Managerial Delusions: One-on-Ones are Micromanaging

Most managers don't manage. 

The concept of the manager being actively involved in the employees' work is foreign to most people. Some will be so baffled by the idea of a weekly one-on-one that you can see it on their face. Upon suggesting that managers should meet with their staff every single week, I've received looks that plainly say, "You can't be serious." 

I get it. My younger self would have been among these skeptics. For most of my work life, I only had two kinds of conversation with my boss: "Hi, how's it going" at the beginning of my shift, or "You messed up and we need to talk about it." That's normal. That's expected. Proposing that a boss should do more than that is a little creepy, a little tone deaf. 

Here's an analogy. People who come from families where you never talk about your feelings cannot imagine the point of doing it on a regular basis. Even more, they find themselves feeling superior to families that do routinely check in with each other. "Our love is understood. It is so strong that we don't need to constantly remind each other of it. If you need to talk about your feelings all the time, it must be because you are weak." 

"The job is understood. My people are so on top of their work that I don't need to constantly check in on them. If you need to touch base with your employees every week, it must be because you are a weak manager." 

This is a delusion, and a very powerful one. It has a certain undeniable logic. But it is the logic of bravado, not the logic of results. Every study of effective management bears out the same result: more communication equates to more effective teams. The origin for this delusion, like so many managerial delusions, comes from our own history of having bad bosses. If you see your boss as a roadblock to getting your work done, it is impossible to imagine a world where weekly one-on-ones are useful. You can only feel horror and dread at the idea of walking your boss through your current work and asking advice. With that kind of boss, asking for advice is about as helpful as trying to write a report without using the letter "e." It can be done, but why add the complication?

We can't imagine the point of these meetings as the employee, so we don't even consider doing them when we are the boss.

There are some lucky few of us, however, who have had a different kind of boss. We had a boss who was an asset to getting our work done. Our conversations with that boss were collaborative rather than authoritarian. Every time we came to them with questions about our work, the boss helped us develop our plan. When we came to them with new ideas, they explored ways to make it work rather than immediately shutting them down. 

When you can see your boss as someone who assists your work rather than blocks your work, it becomes very easy to see the value of one-on-one meetings. The meeting is just a way to build all of these helpful, beneficial conversations into the routine of the work week. When the boss "checks in on your work," they aren't checking to see if you screwed up. They're checking to see how they can help. When they need to give you negative feedback, they do it matter-of-factly without judging you personally. When they ask how things are going, there is no hidden agenda. 

We could go on. It boils down to this. Yes, if your current horrible boss added one-on-one meetings without changing anything else about their management, it would be worse than your boss doing nothing at all. You won't break free of the delusion that one-on-ones are micromanagement until you can imagine a world where the boss isn't out to get you.

Management Delusions: My Employees Will Come to Me

Actions to take: Accept the fact that employees only come to their bosses when the matter is urgent or extremely important. Recognize that those few interactions are not enough to meaningfully manage a person. Create an environment where your employees have regular, frequent opportunities to share and discuss things that are not just urgent or important problems. By far, the easiest way to accomplish that goal is through weekly one-on-one meetings.

Many well-intentioned but wrong-thinking managers push back against weekly one-on-ones. They see the weekly meeting as overly invasive, something that inserts them too deeply into their employees' work. In short, weekly one-on-ones are micromanagement to them. Invariably, when a manager takes this line in a conversation with me, they will say, "I have a great relationship with my employees. They know my door is open. If they need anything, they'll come to me."

The hard thing about convincing these managers is that, in a way, they are right. They are imagining capital "P" Problems when they think about their employees coming to them. Yes, employees will alert you to urgent business when necessary. Even generally unapproachable bosses will be told about major issues that need their attention.

Their wrong-thinking has nothing to do with that scenario. Their wrong-thinking comes from what they perceive as the purpose of their role. "My employees will come to me" springs from the school of thought that managers are primarily there to put out fires. It is in the same vein as "hire good people and get out of the way." Employees work virtually without guidance until a problem big enough for the manager comes along. Then, and only then, the manager steps in.

Managers who think this way want to have their cake and eat it too. They will fully agree with the idea that managers should be involved with employees work: coaching them, helping them develop their skills, ensuring that the team is working together effectively, etc. They don't realize that the two ideas are incompatible. They are. It is not enough to "be there if you need me." Try pressing one of these managers on when and how they do the aforementioned coaching, development, and so on. If they have a team of 10, they will be able to give, at best, three examples from the past month. If they work in a different location from their employees, don't expect more than one example in the past month.

One-on-ones are not "micromanagement." One-on-ones are "management." 

Managers who believe that their employees will come to them end up missing out on the majority of their employees' thoughts and opinions. You do not want to hear from your employees only when the issue is big enough for a manager to step in. Employees emphatically do not want to bother you. They will save little issues until they are big. It goes without saying, little issues are a lot easier to solve than big issues. Create a communication process that encourages employees to share little problems, not just big ones. Same with ideas. You want to hear about employees' little ideas. Little improvements might be worth more than big ones, frankly. You may be able to quickly implement small stuff, whereas big ideas take a big lever and a lot of time to get started.

Again, it is not enough to wait for your employees to come to you. You must go to them. By that, I mean that you must create a time and place for them to share thoughts with you regularly and frequently. 

Over time, they will learn to feel comfortable with the idea of just chatting with the boss about work. Eventually, a good chunk of them will come to love it. There is safety in knowing what the boss thinks about your plans for work. With weekly one-on-ones, an employee can briefly check in on all the little things that never felt big enough to "bother" the boss with in the past, but are nevertheless worth discussing.

They will start telling you how much they appreciate your genuine willingness to listen and that they have never had a boss reward candor before. This is the real goal with one-on-ones. You are working to build the kind of relationship where communication is easy, where it is bi-directional, where your employees will say what they actually think about all sorts of things instead of only sharing the unavoidable, urgent issues. 

One-on-ones are by far the easiest, most efficient way I know of to accomplish these outcomes. If you have a way to do it without one-on-ones, fine by me. But don't delude yourself into thinking "they will come to me" is an answer. 

Managerial Delusions: "My hiring instincts are sharp"

Actions to take: Stop trusting your gut. It is far less accurate than you think, and it likely leads to choosing candidates for biased reasons. Read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for a fantastic explanation of overconfidence in decision-making. Develop and adhere to hiring processes that are specifically crafted to minimize bias and fallibility in human decision-making.

Let's talk about radiologists for a moment, not bosses. Radiologists are quite literally experts at detecting abnormalities by examining medical imagery of the body. That's practically a definition of their job. However, experienced radiologists contradict themselves 20% of the time when they see the same image on separate occasions. A basic computer formula, which examines various factors and assigns a score, will predict abnormality with more accuracy than the doctor. This is true even when the doctor has access to the formula scores! Radiologists, using the formula information plus whatever information comes from their own expertise and examination, will make worse decisions than just having the formula information. (source: Kahneman, Thinking Fast & Slow, p. 225)

These are people who have spent years studying the science of viewing medical imagery to develop their skills. They go through expertly crafted, rigorous training to become radiologists. Let's be honest, managers go through practically zero training to become effective at choosing who to hire. Yet, somehow, every tenured manager I've met is convinced that they know how to pick the right ones. Take a mental inventory of the managers you know. How many would think they are "above average" at hiring effectively if asked? Certainly more than half. Probably all. (Which is, of course, impossible. By definition, half of us must be below average.)

Managers seem to be especially defensive when their hiring methodology is questioned, even lightly. They are convinced that their intuition about people is valuable, meaningful, and worth including in their decision-making process. To imply otherwise is met with incredulity, anger, or "proof" that they know what they are doing. Most managers simply cannot accept the (correct, scientifically proven) idea that hiring decisions should not be based on a general feeling about who they think is best.

After the session on interviewing bias in my personnel management course, one of my students chatted with her boss about it. It sounded like her boss was polite, but thoroughly dismissive of the idea that a manager cannot rely on their instincts about a candidate. The boss's reasoning: look at the people they have on their team. They has cultivated a hard-working department of people who do good work. "I hired you, after all" they said to my student.  

Can you spot the is the huge problems with this manager's logic? 

They have no information on people they didn't hire. If you have a decent set of minimum qualifications, everyone you interview can do the job. So, every person you hire confirms your belief that you picked the right one. It's right there in the boss's argument: "You (the person I hired) did the job well, so I must be doing something right!" But what about all of those people they didn't hire who could do the job even better? 

Second, they are thinking about the people who are still on their team. If your work environment is any good at all, you recognize the bad employees after a few months. They self-select out when they realize their poor performance won't be ignored, or you eventually help them out. Of course this manager had a functional team. It says good thing about their on-the-job management, but it says nothing about their hiring ability.

Our brains are storytelling machines. We automatically attribute cause-effect relationships, even when none are there. If you have a functional team, it must be because you are good at hiring. Every manager thinks this way.

In fact, humans carry around a host of unconscious biases that influence our opinions about a job candidate for reasons that have nothing to do with the work. This is insidious. A totally well-meaning manager might be (probably is) unintentionally discriminating against people who could do the job extremely well, simply because they don't fit the manager's assumptions about what the "right" candidate is like. 

How, then, do we avoid these traps in our hiring processes? That is a subject worth a dozen or more posts. I urge you to start doing research on hiring and interviewing processes that minimize bias. Here are a few starting places:

• If the pitfalls of human cognition are of any interest at all, read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It will teach you to stop trusting your brain.
• Research "behavioral interview questions." Go beyond simply looking up sample questions. Find information about how these interview questions are the most valid and reliable for choosing the best candidate. Understanding why and how they work will help you use them effectively.
• Research and develop best practices for rating candidates during the selection process. This is a richly studied area of organizational psychology and human resource management. Implementing effective rating processes will discourage or prevent various cognitive pitfalls.
• Look for training on bias and bias reduction in the workplace. If your organization is large enough, your HR department may already have training modules on the topic.

Average bosses think they have the best method for selecting great employees. Almost all of them are being misled by irrelevant information. Better bosses know that human cognition is eminently fallible. They take steps to mitigate bias by researching and sticking to scientifically proven selection methods.

Managerial Delusions: "I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way”

Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler during the 1980s, has an extremely popular quote: "I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way." He is one of the most famous leaders in corporate history, and business owners the world over have been attempting to emulate his management style ever since he rose to fame. 

When you read his famous quote, an image of leadership emerges. We have a benevolent leader whose skill in finding talent is his key attribute. Much like the religious deist's Watchmaker, he puts all the pieces into place, then sits back as the entire system naturally synchs into beautiful lockstep. Outcomes are achieved, visions realized, work completed. He does not need to meddle because he has found the right people and put them in the right place.

There is just one problem. That does not describe Lee Iacocca's leadership at all. Iacocca was, in fact, a very tough person to work for. He was a master at applying pressure to those under him, pushing them to just short of their breaking point. He was involved enough in the details of their work to redirect them from disaster and pick up their spirits if they failed. When his people succeeded in meeting his high standards, the sense of accomplishment endeared them to him and solidified their loyalty. Not exactly a "get out of the way" leadership style.

Beware pithy inspirational quotes. These quotes have power. They are a shorthand, a reminder of the direction we should travel or an ideal state we should strive to achieve. Too many of them sound good but encourage a disastrous leadership practice. 

Before you throw your lot behind a good-sounding inspirational quote, ask yourself what advice is beneath its surface. Examine the underlying assumptions it makes about how you should manage or lead. Often, even the person who said it would recoil at the natural interpretation of their words. 

Instead, find quotes that encapsulate ideals that you do want to achieve. Here is one I keep in mind: "Too many bosses are so focused on becoming great leaders that they fail to be good managers."