How Control-Freak Managers (CFMs) lose control

The manager who needs to be in control of everything (the control freak manager or CFM) is driven by a fear of things going wrong and possibly a fear of being blamed for things going wrong. The mindset is "If I don't know what is going on then something bad must be happening, so I MUST know".

They are also driven by a lack of trust. "My staff can't cope with problems or won't tell me if there are problems so I MUST know everything that is going on. And to make sure nothing bad happens, I must get all approvals channelled though me."

So a bottleneck is produced that reduces productivity.

This leaves workers with two choices:

• they can co-operate with the control freak manager and as a result become increasingly dependent and disempowered. They seek approvals for everything even things for which they could use their own judgement. And they are at a loss when the CFM isn't around. And productivity suffers.
• Or they can rebel. They can deliberately conceal what they are doing from the CFM since it's the only way they can get work done without the interference of the CFM.

And it is this second choice that creates an irony: the more the CFM tries to control things, the more the workers keep them in the dark so that they can get their jobs done. And the more CFM's are kept in the dark, the more control they try to exert because the more afraid they are that things are happening that they don't want to happen and that things are getting out of their control. And so a reinforcing loop develops.

A further irony is that the manager who trusts his or her staff may be no more aware of what they are doing. But because they trust staff to exercise their judgement and do their jobs, their staff rise to the occasion, and as a result, such a manager has no reason to be afraid. And the workers because they are trusted to use their judgement become better able to do their jobs and less likely to conceal emerging problems from their manager.

And so the ultimate paradox emerges: that fear and lack of trust generate the conditions which justify that fear and distrust - a self-fulfilling prophecy.