Treat your Team like Children and They will Act like Children

I’ll share an example from my own experience as a micro manager. I planned to organize an event on a new and innovative methodology that would revolutionize the engineering of complex systems. Preparation for this event involved creating in-depth expert content and developing targeted marketing communications. I assigned myself the task to deliver the actual technical content, and the experts of our marketing department would attend to the promotion, facilities, communication with other speakers, and event follow-up activities. We started working, and I could not resist checking frequently on the status of all other activities, sharing helpful and very detailed “instructions”, and not attending to my work. After a couple of days, I got the response: “If you think you know all this better than us, please do it yourself”. Now I was burdened with both tasks….and wondering “what happened?”

You are not the only expert working in your organization

By then, I realized I was not trusting the experience of my professional colleagues and giving them a lot of micro instructions in their field of expertise. Their reaction was to just blindly follow my ad hoc orders and not use their own judgment and competence. They started acting like children in response to my infantile instructions. Below, I list some of the responses I got over the years. These responses trigger me to review and adjust my leadership style:

• I don’t want to do …..
• I don’t like this.. it’s no fun.
• It is too complicated.
• I don’t know how to do this.
• Are we done, yet?
• I do not know who to ask for that.
• You did not told me it worked like that.
• That’s not allowed over here.
• I am hungry, is it lunch already?
• I am bored, can we go and do something fun?
• Ok, if you say so, you are the expert.

These responses are actually honest responses. When you remove ownership, creativity and independence from the work, all you have left is indifference. In the end, this is the only sensible response since you have removed the respect for and trust in their competencies. They honestly don’t care about the work they do for you, and it has become your problem.

My takeaway

Just like real children; the behavior I get from my team is a response to the way I behave. So when they act up; it is not them, I have to change.

And do not forget to have lunch together and have some fun…. that’s very important.