The Perils of Helicopter Management
Either from having suffered from it themselves or just because it’s so roundly condemned, most managers are alive to the perils of micromanagement. And equally, there is all sorts of wonderful talk about celebrating failure and the importance of giving high-potential employees a variety of challenges in order to grow. But it’s maybe worth zeroing in on that moment where a manager decides that someone is ready for that challenge and up to it.
And here we can find a shadowy variant on micromanagement which is often hard to recognize because it makes us feel like we are doing the right thing by the person. And that is when we tell ourselves that someone is not ready yet, and if we put him into that role, give her that challenge, it could be career-damaging or even career-ending: the risks are too high, the stretch too far, the impact to a client too dire if we get it wrong. So maybe next year. Maybe we ask this other, more senior person to take it on instead.
The reality is the choice to throw someone into the water with the sharks (abandonment); dive in ourselves (micromanaging); or keep that person ashore and send in a more capable diver exists along a spectrum. It is a judgment call and ambiguous, and we can get it wrong. Here my friend Jim McGill’s warning about the perils of second order effects needs attention: threshold decisions are often dominated by our conscious or unconscious biases. In that moment, as we tell ourselves we are protecting the more junior person, we are making a risk assessment based in part on our feel for who is right or ready or suitable for that challenge. We may also be biased by the tendency — due to personality, culture or gender — of some people to more aggressively advocate for themselves, which further embeds the bias across a career. As we set the dial to a calibrated threat level, just enough challenge, but not fatal, does our hand waver?
How well does the person’s past experience align with the needs of this challenge? What is the likelihood they will overcome or can be supported to overcome the risks? For example, in the automotive press, how often have we seen debates about a prospective CEO asking if that person is a “car guy”? There are two biases embedded there: the obvious gender one, but also one about what experiences are needed. The right person for the challenge and the time is not always obvious. One crypto hedge fund COO I know describes his company as “the island of misfit toys;” a crypto trading desk head characterized her ideal team as “a band of pirates and mutants.” By overlooking the less obvious choices or, worse, holding them back in either a caring fashion (admirable, but perhaps wrong) or a paternalistic one (in the worst cases), we not only put drag on their careers but we may in fact hurt our organizations.
One of the less commonly cited benefits of starting your own company is you get to make this choice for yourself. Ultimately your investors, clients and employees will judge whether you were the right person for it, but you make that initial decision alone. For my own part, I consider myself the most unlikely CEO, which maybe means I am a little more likely to ask at such moments: what am I missing? The next time your hand rests on that dial and you are making that very difficult call, you should do the same.
