If You Can’t Give Up Control, Either You Have a Problem- or Something Isn’t Working

I have been in New York City government since I was 23.

I started as an analyst. Today, I am a director responsible for people, consultants, technology procurements, contracts and budgets. Somewhere along that progression, I had to learn something that I don’t think comes naturally to many managers:

Your job is not to do everyone else’s job better than they do.

That’s particularly difficult when you were promoted because you were good at the work yourself.

You know how you would write the memo.

You know how you would analyze the quote.

You know which questions you would ask the vendor.

You know how you would build the spreadsheet.

So when someone working for you does it differently, the temptation is to jump in.

Fix this.

Change that.

Copy me.

Send it to me first.

Let me review everything.

I have certainly had that instinct myself.

But eventually, you aren’t managing employees. You’re using employees as assistants while continuing to do their jobs yourself.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that when a manager can’t give up control, the first place to look isn’t necessarily at the employee.

Sometimes the manager has to look in the mirror.

And if trust still isn’t there after clear expectations, training, feedback and a reasonable opportunity to develop, then perhaps the person and the role aren’t the right fit.

Permanent micromanagement isn’t a solution to either problem.

I Don’t Need Six Versions of Me

I don’t expect employees to approach every assignment exactly as I would.

In fact, that would defeat much of the purpose of hiring capable people.

I want someone to understand the objective, understand the boundaries and exercise judgment.

Sometimes that person will reach the same conclusion I would.

Sometimes they’ll reach a better one.

And sometimes they’ll make a mistake.

So will I.

That last part matters.

A manager who expects employees never to make mistakes isn’t really delegating. He is transferring tasks while retaining every decision.

The question isn’t whether an employee performs every task exactly as I would have performed it.

The question is whether I can trust the person’s judgment within the responsibilities I’ve assigned.

If I can’t, I need to determine why.

Did I fail to explain the expectation?

Does the employee need training?

Have I delegated responsibility without delegating authority?

Am I demanding my preferred style rather than the required result?

Or is the employee genuinely struggling with responsibilities that may not match that person’s strengths?

Those are management questions.

Repeatedly taking the work back isn’t an answer.

Sometimes I Catch Someone Watching YouTube

There is a small moment at work that has probably shaped my thinking about management more than any formal management course.

Occasionally, I’ll walk by an employee’s desk and see a YouTube video playing.

Or I’ll notice someone doing a crossword puzzle.

Sometimes you can almost see the reaction when the person realizes I’ve noticed.

The screen changes.

There is that moment of apprehension: What is the boss going to say?

Usually, not much.

I’m human.

More importantly, I’ve spent much more of my career as an employee than I have as someone’s boss. I remember what it is like to want five or ten minutes when your brain isn’t focused on work.

People aren’t machines.

If someone works for seven hours, I don’t believe every second has to involve staring intensely at a government spreadsheet to prove taxpayers received value that day.

What matters to me is whether the work gets done.

Are you meeting deadlines?

Are you responsive?

Are you handling your responsibilities?

Are you producing good work?

Are your coworkers constantly having to compensate for you?

When something goes wrong, do you tell me?

If those answers are good, I’m not particularly interested in turning myself into the YouTube police.

Obviously, there are limits. Watching videos for hours while work piles up is a performance problem. So is routinely disappearing, missing deadlines or forcing coworkers to carry your workload.

But a crossword puzzle during a mental break isn’t the same thing as poor performance.

Managers should be capable of recognizing the difference.

My Breaks Just Look Different Now

There is also a little irony in this.

These days, I’m usually too busy to take the kind of break where I sit down and do a crossword puzzle.

My “break” might be ordering something one of my kids needs.

Paying a doctor’s copay.

Paying a utility bill.

Ordering something for my wife or family.

Taking care of one of those dozens of little tasks that accumulate when you’re working, raising children, managing a household and trying to fit the rest of life around a career.

Then I go back to whatever procurement, contract, budget or problem was sitting on my screen.

I’m not pretending that ordering something for my kids is productive government work.

It isn’t.

It’s life.

And I think pretending employees can completely separate life from work for every minute of every workday is unrealistic.

There should be reasonable boundaries, of course. Government employees are paid to perform public work, and managers have an obligation to make sure that happens.

But there is a difference between accountability and pretending human beings don’t occasionally need to reset their attention.

I care much more about whether someone consistently delivers than whether I happened to walk past that person’s desk during the five minutes he or she didn’t.

Remote Work Makes This Even More Obvious

Hybrid work has made the distinction between managing work and watching people harder to ignore.

My own schedule includes remote work, and I manage in an environment where employees aren’t necessarily sitting within eyesight of a supervisor every day.

When someone is sitting ten feet away, there is a temptation to equate physical presence with productivity.

You see the employee arrive.

You see someone at a desk.

You see the person typing.

But what exactly have you learned?

Mostly that the employee is physically present.

And my YouTube example demonstrates the other side of it.

Someone can be physically sitting in an office and not be working at a particular moment.

Someone working remotely can be extraordinarily productive without a manager seeing any of it happen.

That’s why I think one of the worst responses to remote work is trying to digitally recreate the supervisor walking around the office.

Constant messages.

Unnecessary check-ins.

Extra status reports.

Monitoring whether someone’s status indicator is green.

That’s not necessarily management.

Sometimes it’s surveillance substituting for management.

The better questions are straightforward:

What is assigned?

When is it due?

Is the work good?

Is the employee responsive when needed?

Are problems being escalated?

Are customers and coworkers getting what they need?

If I know those things, I have a pretty good idea whether someone is performing effectively whether that person is down the hall or somewhere else.

Remote work doesn’t eliminate management. It exposes weak management.

If the only way I know whether someone is productive is by seeing the person sitting at a desk, I probably didn’t have a very good performance-management system to begin with.

Trust Still Requires Accountability

None of this means remote work—or office work—should operate on blind faith.

Trust has to work both ways.

Employees have an obligation to be reachable when expected, attend meetings, complete assignments, communicate problems and produce work.

Remote work can’t mean disappearing.

Office work can’t mean occupying a chair.

And not every employee necessarily performs equally well with the same degree of independence.

If performance declines, address performance.

If responsiveness becomes a problem, address responsiveness.

If deadlines are missed, address the missed deadlines.

If an employee consistently produces excellent work, don’t invent a problem because you occasionally saw a crossword puzzle.

Manage the performance you actually have.

Delegation Is a Test of the Manager Too

Managers sometimes talk about trust as though employees have to earn it while managers merely dispense it.

I think it works both ways.

Delegation tests me.

Can I clearly explain what outcome I need?

Can I distinguish between something being wrong and something simply being different from how I would do it?

Can I tolerate an employee making a reasonable decision without asking me first?

Can I allow someone to develop?

Can I accept that another person may know more than I do about something?

And can I resist the psychological comfort of being involved in everything?

Being needed feels productive.

Being copied on every email feels important.

Having every decision come through your office can feel like control.

But it may actually indicate organizational weakness.

If everything stops when the manager is unavailable, the manager hasn’t built a strong operation. The manager has become a bottleneck.

I Learned to Stop Tracking Everything Myself

Budget management helped teach me this.

Earlier in my career, I was more inclined toward detailed tracking and frequent reporting.

That instinct wasn’t irrational. I manage public money. I should know where it is going.

But eventually I realized that visibility and manual oversight aren’t the same thing.

Different parts of the organization were tracking some of the same capital and expense information. We were producing regular reports and maintaining parallel records.

I eventually asked:

Why do I need two units tracking the same dollars?

If there is an independent-control reason, fine.

But duplication isn’t automatically internal control.

We developed a tracker that could update automatically. If I needed to review object-code spending against the broader budget, the information was available.

I didn’t give up control of the budget.

I gave up a process that made me feel like I had more control without necessarily giving me better information.

We also allowed the capital-budget function to own the capital tracking rather than recreating the same information in my operation. Eventually, attrition allowed me not to replace a position associated with work that no longer needed to be performed that way.

I didn’t need another person preparing information for me.

I needed reliable access to the information.

Tell Me What’s Wrong, Not Everything That’s Right

That experience is part of why I increasingly favor management by exception.

If 97 percent of something is proceeding normally, I don’t need a 40-page report proving it.

Tell me about the other 3 percent.

The procurement that isn’t moving.

The contract approaching its ceiling.

The project spending faster than forecast.

The vendor that can’t meet a requirement.

The invoice that doesn’t reconcile.

The deadline we’re likely to miss.

That’s information I can act on.

The same principle applies to employees.

I don’t need someone documenting every hour of a remote day to demonstrate productivity.

I need to know when commitments aren’t being met.

Good management should surface exceptions without requiring everyone to constantly prove that normal work is occurring.

If I Have to Redo Everything, Something Is Wrong

There is a point where managers have to be candid with themselves.

If I assign work and routinely redo it myself, why?

If the employee is capable but I simply can’t tolerate giving up control, I am the problem.

I need to learn to manage.

But there is another possibility.

Maybe I’ve communicated expectations clearly, provided training, given feedback, delegated appropriate authority and allowed reasonable time for development—and the arrangement still isn’t working.

That doesn’t necessarily mean I “hired the wrong person.”

People have different strengths. Sometimes a good employee is in the wrong assignment. Sometimes additional training is needed. Sometimes responsibilities need to be adjusted. Sometimes a manager and employee simply need to communicate differently.

And yes, occasionally it becomes clear that a person isn’t a good fit for a particular role.

Management means being willing to recognize all of those possibilities.

What doesn’t work is permanent micromanagement.

Good Employees Should Make Their Managers Less Necessary

Some of the best employees I’ve worked with are the ones who gradually require less of me.

At first, they ask questions.

Then they start bringing recommendations with the questions.

Eventually, they handle most situations themselves and tell me about the exceptions.

That’s development.

A strong employee doesn’t make a manager irrelevant.

The employee frees the manager to manage something larger.

Likewise, a strong manager should be developing people capable of assuming more responsibility.

If I am still personally making every decision five years later, I haven’t developed much organizational capacity.

I’ve protected my territory.

Those aren’t the same thing.

My Success Isn’t Measured by How Much Depends on Me

Early in a career, being indispensable can feel like success.

Everybody asks you.

Everybody needs you.

Nothing happens without you.

Eventually I came to see that differently.

If nothing can happen without me, I have created an organizational risk.

I should be able to take a vacation.

Someone else should know how the operation works.

Employees should be able to make decisions.

Information should be accessible.

Processes should be documented.

The organization should continue functioning.

That’s not making myself less valuable.

That’s management.

My job isn’t to be the busiest person on my team.

It isn’t to demonstrate that I can perform everyone’s work.

And it certainly isn’t to hire capable people and then refuse to let them exercise the judgment I hired them for.

My job is to put people in positions where they can succeed, establish expectations, give them appropriate authority, hold them accountable for results and know when I need to get involved.

When I find myself unable to give up control, I should first ask whether I’ve created the problem myself.

Maybe I haven’t communicated clearly.

Maybe I haven’t delegated enough authority.

Maybe I haven’t provided enough training.

Maybe I’m confusing my personal preference with the correct way of doing something.

And only after examining those possibilities should I conclude that the employee and role may simply not be the right match.

I think employees deserve that consideration.

I remember being the employee.

And even now, when I see someone hurriedly close YouTube because the boss walked by, part of me understands exactly what that person is thinking.

I’m not looking for seven uninterrupted hours of visible activity.

I’m looking for people I can trust to do good work.

Because ultimately, if you can’t give up control, don’t automatically assume you have the wrong employee. First make sure the employee doesn’t have the wrong manager.