The Eighth-Grade Reflex

The overachiever reflex that stops scaling

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:30Bill Gallagher: Well, I wonder if you might be a micromanager sometime. Are you? I know I've been. I think many of us are at different times. Micromanagement is a problem. We're going to get into that. How do you know? What does it look like? What's it like for the other people? How do you change anything to do with that micromanagement? That's our topic for today: micromanagement.

00:54Bill Gallagher: Maybe you don't want to think about this one. You're going to skip ahead. You're like, ugh. You should listen in.

01:02Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week for about 700 episodes now, and you'll find the show where you're getting it right now, so you can turn on your notifications, like it, subscribe, do things like that. Scaling Coach is all about how to grow your company — the journey, the tools, the strategy — and we talk to and share stories from our clients, our work, authors, gurus, experts, CEOs in the world of business growth. So that's what our show is all about. Get this every week. This particular episode is part of a series to do with my book that's coming out now, Busy Is Broken. Busy Is Broken talks about the leadership side of what goes along with scaling your business. So how do you need to evolve as a leader? How do you stop being the bottleneck even after you have the team? You build a team. You've got some form of team right now, probably, if you're listening to the show, or you're aspiring for one. And then even then you might be the bottleneck. That's the point of Busy Is Broken. You can't just try to keep working harder and harder every time, and that's what this deals with. So you'll find the book, pre-ordering, excerpts, extras, things like that at busyisbroken.com. So go check out that website, busyisbroken.com.

02:25Bill Gallagher: All right. As I like to do, I like to tell you a story about a real client. This is a real client. I've changed the name, some of the details to keep them anonymous, because it might be uncomfortable otherwise, because this is one that didn't go well, was expensive, chewed up some time in the process with unchecked micromanagement. Sometimes, you cringe. You've heard it before. You maybe don't want to hear it. You're hoping it's fixed or it's gone away or you've grown out of it. But you know in your heart you might have done this once or twice.

Lee rewrote everything and everyone checked out

02:59Bill Gallagher: Well, there's a healthcare CEO that I coached a few years ago — smart, driven, impeccable résumé, great — and they tried to run a national healthcare company the same way they ran projects back in eighth grade: doing everybody else's work for them, meddling in things all the time. I bet more than a few of you have done that. I know I have, and certainly this one did. So we'll call this person Lee. Lee came into a healthcare empire valued in hundreds of millions of dollars, and from the start, Lee second-guessed the leadership of everyone on the team, all of their work, always, in everything. Reworking slide decks that other people had created until late at night, editing marketing copy as they flew across the country, jumping into — like, even jumping into my work as the coach — on simple basic things like welcomes and facilitation exercises, things like that. Not to collaborate, but a desire to control everything. Not from cruelty or suggesting that Lee was incompetent, except the experience for sure was that.

04:15Bill Gallagher: This, it turns out, was kind of an overachiever reflex that probably started somewhere around middle school and had not been updated. It certainly came out in our conversations that this was a regular pattern through much of life, and it sounded like it was like the end of grade school, middle school kind of timeframe thing. So very overachiever, high marks in school, always the one that could be counted on to get things done. But that way of working with other people, with teams, hadn't really been updated in that time. They'd worked in different environments — corporate environments, that kind of thing — developed some skill, but always by being like the hardest worker, not by raising other people up.

People stopped presenting because they knew Lee would meddle

04:58Bill Gallagher: So what happened is people stopped presenting things. They looked for any way not to present something or to go late or that kind of thing, because they knew that Lee would just change everything around. They stopped proposing creative solutions, kept their mouths shut, because they knew that they would get overwritten in the process of all of that. Well, people start to learn helplessness. They throw their hands up. They mark time. They hope for something to settle out. The very best people checked out. They took off. People grumbled behind the scenes about how things were, and they questioned and they did this like question-complaint thing. Like, I don't really know what I do. I don't know if I have that or they have that or who's got what, because they knew it was going to get meddled with.

05:56Bill Gallagher: I personally was like, what am I even doing here? And it's frustrating. I'm laying out sessions with the leadership team to do planning and things like that, and we have detailed timelines, whether it was in person or it was on Zoom. We had a mix of both with this company. I knew that at any moment Lee would throw things off track, like could intervene in something, and something that was intended to be fifteen minutes could go forty-five or an hour, and then everything else would be a problem. And so I just knew, like in my bones. And I resisted, but I watched the other people. What I do as a coach is not nearly as important as watching what the rest of the leadership team is doing day to day. How did they behave? Where do they hold back? Where do they bite their tongues? Where did they not do their best work?

Micromanagement follows delegation but kills trust

06:48Bill Gallagher: Micromanagement is what follows delegation. So you start to learn to delegate. You have some leaders or some people on your team, and you've given them things to do, but then you still get involved in it. You ask to see it. You come by their office, their desk, their workspace. You pop into their calendar, and you get involved in work that you probably shouldn't be getting involved in. That's where we get into the world of micromanagement. So I'm interacting with you on details that really should be your purview, part of your work. And you're like, leave me alone, I know how to do this. Like, it's going to be all right. And the problem is, sometimes you're right. Sometimes you are doing it better than they might do it. But many times it's just about control. You just want to get in because you feel comfortable — like emotionally you're uncomfortable. You're not trusting. It could be you trust them, but only to a point, or maybe you don't really trust them at all, but you've given them the job anyway.

07:46Bill Gallagher: The net result, though, is people feel untrusted, invalidated, interfered with, meddled with. And then they tune out. Like, what happens when somebody does that to you? Like, I don't want to work. How can I get out now? If I'm getting offers, if I am in-demand, popular, that kind of thing, I'm going to get pulled out of things. I'm going to be able to go. The kinds of things that work for you in eighth grade — they get a small project done over the mark, like get you through the class, through the year, through the semester, whatever it is — that kind of thing doesn't scale. It doesn't help when you're trying to run a bigger and bigger company.

08:24Bill Gallagher: It really creates a problem with having real strong leaders. You've got to be willing to let people do things, maybe even not do them perfectly, not do them the way you would do them, but start to grapple with things. You can give people feedback, especially if you'll do it a little bit after the fact. Now, I don't want you to let people fail entirely. You've got to be there to make sure that there's some kind of boundary micromanagement. We're talking about getting involved in things that don't matter that much, where you're meddling in things that isn't like win-lose, succeed or fail. It's just like degrees of refinement.

09:01Bill Gallagher: You don't have eighth graders on your team, mostly. They're adults. You hire them because they're good at something and they have more potential. Every time you insert yourself into other people's work uninvited, you're saying without words, I don't trust you. And people who don't feel trusted, they stop trying. People who are really good, who have options, who are getting recruited, depending on your industry and things like that, they will leave.

Years of damage before Lee let go

09:31Bill Gallagher: Eventually Lee got over it, managed around it. People worked around it. They figured things out, settled Lee, settled down. Like some of it settled out in this case. Some new hires got made that Lee was more willing to trust. And Lee started to let go. The company did stabilize, but it took years of damage, not one, more than two years of damage, expense, talent loss, projects delayed, restarts on all of that. So that is really the fundamental kind of challenge with it. And we're talking about a fairly big company, right? I coach companies across a big range of size. Work with — we've got 2,000 companies in the EO Accelerator program around the world that I have something to do with. We have small companies in our Growth Navigator program, getting them to their first $20 million. Then we have a handful of companies that are north of that, maybe averaging $75 million.

10:30Bill Gallagher: We go up to billion-dollar valuations. Even with thousands of people in a company, you will have a leader micromanage at times, and it just sucks the life out of people. It upsets them. It invalidates them. It creates churn. It creates negative back talk in the company.

10:50Bill Gallagher: So if you want to get good at this, the first thing you have to do is start to notice it. You want to catch yourself in the reflex. Now you've maybe heard this before, but when people bring you things — a plan, a decision — notice the impulse to edit, to improve, to add your fingerprints to it, and start to ask yourself, do I really need to do this? Do I really need to comment? Maybe I should bite my tongue or just use curiosity and question. Why did you do that like that? How do you feel about that? Are you confident about that? What would you do to make that any better? Let them drive the decision. Let them do the thinking in it and be careful that your questions aren't entirely leading and manipulative. Right? You know when you're doing it. You're like, are you sure you want to go out dressed like that? You know, that kind of a conversation that you might have with somebody in your world where you're really trying to tell them with a question, but it's curious. It's like, you know what? Of course, none of this is the project the way I would have done it. I'm curious. Why did you come up with this? What do you feel are the risks here? But now I'm coming with a little bit more of an open mind and I'm coming from a place like maybe I don't know the best of everything and everyone.

Notice the impulse to edit before you act

12:10Bill Gallagher: So you're starting to look for that. Look for when people wince, look for their facial expressions. If you think you might be a micromanager, start to ask yourself, where am I doing it? See if you can notice when you're doing it and see if you can challenge yourself then — should I really be doing this? If you do this for the next two weeks, you might see something interesting. Maybe you'll see that you're not at all a micromanager, or maybe you will see a wide variety of situations where you're doing it. And you'll start to notice the impact on the other people around you.

12:43Bill Gallagher: If you keep holding people down, not trusting them, they won't give you the best work. They won't level up into the people that you want them to become — the leaders — and ultimately, it'll hold your company back. I see it again and again. I've done it myself. I've watched others on my teams and the companies I coach do it. And it's a recurring kind of thing that gets in the way. So we've delegated, but we're still controlling. That is micromanagement. Right? And it is very upsetting to people around it. And when people talk about you, if you're a micromanager, it's not a good thing that they have to say about this trait in you.

13:19Bill Gallagher: All right. So that's your focus for the next week. See if you can catch yourself. See if you can notice if it's really necessary or not, the kind of feedback you're about to give, and start to just bring self-awareness to it. You'll naturally begin to correct if you start to bring your self-awareness to it and reflect on whether or not it's actually really necessary.

Next episode on what Bill missed building his career

13:39Bill Gallagher: In the next solo episode that I do two weeks from now, it'll be maybe the most personal one in the whole series. I'm going to tell you about some of the things that I missed out on in building my career, the big events that I made, but all the other kinds of things in everyday life that I missed and what it cost me and then what I did about it. That's all in our next episode. Until then, until next time, keep scaling. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks.

14:09Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.