The Puzzle Of Micromanaging Managers

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Have you fallen into the Sudoku vortex? These Sudoku puzzles are addictive -- like crossword puzzles without the words. The trick is to fit the numbers one through nine into every row, column, and three-by-three square on the page without repeating any configuration. They're a great way to while away a tedious flight from Pittsburgh to San Diego, for instance.



I was thinking about Sudoku puzzles the other day while rescheduling an international conference call for the third time. Our lives as managers are a bit Sudoku-like, at times: 8 million details and arrangements have to fit into our available time, such that priorities are attended to, bosses are satisfied, teams are accommodated, and clients are kept content it's a constant, complex puzzle, with way too many possible combinations and constant judgment calls. The good news is that when we get it all together, it's the greatest. It doesn't happen every day, or even every week. But those evenings when we go home knowing that we've put it all together and that it all works are golden.



Change Is Constant

But here's where Sudoku is different. With the puzzles, once they emerge from the Sudoku-matic or whatever machine puzzlemakers use to create new puzzles, nothing is going to change. You can't get halfway through a Sudoku puzzle and find that the empty space that required a six before now needs a seven. But in a manager's life, it's much more complicated, because nothing is fixed. It's all about moving parts.



Bosses change their requirements. Customers change priorities, and your No. 1 champion at your largest account can quit his job while you're on vacation. Your own team members get sick or go on maternity leave or decide to head back to graduate school. All sorts of things can happen on the fly, and they do. Your daily task as a manager makes completing even the most diabolical Sudoku puzzle look like beating a toddler at tic-tac-toe.



Any analogy that you can think of to describe a typical business leader's assignment falls short under scrutiny. People say leading a department is like quarterbacking a football team. That might be true if the players constantly moved on and off the field, the rules regularly changed in midplay, and the entire coaching staff might decide to change strategic direction and abandon football for lacrosse.



Or people say that a business leader is like an orchestral conductor. That's nice and dignified, but I've never seen a real-life orchestra where the oboes were unexpectedly given the cellists' music to play, or where the audience might suddenly decide, en masse, that they prefer bluegrass music to the Beethoven concerto you're conducting, and depart the auditorium. When you think about what a business manager has got on his or her plate, you realize that a management career isn't for the weak-willed or wimpy. There's way too much at stake, from quarterly numbers and career paths to product launches and system crashes, to take the leadership role lightly.



Streamline the Process

And that's why it's critical for the people at the tops of organizations -- and the people in staff roles who have influence on managers' roles -- to be mindful of the heavy burden that business managers bear. If you think for a moment about the complex, shifting, insanely demanding Sudoku puzzle that your managers are asked to solve every day, it's obvious that the greatest service you -- as a senior leader or a human resources, information technology, legal, or finance staff person -- can provide would be simply to minimize any additional, corporate burdens.



Think, for instance, about the typical corporate performance-review process. As an HR person myself, I would think that a critical priority would be to implement the simplest and most time-effective performance-appraisal system ever. But that's not always what I see. Companies heap process on process and form on top of form, tying up managers' [and their teams'] time. And that's a mistake. If we don't trust our managers to manage well, maybe what we need is new managers [or more trusting executives] rather than another time-sucking process.



There are countless ways companies force employees into pointless exercises. Many corporate expense-reimbursement policies, for instance, are written with a strong tone of "we don't trust our managers, much less our employees, to manage expenses wisely without explicit guidance." All that explicit guidance, naturally, translates into hours and hours of clerical time, as expense vouchers are checked against 35-page-long expense-reimbursement guidelines.



Trust Your Hires

Fear is a strange thing. It motivates us in illogical ways -- so that, for instance, the fear of a single employee charging an unauthorized viewing of Rocky III to his expense account justifies, for many employers, the creation of vast bureaucracies to check and double-check every single person's every expense. Penny wise, pound foolish -- just in case!



The 3D, real-time, shifting Sudoku puzzle that managers confront every day is best solved with full concentration and a minimum of distraction. Senior leaders and staff professionals get to decide how many additional, burdensome just-in-case rules to enact and enforce. Maybe there's a manager out there not managing -- maybe there are six or seven -- but does every manager have to bear that burden?



Might we, could we possibly, decide to trust managers to manage [and employees, come to that, to manage themselves] and cut out the extra rules and systems? Might we see that, given time to solve puzzles rather than triple-check expense vouchers and force-rank their teams, our managers actually shine? I have a feeling we would. Why not unfetter your managers from some of the rules designed to prevent bad management -- remind ourselves that we only hire smart and capable managers in the first place -- and see what happens?