mentor or Micromanager? An executive coach's delegation advice

Two unrelated executive coaching clients this month told me they angered their CEO, as they saw it, “for caring about their people”.

Here is one case.

One of my executive coaching clients, a European industrial firm’s APAC head of sales and business development with he title of CBDO, mentored a team member for high-pressure customer cases—of which they have plenty lately. The CBDO accompanied the newly hired manager to meetings with key customers he personally knew, and even to workshops where he briefed the manager on high-visibility machinery products. Things seemed to go well. The CBDO enjoyed the process, and the new manager learned fast.

The adventure, however, soon got him in trouble with the CEO.

Why on earth did he spend hours at meetings that the new manager was supposed to handle? Why the personal machinery briefing? Was there nobody else who knew the machines? Couldn’t the newcomer handle clients?

Had the firm made a hiring mistake?

The CBDO’s confusion came from the kind of good intentions that pave the way to hell, as they say. But “Where did things go wrong?” is not the right question to ask here.

The real question is: “What should executives do when pressure and high workload pull them back to the operational level?”

AWARENESS: What pulls leaders away from a strategic mindset?

The problem starts with understandable, but ultimately hurtful human habits and comfort zones. People get promotions to leadership because they performed well at lower levels. They gained experience, then routine, and learned to love what they did well. A promotion to leadership, despite its pride and honour, is a step away from the well-known routine. In the leader’s mind, it feels like a waste not to use their experience for the company’s benefit. When someone needs guidance with a machine or spreadsheet, they step in to help.

SKILLS: Why is delegation so hard?

The problem is that when the leader steps in, reports often step aside. The boss can solve the problem before a newcomer can even understand it. The leader knows whom to call, where to find data and fixes things from confident muscle-memory. But executives must be careful to mentor and delegate as opposed to taking over completely. It’s hard to watch someone do something at half the speed, self-confidence and precision, but that’s where the leader started 5 or 10 years back. A leader’s job is not to solve problems: it is to produce people who can solve them.

HABITS: Make delegation irreversible

Executives don’t need coaches to get this in theory. They remember that ineffective micromanagers are often admired: who doesn’t like a boss who does your job? Many leaders I coach have EMBAs and can calculate the damage of gaps in workloads and succession to the dollar. But humans are poor followers of their own advice. Pressure, new technologies and complaining clients drag them back to the shop floor. The remedy is transparency: if all sides (boss, manager, other managers, client, supplier) know that a manager took over a project, it’s harder for the boss cut across functional lines.

It’s not that executives are not welcome in the workshop, or at the negotiating table. It’s that while they spend two hours mentoring someone, they are needed in five other rooms.

People at work are called “Human Resources” for a reason. A senior executive can spend 45 minutes to an our on briefing someone, but beyond that, the right question is: “Who else knows this particular task as well as I do?” Then, that person should either do the task, or teach the task.

Questions to consider before you intervene:

1. Does someone else already know enough to solve this?

2. Am I helping—or taking ownership back?

3. Is my involvement creating future capability or future dependency?

Many of the ideas in this article come directly from executive coaching conversations. Message me to learn how we can apply them to your leadership team: https://www.eastwestleadership.com/#contact