In her thoughtful book Generous Thinking, Kathleen Fitzpatrick quotes John Kotter’s familiar but powerful observation: most organizations are “over-managed and under-led.”
The phrase stopped me. I’ve been turning it over ever since in coaching conversations, in team retreats, and in quiet reflection after a tough meeting. I’m also reminded when terrific leaders share with me the struggles they are facing, being over-managed and under-led.
Here are a few patterns I’ve observed that might help leaders notice their over-management and shift into greater leadership.
1. Managing Control vs. Leading with Trust
- Micromanaging approvals, permissions, or processes often communicates a lack of trust and drives disconnection. Too many leaders return to the competencies that served them in their previous role because they are familiar with them and have a career full of affirmation, rather than embracing the new and unfamiliar competencies needed in this leadership role.
- I see too many insecure leaders feeling threatened by smart, connected, or values-driven leaders on their team. Rather than embracing these leaders creating a complementary team, they feel threatened, marginalize them, and often push them out.
- Leadership requires courage to trust people, not just control outcomes. We need leaders to invite others’ brilliance rather than contain it and be threatened by it.
2. Crisis Reactivity as Comfort
- Crisis response is dramatic. It creates adrenaline. It feels important. Not only does it get you lauded for coming to the rescue, but it can also be a good excuse for not leading those you serve.
- Are we solving the crisis or perpetuating a cycle? The need to feel needed and the addiction to coming to the rescue and saving others are contradictory to leading and empowering others.
- When we’re addicted to reacting to a crisis, we tend to find them everywhere.
- The cost? No time or energy left for vision, alignment, connecting with your team, or leading actual progress.
3. Rational Decisions, Emotional Fallout
- Budget decisions made alone with a spreadsheet and announced via email from a generic account without tending to people’s emotions can corrode morale. I’ve seen and heard it. “I used to love it here, but now I’m just demoralized.”
- One heartless memo without context, hope, and conveying value about cutting professional development might save $10,000 and cost you $100,000 in disengagement.
- Across-the-board cuts (or raises) demotivate your best people and affirm underperformers.
- People need to feel seen and heard. It isn’t just about the decisions, it is also about how we communicate them.
4. Short-Term Efficiency, Long-Term Efficacy
- Canceling professional development travel to save 3% might seem wise, until it undercuts culture, relationships, learning, growth, and meaning.
- Cutting lunch to the bare minimum for an all-staff retreat might save $600. But what is the cost of leaving your team feeling undervalued and taken for granted over the next year? Are we protecting the culture or undermining it for short-term gain?
- Management solves for small problems in this moment. Leadership stewards people, purpose, and possibility for the long-term.
5. Scarcity Framing vs. Possibility Thinking
- When we only talk about challenges, problems, and the crisis of the moment, we miss the chance to imagine what’s possible, innovate, and create something better.
- Focused solely on problems, we can be obsessed and even fall in love with the problems, which can prevent us from leading transformation. Even the most pressing and critical challenges have within them possibilities.
- How are we framing our perspective, conversations, and focus?
Leading
Leadership doesn’t replace management, but it should guide it. Leading well means tending to culture, communicating with clarity and empathy, and cultivating a shared sense of purpose. It’s slow work, human work, culture work, and often invisible work.
But especially in these times of serious challenges, indefinite uncertainty, and disingenuous actors, leadership is the difference between surviving the moment and leading toward a better future for us all.
