Do Hands-On Leaders Get Better Results?

Episode #391 Do Hands-On Leaders Get Better Results?

ARE ALL HANDS-ON LEADERS MICROMANAGERS?

There are different schools of thought about when and how leaders should get involved in their people’s work.

Some pundits call it “leading from the front”: showing your team that nothing is beneath you, and that you are prepared to get your hands dirty to help them deliver.

But there’s a sinister side to dipping down into your team’s work. Organisational design and performance depends on leaders at each level doing the right job; not the job they drift into to fill the gaps their people leave when they don’t perform.

I’m a massive advocate for leaders knowing their role and staying in their lane, which is why I was mildly triggered when I came across an article in Harvard Business Review titled, “The Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders”.

Is this research telling us that dipping down into your people’s work and micromanaging your team is the latest performance panacea?

In this newsletter, I go deep on the concepts of working at level, capability building and micromanagement. I begin by taking a look at what it means to work at the right level; I explore the HBR article about hands-on leaders; and I finish with six tips to prevent you from becoming a micromanager.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND ORG STRUCTURES

Every organisation has some form of structure and, obviously, the larger a business becomes, the more people are employed, and the more structure is required to keep it all together.

There are many vast, complex businesses that span multiple industries and multiple countries. These companies have many layers of leaders to control the flow and execution of work.

Just think about how many layers your current organisation has, and ask yourself, Is it clear why each layer exists?

Working at level is really simple in principle: whichever level you’re at, you should only do the work that’s appropriate for that level. To be clear, that means you don’t do the work of people at other levels: that’s what they’re paid to do. But this is much easier in principle than it is in practice.

The concept of organisational levels was studied deeply by Canadian management consultant, Elliott Jaques in the back half of the 20th century. His Stratified Systems Theory laid the groundwork for modern organisational design.

Jaques observed that, as you ascend through each level of an organisation, the complexity becomes greater. Along with that increasing complexity, the time horizon for the work at that level is longer. Let me bring this to life with a quick example:

If you’re a frontline worker in say, a customer service role, your job is to answer incoming customer queries and complaints.

Despite the obvious pressures and difficulties of the job, it’s not a particularly complex task, and the time horizon for your job is really short: it’s today… this hour… this call, even.

If you did look beyond the immediate day-to-day demands of answering customer queries, it would only be to try to improve your own ecosystem. For example, to suggest improvements to a call centre process or to rewrite a telephone script.

If you did that, you would demonstrate a level of proactivity that would probably see you earmarked as a future leader. In summary, though, at the frontline, your job is finite; it’s relatively simple; and it has an extremely short time horizon on which to focus.

Let’s contrast this with the CEO of that same company.

As CEO, your number one job is to ensure the perpetuation of the business. That means:

• Navigating an uncertain economic, political, and regulatory environment;
• Making strategic bets about which products to invest in, and which markets to compete in;
• Building the workforce capability of the future; and
• Managing multiple stakeholders with competing interests.

The complexity at that level is many multiples of the frontline complexity, and the time horizon you focus on isn’t measured in days: it’s measured in years.

I’m sure you can see this operating implicitly in your company right now; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that each organisational level is optimised.

The difference between frontline and the CEO is pretty clear, but the difference between, say, a General Manager and an Executive is much less so.

The bottom line of Stratified Systems Theory is this:

• Every level must have a unique purpose;
• Every level must have a unique set of deliverables; and
• Every level must have a unique time horizon.

If you aren’t clear on this, you’re going to be tempted to dip down: that is, to do the work that rightly belongs at the levels below you.

And if you focus on your people’s work at that level of detail, you will slip quietly into micromanagement.

HANDLING THE LEADERSHIP TRANSITIONS

Working at level becomes trickier the higher up you go. In your very first leadership role, you’ll most likely have quite a small team. You’ll be what we call a Leader of Others. You don’t have any leaders reporting to you, just individual contributors.

Your work may not be strictly confined to leadership work either. You’ll probably have an assumed level of output from being on the tools yourself. And with the flatter organisational structures that are being implemented in large businesses, there’s an ongoing need to do technical work at ever-higher levels.

Certain industries (like law, education and consulting) also expect hands-on work from their senior leaders.

As a Leader of Others, though, it’s really easy to dip down into your people’s work. In fact, it’s almost expected that you’re going to do it. But if you do, you can develop some bad habits that can be quite difficult to shake.

When you get promoted to the next level, you find yourself in a Leader of Leader’s role. You have other leaders reporting to you, who have their own teams below them. You can’t do the work of your individual contributors from that position (or at least, you shouldn’t).

Leading through other leaders is a completely different proposition. You can’t grab the value levers yourself: you have to give your direct reports the clarity of objectives, resources, and capability to deliver without your direct involvement in the actual work.

This is where many leaders flounder. It’s no surprise that there are so many micromanagers out there, because they’ve never been coached and mentored into how to make that transition.

There are some very plausible reasons to explain why leaders dip down.

For a start, when you are promoted, you have to leave your comfort zone.

Simply letting go of your technical work in those early leadership roles is hard. Why? Because you’re good at it; you’ve spent years building your expertise and knowledge; it’s what defines your value in the market; and, besides, your technical skills are probably what got you promoted in the first place.

Let’s face it, a lot of your identity is tied up in your technical competence.

Then there’s just the pure loss of control.

You rationalise that no one can do the job as well as you (which might well be true). If you do it yourself, you know it’s going to get done the way you want. It’s easier, faster, and more reliable, so why not just roll your sleeves up and do it, right!?

Or you may be covering for a weak team with poor capability.

If your team members are underperforming or not delivering, dipping down into their work is one way of getting the job done: but you’re over-functioning for them.

Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to do the work yourself than it is to lead someone else to deliver it to the required standard.

Every time you dip down, you lose visibility and squander opportunity:

• The visibility of finding out what an individual is truly capable of; and
• The opportunity to let your people do it themselves, and build their capability.

This of course, can be justified with noble rationalisation: I lead from the front; I always get the job done; and I wouldn’t ask my people to do anything I’m not prepared to do myself…

All of which is complete bullsh!t: it sacrifices long-term performance for short-term expediency.

WHAT DOES HBR SAY?

When I saw the title of the Harvard Business Review article, The Surprising Success of Hands-on Leaders, I immediately thought, “Here we go: another excuse for leaders to justify interfering in their people’s work!”

The authors looked at a few companies that have been extremely successful, and attribute that success to certain leadership and cultural behaviours. It begins by stating:

“Senior leaders should focus on the ‘what’—purpose, vision, strategy, goals, resource allocation, and assembling a capable team. To protect their time for those high-level priorities, they have to delegate the day-to-day operating decisions (the ‘how’) to their subordinates.

“Many CEOs would claim they care about execution. What distinguishes the leaders of these high-performing firms is their sustained and close attention to behaviours and systems. They are teachers and system builders.”

The article explores five core principles of hands-on leaders:

1. They obsess over customer metrics.

Not just how a customer benefits the company, but the metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer. They focus deeply on how the business creates and delivers value for its customers.

How do I interpret this? This is ultimately just about strategy, and how strategy drives the operating model of the company. Nothing about this screams “hands-on” to me. It should be a focus of every single leader, everywhere, and it starts at the top.

2. They architect the way work gets done.

This is about shifting decision rights closer to the front lines, and equipping those teams with the tools and frameworks that allow them to act. It often requires leaders to give up control, to redistribute authority, and to remove the need for upwards approvals. It also reduces the friction points that slow teams down.

What’s my spin on this? This is the whole point of leading at level: pushing accountability for decisions downwards so that they’re made as close to the action as possible. At this stage, I’m still reading patiently waiting for the ‘hands-on’ bit.

3. They use experiments to make decisions.

Everyone from frontline workers to executives is expected to propose ideas, and test them through structured experiments. This is the formal implementation of the scientific process.

How do I interpret this? It seems like a sensible process for regulating investment in new ideas. It removes opinion, conjecture, and politics, and it forces a focus on value. Is this an indicator of hands-on leadership, or is it just the process of understanding value at every level of the business?

4. They lead by teaching the toolkit.

This is getting a little bit more hands-on now. The authors use the example of senior executives at Danaher getting involved in training their leaders in the principles of Kaizen (continuous improvement). It requires leaders to know the customer; to observe so that they understand the problem; to analyse root causes using data; and to brainstorm countermeasures. This enables you to develop a rapid prototype.

My interpretation? A senior executive taking time out to engage in the training isn’t outlandish, but I would probably use a slightly different approach. I would invest in having someone else train the leaders without my personal involvement; and once they were trained, my job would be to support them and hold them accountable for delivering results to the required standard.

5. They strive to be better, faster, and cheaper—every year, forever.

This is absolutely critical. Leaders need to build systems, habits, and norms that embed continuous improvement into the culture, as a standard business practice.

My take on this? Every leader, at every level should be striving to create a culture of better, faster, cheaper… but crucially, not at the expense of the big-ticket value objectives that you’re pursuing.

It appears that the concept of the “hands-on manager” described in the article isn’t so much about leaders operating below their level or micromanaging; it’s not about doing things that your people are being paid to do; it’s not about rolling your sleeves up; it’s not about focusing on an inappropriately low level of detail.

It’s about being a strong leader who creates the conditions for performance. A leader like this understands the mantra:

Nose in, fingers out.

DON’T FALL INTO THE TRAP

Here are six tips for making sure you don’t slide into micromanagement:

1. Psychologically, you need to focus on the trade-off decision.

Do I do this myself, or do I stand back and support the person to do it? You’re trading off short-term delivery with long-term capability building. As I said earlier, you need to get the job done, so your decision has to be guided by your assessment of the risk.

What if the person doesn’t deliver? How big a deal is that going to be?

2. Look up and out, not in and down.

You’ll be tempted to look inwards, and to focus 90% of your energy on your team. But it helps to be conscious of this, looking outward from your team to your peers and boss.

If your tendency is to focus on the issues above your level, you’ll be way less likely to get drawn into the detail below your level.

3. Build capability.

Nothing will drag you down faster than lack of team capability. If your people aren’t competent (both individually and collectively), you’ll be forever dipping down: you won’t have a choice. So, hire the right people, move the wrong people out, and spend your time on improving their capability and performance, instead of compensating for their shortcomings.

4. Learn to inspect outputs.

Many leaders rely on inputs to manage their teams: things like time at the desk; hours worked; number of emails written; amount of talk time in meetings and so on.

None of this matters.

If you can work out how to inspect outputs, you’ll be able to lead for results, and this is when you can truly drive a step change in team performance.

5. Hold people accountable for delivery.

Many leaders will gladly accept a never-ending litany of excuses from their team. You’ve probably already worked out that some of your people are masters at finding a thousand ways to explain away their failures. But all of these are just variants of the same excuse: The dog ate my homework.

Strong single-point accountability is the only way to kill these excuses.

6. If you do choose to dip down, follow up with feedback and reset expectations.

Dipping down has to be the exception to the rule: a one-off. You can’t let it become a predictable pattern.

If you make a risk-based decision to do one of your people’s jobs for them, it can’t end there. You have to follow up with a conversation that goes something like this:

“Look, Marty, I had to step in to get the result this time, but I can’t keep doing that. It’s not my job; it’s your job, and you have to be able to do the job to the required standard, without my constant intervention. Otherwise, this simply isn’t going to work.”

Now that sends a pretty clear message: it also lets you get the job done, while still taking advantage of a teachable moment.

STAY IN YOUR LANE

Knowing how to stay in your lane, work at your level, and build your team’s capability are critical skills for every leader, no matter where you are in your company’s hierarchy. If you don’t master these skills early, the higher up you go the more you’ll be exposed.

Learning how to keep your finger on the pulse (or being “hands-on” as the HBR article calls it), without dipping down is one of the more subtle elements of leadership. Your objective should be to exercise restraint, and leave a vacuum for your people to fill, rather than you stepping in to fill the gaps yourself.

This creates a virtuous circle: your people’s job satisfaction improves; you build speed and momentum into your culture; and your own personal effectiveness increases… tenfold!