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.

Fear, Control and Meaningful Work

To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.

~ Abraham Maslow

If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do

~Frederick Herzberg

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity. In Existentialism, Albert Camus used this myth as a metaphor for the futility of life, but it could equally be used as a metaphor for the futility of work that has been stripped of meaning.


How do managers strip meaning from work? 

One way is to eliminate opportunities for workers to use their minds, by developing complex sets of rules that eliminate discretion. Part of the problem with rule-obsessed management is that it becomes increasingly difficult for workers to make decisions.

• The more rules there are the harder it may be for the worker to determine whether there is a rule that applies and then to find that rule.
• If workers are unable to find a rule and end up using their own discretion, they will still be left with doubt and uncertainty about whether they have complied with what was required, and with fear of reprisal if they haven't.
• With workers getting fewer opportunities to actually use their judgement, even simple decisions may become problematic.
• Workers end up applying the rules mechanically without using their common sense or judgement to determine whether a rule should be bent, broken or tweaked for a particular set of circumstances.
• Maintaining a complex set of rules becomes a task in itself requiring resources that could otherwise be devoted to getting the work done. It also becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether the rules are consistent.

In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein tells the story of a senior air traffic controller faced with a hijacking situation and also faced with a 15cm (6") thick manual of procedures to follow. Time was critical so he jettisoned the manual and instead drew on contacts in the security services and started to improvise. As the senior air traffic controller told Klein:

I was reprimanded for not following the procedure and commended for handling it with no civilian casualties. Then I was asked to re-write the procedure. It is still too thick.

Incidentally, rule-obsessed management isn't about getting the job done effectively. The person who makes the rules probably believes that they could do the job without the rules, they just don't trust anyone else to do so. So on the one hand there is arrogance ("I am smarter, have better judgement...than any of the people working under me") and on the other hand there is a desire to centralise power due to lack of trust ("I must control things through rules because I can't trust the workers to do the right thing"). And both of these attitudes send a demotivating message to workers, as well as resulting in delays, logjams and bottlenecks as workers end up seeking guidance on even the simplest decisions. Or conversely, it may lead to malicious compliance where the workers apply the rules to the letter regardless of the consequences.


A second and related way is to eliminate the exercise of skill in the job. For example, a manager may not trust the workers to write effective letters to clients, so they may put in place hundreds of different letters for staff to use with only limited discretion to vary them. Again, it is about centralised control and lack of trust. And paradoxically it achieves the opposite of the intended result. Since workers get less practice in wording their own letters, they lose confidence in their abilities and so they end up choosing the wording that fits the best even if it doesn't fit that well and are afraid of modifying it. And the client who writes in more than once may receive identically the same response implying that the issues they ave raised have not been given any genuine consideration.


I think you can see a pattern here:

• management fear leads to
• mistrust leading to
• centralised controls leading to
• skill reduction leading to
• mechanical performance due to fear of deviating from the centralised controls leading to
• poorer customer service.

The lesson here is that:

• You don't build a skilled workforce by eliminating opportunities for the exercise of skills.
• You don't build a motivated workforce by removing the more satisfying parts of the work.
• You don't build trust and confidence by increasing fear

Micro-Managers are overpaid!

Let's suppose we have a manager who spends a lot of time micro-managing the work of the people under them.

I claim that they are overpaid and here's why.

Effectively, they are trying to do the work of lower level employees rather than just letting those employees do the work they are getting paid to do. Suppose the manager is being paid $60 an hour and the lower level employee is being paid $30 an hour. Then for every hour the manager spends micro-managing, that manager is being overpaid by $30 an hour.

But it gets worse.

Every hour spent on micro-managing is an hour not spent on doing the work the manager should be doing. So effectively micro-management is a form of loafing.

And on top of this managers who micro-manage create bottlenecks when they want to approve work that should simply be allowed to be done and in the process they create waste and delays which are a cost to the company. These unnecessary costs should also be deducted from their salaries.

And finally micro-managers disempower those who work from them and the employees end up suffering from learned helplessness - they become afraid to make decisions and manage their teams because they are certain that they will be second-guessed and over-ruled by their manager.

The lesson here is that micro-managers don't just not earn their own salaries, they also make it hard for those who report to them to earn their salaries as well, so there is a domino effect that undercuts the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation.