Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees

The Harvard Business Review says that being a “controlling” boss can hurt the bottom line, let alone employee morale:

Believe it or not, the mere thought of you can make your employees do a lousy job.In fact, if your employees consider you a controlling person, even an unconscious thought of you can have a negative effect on their performance. If, for example, they were to happen to subliminally see, out of the corner of their eyes, your name flash for 60 milliseconds, you could expect them to start working less hard. Even if they didn’t intend to slack off.

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It’s all too easy, once people become managers, for them to forget how deeply their employees value freedom and autonomy, and the extent to which some of them, at least, will react to any infringement of it, even unconsciously.

I’ve seen it before, firsthand. I had a boss who micromanaged everything my team did, literally adding days to the time it took to finish a project. I also had a boss who hectored me about deadlines–even though I never missed deadlines–several times a day in what I can only think was an attempt to assert his authority. The grand prize goes to the boss who told me who I could sit with when I ate lunch in the company cafeteria.

Seriously. No kidding. I’m sure it goes without saying that I probably didn’t always do my best work in those situations.

I maintain that when you give your staff parameters to do their jobs with the autonomy and empowerment to make decisions, they will become your greatest asset. When you stand over them like a parent does a rebellious child, you will get an employee who acts like a rebellious child, however subversively.

If managers hire the right people and give them the tools they need, managers shouldn’t have to be controlling at all. Management and control are two different things.

In my career I’ve been a manager of anywhere from three to more than a hundred employees. I viewed my management duties this way: I had my own work to do and little time or patience for staff who needed me to “stand over them” to ensure they did their work properly and on-time. I hired people who were professional and, once given parameters and the tools they needed, got their job done.

Nine times out of ten, that management philosophy worked well. The few times it didn’t usually indicated a need for me to work on my management skills or the person I was managing was–for whatever reason–in the wrong job.