was open to anyone in the company). It was his way of ensuring that he was spending time reading, reviewing, and investing in his own professional knowledge.
How about spending 20% of your time with your peers, partners, and customers? This is also not beyond the realm of the ordinary. Another CFO I know spends some of their time reviewing NPS scores suppliers give the company’s AP/AR department. The status meetings then become more than just managing payments but balancing them with how the company treats its suppliers.
This Is Personal
Recently, my work as a strategy consultant has focused on scaling decentralized organizations. This is hard. Decentralization is a balance between chaos and order, between certainty and the unknown, and between accountability and autonomy. And without the diffusion of responsibility that follows most decentralized organizations.
It is during this research that I chanced upon Dee Hock’s book. I knew who he was, but outside of the generic mention in Wikipedia, I didn’t know the scale of what he built or the how of it. If the hallmark of a good memoir is wanting to know more, the book delivers. As much wisdom as Hock imparts, I wanted to learn more, knowing there was probably more to the story.
Finally
Micromanagement kills decentralization. Hock’s roadmap is a checklist to keep our tendency to incessantly micromanage at bay. It forces us to focus first on our own effectiveness and then sweating the details with our teams. The roadmap creates a service mindset built on curiosity instead of inquisition and mistrust.
