Good Managers Don’t Make These Mistakes

March 14, 2024

All managers make mistakes. However, some mistakes are not only avoidable, they’re costly to business and hinder team’s development and growth.

Most managers are too busy playing a catch up game—handling unexpected issues, calendars filled with meetings and pacifying unhappy stakeholders—that they fail to pay attention to harmful practices that hurt their team’s productivity and performance.

These mistakes repeated often can become a habit—they start creeping into everything they say and do. But unconscious habits like these are not only hard to detect, they’re even harder to break. Once your brain learns how things must be done, it runs on autopilot and makes most of the decisions for you.

To break unhealthy patterns of thinking and acting, managers need to pay special attention to how they communicate, collaborate and get work done. In particular, they must pay attention to these 5 mistakes that other good managers don’t make:

Delegate, then abdicate

John C. Maxwell said in Developing the Leaders Around You “If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.”

Learning to delegate well is the most crucial part of a manager’s job, but doing it right is a big struggle.

When managers delegate work and leave their people struggling to figure out everything on their own, lack of support at crucial moments leads to frustration, confusion, helplessness and can even be demotivating.

Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.
— Andy Groove, High Output Management

Good managers understand this very well—empowerment is not boundary less freedom.

The big challenge here is in knowing how much to be involved. Involved too much? You run the risk of micromanagement. Involved too little? It can make you miss those critical moments where your support or advice could have made a difference. The magic is in the balance.

To avoid making this mistake:

Set upfront expectations on the intermediate milestones.
Align on frequency of updates. Discuss how and when you can touch base to keep things moving.
When your team faces challenges or setbacks, help them find their own solutions by asking questions instead of spoon-feeding solutions. Coach, don’t solve is the mantra. Ask relevant questions to develop their critical thinking skills

Don’t be the manager who delegates and forgets. Be around to guide, support and be their force to help them stay resilient when faced with setbacks and challenges.

Bottleneck decision-making

Reed Hastings writes in No Rule Rules “Lead with context, not control. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.”

Managers who don’t trust their team to make their own decisions get involved in every decision—they think it’s part of their job.

Getting involved in every small detail, in every small problem is no joke. It takes a lot of energy and often leads to decision fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout.

There’s another problem. Exhaustion from attending to surface-level problems leaves less mental space to think about hard problems. More time spent on small decisions leaves less time for key decisions—decisions that are critical for business and organization growth.

Reliant on their boss to do all the thinking for them, employees fail to think for themselves. Dependent on their boss for every small decision and every small action stagnates their growth—it slows them down, prevents them from developing critical thinking skills, and leaves them feeling uninspired and unmotivated.

This conscious or unconscious internal response is incredibly expensive both for the organization and for the individual. Trying to build leaders by regularly exposing them to your brilliance guarantees a lack of development. You will not have allowed anyone around you to show up with solutions outside the reach of your own personal headlights. If your employees believe their job is to do what you tell them, you’re sunk.
— Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations

Good managers don’t make this mistake. They build their employees’ confidence by enabling them to make their own decisions thereby putting their knowledge and experience to practice.

Being empowered to make their own decisions also increases their motivation to do better because they feel accountable for their decisions.

To avoid this mistake:

Shift from control to context.
Give clarity to your team on the decisions they can own independently from the ones that require your attention.

Don’t be the manager who thinks that your team will screw up if you aren’t involved in the decision-making process. Give them a chance to earn your trust.

Dictate solutioning

General George S. Patton said “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

Yet, most managers do exactly the opposite.

They give the right opportunities to their team but refuse to give the autonomy that goes with it. They want things done and want it done their way. It leaves their team members, especially the high performers frustrated.

Good managers don’t make this mistake.

They empower their team to find their own solutions by focusing on the results without laying down the specific steps needed to achieve them.

To avoid this mistake:

Show them the destination but let them steer their own ship. Share the “what”—the specific outcome that needs to be achieved. Support it with “why”—how it fits into the big picture and define what success looks like; what looks like a job well done. Knowing the “Why” of doing something is both motivating and inspiring. It opens the door to creativity and innovation.

Don’t let your ego or desire for perfectionism obstruct others from getting work done. Accept different approaches. Let your team know that some failure is acceptable, but that doesn’t give them permission to be careless or lazy. Talk to them about what’s acceptable and what’s not. You can keep the bar high while leaving room for learning and growth.

In Drive, Daniel Pink writes that people often want autonomy over the four T’s “their task, their time, their technique, and their team.”

He adds “In an economy that demands nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities—as any artist or designer would agree. Autonomy over task has long been critical to their ability to create. And good leaders (as opposed to competent “managers”) understand this in their bones.”

Don’t be the manager who doesn’t let their team determine their own solutions. You aren’t being helpful; you’re simply being annoying.

Fail to look beyond results

Robert Sutton writes in Good Boss, Bad Boss “The best bosses do more than charge up people, and recruit and breed energizers. They eliminate the negative, because even a few bad apples and destructive acts can undermine many good people and constructive acts.”

When it comes to eliminating these bad apples though, many managers turn a blind eye, especially if these people are high performers who have an uncanny ability to produce outstanding work.

Tolerating their toxic behavior—getting agitated when others make mistakes, expect them to work at their pace, pass sarcastic remarks, challenge their intelligence, belittle their skills, or demean them when things don’t work out the way they expected—conveys the message that such behavior is acceptable and anybody can get away with it.

This can happen in two ways:

Passive enabler: Passively enabling these behaviors by failing to notice them and staying ignorant of the effect they have on your team.
Active enabler: Actively contributing to it by delaying action—waiting for more proof, ignoring the conflict, worrying about losing them. You may also try to rationalize the situation by convincing yourself that things aren’t that bad after all, or they are too minor to be noticed.

Sometimes really talented people have heard for so long how great they are, they begin to feel they really are better than everybody else. They might smirk at ideas they find unintelligent, roll their eyes when people are inarticulate, and insult those they feel are less gifted than they are. In other words, these people are jerks. Many may think, “This guy is so brilliant, we can’t afford to lose him.” But it doesn’t matter how brilliant your jerk is. The cost of jerkiness to effective teamwork is too high. Jerks are likely to rip your organization apart from the inside.
— Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules

Focusing too much on results can also make you ignore poor performers in the team with the attitude that they don’t deserve your attention. But doing nothing about their poor performance is not harmless—it impacts morale in the team as others feel dragged down to make up for their slack and find lack of accountability as a sign that their manager doesn’t care about fairness or building excellence in the team.

Good managers don’t make this mistake. They know that the overall damage done to the team by tolerating bad behavior or poor performance is highly expensive.

To avoid this mistake:

Don’t put off or delay difficult conversations—especially when it involves toxic behavior or poor performance. It will only get worse and won’t disappear on its own.
Be careful about the words you choose. Emotionally charged words can trigger negative emotions and put them on the defensive.
Share your observations, talk about the impact and invite them to come up with a solution.
Leave the feedback with clear expectations on the desired changes, timeline and repercussions of not taking the feedback seriously.

Don’t be the manager who only cares about results. You can build an excellent team without compromising on your team’s well-being.

Offer too much protection

Cal Newport writes in Deep Work “The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”

Work environments can be brutal especially when people lack respect for others’ time and productivity. Too many meetings, conflicting requests and information overload can damage a team’s productivity. Without getting an opportunity to focus for long durations without interruptions, employees can’t produce quality work.

Interruptions are destructive to productivity. The more a manager can absorb trivial and unnecessary interruptions, the better work their team can produce.

It’s natural for good managers in such environments to act as a shield for their people—protecting them from getting overwhelmed by requests, blocking information that doesn’t concern them and keeping them away from anything that might distract them from doing their work.

However, what starts as a healthy protection can often turn into toxic behavior that’s destructive to a team’s growth. When managers don’t know where to draw the line, they tend to go overboard with it.

By not knowing how to separate healthy interactions from unhealthy ones:

They block their people from getting the necessary exposure.
Their team may acquire technical excellence but fail to learn other valuable skills like effective communication, conflict resolution or delegation.
They create strict team boundaries with a “my team” vs “your team” attitude by treating their own team’s goals as primary and everything else secondary. This breaks down collaboration necessary to achieve common goals.

Good managers don’t make this mistake. Instead of trying to over protect their teams from unnecessary distractions and interruptions, they coach them to manage their own time well.

To avoid this mistake:

Explain the benefits of healthy collaboration and show what it looks like.
Empower them to say no to requests that do not align with their goals.
Encourage them to go beyond team boundaries to acquire knowledge about other teams and functions.
Tell them to make decisions aligned with the larger interest of the organization and not just their teams.

Don’t be the manager who acts as a gatekeeper—spending more and more time shielding people while spending less on doing work that will move your team forward.

Summary

Manager’s can’t do it alone. They need their team to fulfill goals and achieve business targets. Effective delegation helps them achieve that. But this is where many managers go wrong. They delegate without providing the necessary support to their team to do well in their jobs. Delegate, then follow-through. Don’t leave your people struggling by expecting them to figure everything out on their own.
Managers who like to be involved in every decision don’t help their teams make better decisions, they make it worse. Being part of every small detail, every issue and every problem bottlenecks decision-making and prevents their team from developing critical thinking skills required to learn, grow and do well at work.
Providing clarity to the team on the specific goals and outcomes they need to achieve is critical. But some manager’s take this too far by not only defining what must be done, but also dictating how to achieve those results. Not letting your team determine their own solutions limits their ability to learn, adapt and course correct if necessary.
It’s important for a manager to be outcome oriented, but not at the cost of their team’s mental health and well-being. Toxic high performers and poor performers in the team can have a huge negative impact on the performance and productivity of the entire team. Don’t ignore them and let the problem spiral out of control.
Trying to protect your team from unnecessary time wasting activities or other distractions at work is a good thought process. But it can’t be achieved by acting as a shield for your team. Taken too far, this protection can prevent them from getting the right information and building the right skills. Instead coach them to manage their own time well.