Leading With a Vision
The higher your rank, the more fundamental your instructions should be. Use the Pyramid of Purpose to ensure you get involved at the right level.
Few management styles are as universally loathed as micromanagement. And with reason: the micromanagee will feel infantilized and unable to use their skills. The micromanager will spend all of their time second-guessing their employees. Teams with micromanagers have abysmal productivity and motivation, often resulting in employee departures, burn-outs, and other unpleasant consequences.
The causes of micromanagement
But what causes micromanagement? In some cases, the micromanager is simply a narcissist who couldn’t imagine anything being done well if they aren’t the one doing it. If there is a solution for that, I don’t have the right skill set to formulate it.
In other cases, though, micromanagement is a product of confusion. In My Way or the Highway, Harry E. Chambers writes¹:
Confusion reigns when priorities, objectives, and goals are not clearly identified, communicated, or accurately comprehended. Confusion creates unfocused activity or inactivity; in some cases, it freezes people in place. People who micromanage are quick to step in and fill any perceived void. They believe their activity is necessary to gain order and stability. Confusion provides many people with an open invitation to micromanage.
He then continues:
People who micromanage cannot tell you what they actually want, yet they can tell you what they don’t. They can tell you what it isn’t, but not what it is. While they cannot really clarify their expectation, they will just know it when they see it.
I do know a thing or two about lack of focus and direction, so let’s talk about it.
The Pyramid of Purpose
I’ve written in the past about what I call The Pyramid of Purpose: a series of principles, going from the broadest and most fundamental (values) to very concrete and tactical (business objectives) that provide grounding to any action within a company: the day-to-day decision of whether to build feature A or B cannot be answered in a vacuum. The feature that should be built is the one that furthers the organization’s business objectives. Those, in turn, should square with the strategy, which should help the organization reach its goals, further its mission, and so on.
But the Pyramid of Purpose isn’t just about providing grounding. It also dictates how every layer in the hierarchy should be communicating.
Org level vs. Pyramid of Purpose level
Without a clear purpose to ground the employee’s decisions, the only (bad) recourse is for management to step in and tell people directly what they should do. Of course, one of the many reasons this is a terrible idea is that top management cannot possibly know at this level of granularity what employees in the field should be doing! That’s a recipe for disaster, where everyone gets increasingly more frustrated.
This issue disappears if every level in the hierarchy sticks to what they are best suited to do, with the highest levels of the hierarchy concerning themselves with the lowest levels of the Pyramid.
The higher you are in a company’s hierarchy, the more fundamental the layer of the pyramid you should be concerning yourself with
Thus, the CEO should be concerned with the values and vision. The C-Suite will discuss the Mission and Goals. Individual contributors will tackle the features and other day-to-day activities.
This idea isn’t mine, and it isn’t new. In the universally beloved page-turner that is the 1869 Instructions for Large Unit Commanders, Helmut von Moltke writes²:
The higher the authority, the shorter and more general will the orders be. The next lower command adds what further precision appears necessary. The detail of the execution is left to the verbal order, to the command. Each thereby retains freedom of action and decision within his authority.
The CEO shouldn’t tell a developer to put a semicolon on the end of a line any more than a developer should wonder what new world the code they write will usher in. The CEO’s role is to lay out the vision and the mission and establish the company's values. Lower levels in the hierarchy should be built on top of these and add the required granularity. This allows everyone to leverage their skills, ensuring that the whole company is aligned, productive, and happy as a side benefit!
Wrapping up
Everything you do, day to day, should serve your vision—anything else is a distraction. As a leader, your job isn’t to tell people to do A rather than B; it is to define and socialize a kick-ass vision throughout the organization.
At every level underneath, your job should be to add the relevant detail — and just that! — so that the people reporting to you know how to proceed.
But, as always, it all starts with building a great vision, so start by verifying that yours is good.
¹ Harry E. Chambers. My Way or the Highway: The Micromanagement Survival Guide. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.
² Helmut von Moltke, 1869 Instructions for Large Unit Commanders, translated by Daniel J. Hughes and published in Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke, Daniel J. Hughes, and Harry Bell. Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings. Random House Publishing Group, 1993.
