Addiction to Detail

I have observed this particular organizational
dysfunction throughout my entire career, but
have never put my finger on a root cause until
I recently read a book called The Leadership Pipeline*.

The first thing that jumped out at me was a comment about the career transitions from
worker, to manager of people, to manager of
managers, to functional manager, to general manager, to business manager, etc.

1. Making these transitions successfully requires not only new skills, but the need to change what you VALUE as you advance.

That is a big idea.  When you are the individual worker you value doing an excellent job at the work – the knowledge, content, details, tasks etc.  Knowing the details and doing the work well defines success.

However when you transition to manager of workers…

You need to Value the managerial responsibilities more than you Value the work.

Success is now about managing the people, the costs and timelines, and developing the next managers – not the detail and the content.  You need to value these managerial tasks more than the details.

Which leads to second big point for me:

2. People who miss this first value transition, sometimes miss it for the rest of their career.

They can end up in functional or general management positions, and then this dysfunction permeates throughout the whole organization. (There’s the root cause!)

They think that they must maintain the same mastery of the details and content as the people who work for them or they will lose credibility.  And they don’t know what they would even do otherwise!

So they never make the Value transition to the higher level role.
And then they:

  • End up competing with their subordinates about who is smarter
  • Continue to torture their team for inappropriate amounts of detail
  • Waste everyone’s time doing deep dives into content
  • Develop a culture around being a brilliant hero vs. building a high performing team
  • Miss the opportunity to set strategic direction, lead the organization, and develop future leaders.

In essence, they squander their Leadership Pipeline.

People often ask:

What do I do when my boss requires even more detail than I do? and knows more detail than I do?  I’m afraid of losing credibility if I don’t stay deep in the content.

The answer has 3 parts.

1) Use this as an opportunity to connect your boss with your team, which is always a good idea.

Act as the broker of the detail not the owner.

Never be the one to personally carry detail upward.  Transparency and insight add value – moving detail upward degrades value.

2) Distract your boss from the details and help him see the necessary Value transition by proposing the kinds of measures he should be worried about. A few ideas:

  • Organizational fitness for purpose (getting the right roles defined and assessing the talent)
  • Developing processes and frameworks to measure and track what you need to know about the work getting done.
  • Talent management/development plan.
  • Process maturity around customer knowledge
  • Strategic alignment around priorities and values.
  • Process improvements which drive cost reductions
  • Effective relationships with partner organizations.

3) Focus on the Desired Outcome (You knew that one had to be in there!)
If you can drive more conversations around key desired outcomes, the discussions and resulting actions will naturally gravitate to a less detailed, more strategic level.

Detail is crucial if you are the one doing the work.  But if you are the one managing the people or managing the managers, you need to make the value-transition to value the leadership and managerial work more than the detail and the content of the work.

That’s what the business and your team needs from you.

See also:  Building Capacity.

* The Leadership Pipeine: by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel. The premise of the book is that organizations do not typically do a good enough job developing leaders so they are always seeking external candidates for key leadership positions – i.e., they have not built a “Leadership Pipeline” internally.

You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or Facebook, or read her books RISE and MOVE.


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