Walking the Management Tight Rope

Being a manager is to walk a tight rope. It’s about finding and maintaining the right balance consistently, lest you fall and fail.

            By balance, I mean walking that fine line between over-managing people and giving them too much leeway in their jobs. I couldn’t illustrate this better than did Danish author Carsten Jensen in a passage in his well-crafted 2011 novel, We, the Drowned, about generations of seamen from the small Danish port of Marstal:

“Every sailing ship has miles of ropes, scores of blocks, hundreds of square yards of canvas. Unless the ropes are constantly pulled and the sails endlessly adjusted, the ship becomes a helpless victim of the wind. Managing a crew is the same thing.

“The captain holds hundreds of invisible ropes in his hands. Allowing the crew to take charge is letting the wind take the helm: the ship will be wrecked. But if the captain takes complete control, the ship will be becalmed and go nowhere: he strips his men of all initiative; they’ll no longer do their best and go about their work with reluctance. It’s all a question of experience and knowledge. But first and foremost, it’s about authority.”

Of course, modern organizations are not 19^th century sailing vessels. Plying the vast open waters of the world’s great oceans at the mercy of fickle winds, currents and weather, there was an ever-present danger of rogue waves, sudden storms and typhoons, and lapses in judgment that could and often did result in disaster: lost ships, drowned crew, and lost cargo.

            While there may be no such life-and-death dangers in today’s modern office buildings and factory floors, the metaphor works.

Tight Reins Stifle Excellence

Managers who keep a tight rein on their teams, who micro-manage and second-guess their employees’ every move soon create a disheartened workforce. I’ve seen these situations first-hand.

            Employees “check out.” They go through the motions of doing their jobs, waiting for their manager to correct them, admonish them, or figuratively reach over their shoulders and do their jobs for them.

            This approach begs the question of such managers: why do you hire people? And exactly what skills were you looking for when you hired them? Are your people interchangeable? Clearly, by their actions, this sort of manager telegraphs his/her own gross insecurity that often betrays a personal lack of confidence, an innate craving to be superior when, in fact, that is in doubt.

            Conversely, the other extreme can be just as bad. When the manager is hands-off, offering little or no feedback or coaching, employees are cut adrift. They are left to guess what is expected of them, what determines excellence. In their minds, what they do has little meaning. Their errors and mistakes may or may not bring harm to the company, but it’s unlikely they’ll realize it until it’s too late.

            The happy middle ground is a bit of both: mentoring and coaching, nurturing and building the self-assurance of one’s employees until they feel secure and confident in their own abilities. They eventually gain a larger understanding of the team’s challenges, better able to make independent judgments, acquiring the wisdom that comes with experience.

            As Jensen notes, a manager’s role is to exert authority – not by doing your team members’ jobs for them or second-guessing every decision they make, but rather driving them to improve their own individual performances constantly for the betterment of the larger effort. It is coaching them to ask the right questions and to strive for personal improvement in their individual quests for excellence.

            As a manager, it’s your responsibility to leverage your own knowledge and experience to guide and coach your employees toward the acquisition of the same in application to the unit’s and the business’ challenges. It is helping them make the links between what they do every day and the organization’s larger purpose and goals.