Three Management Habits That Waste Good People

“I need to see all of the information you have backing that decision up.”

A boss I had years ago said that every time I walked into his office with a decision. These weren’t hard decisions. We needed to put in some hardware, and it wasn’t a death-defying call. To me it was obvious. He wanted every piece of supporting information before he’d sign anything, and he wanted it every single time.

I’ve spent 33 years in enterprise technology, and I’d rank habits like his as a bigger waste of good people than bad hires and bad budgets put together. Nobody gets fired for them, and nobody writes them up. They grind people down a little at a time until the best ones stop trying or walk out the door, and the managers who do it never connect the exits to themselves. I hate these habits.

Picture a car driven with the parking brake on. The engine still runs. It runs hot and burns more fuel to go the same distance, and after enough miles something expensive wears out. The driver blames the car. Good people are the engine in that picture, and these three habits are the brake.

Why do some bosses demand 100 percent of the information before deciding?

Fear. My old boss wasn’t technical, and the hardware decisions I brought him were decisions he couldn’t evaluate on his own. He was afraid of the decision itself, so he asked for all of the information, as if a complete enough file would make the decision for him.

I make decisions on about half the information. On plenty of calls I’ll move with 25 or 30 percent, maybe 40, depending on what’s at stake. He wanted a hundred percent. Literally a hundred percent. That gap caused conflict between us, and I didn’t recognize it as the source until years later.

Now put yourself on the other side of that desk. You’ve done the analysis in your head in ten minutes, because that’s your job and you’re good at it. Then you spend two days building a justification document for a purchase that was never in doubt, and the problem you were trying to fix sits there while you type.

Your boss reads it and asks for one more number. You go back and get it. After the fourth round of that, why would you bring him anything at all?

That’s the brake. The good ones stop deciding and wait to be told.

The arrogance of the demand bothers me as much as the waste. A manager who insists on complete information is telling his people he doesn’t trust their judgement, and he’s saying it about the exact skill he hired them for. Would you keep handing your best thinking to somebody who treats it as a rough guess to be audited? Hell no. You’d take it somewhere it was wanted.

How much information does a manager need to make a decision?

Less than most managers want, and the amount depends on how hard the decision is to undo.

Jeff Bezos put a number on it in his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders. He wrote that most decisions should be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. Wait for 90 percent, he said, and you’re being slow. His argument was that a manager who’s good at correcting course pays less for being wrong than for being slow. I’d go lower than Bezos. Sixty percent is too high for me on an ordinary call.

Sort your decisions by two questions. Can you undo it, and what does it cost if you’re wrong?

A hardware purchase you’ll return or redeploy if it doesn’t work is cheap to reverse, so it gets made fast on a quarter of the information. A decision that’s expensive and permanent, like a ten-year lease or closing a department, earns the extra digging. Most of what lands on a manager’s desk in a given week belongs in the first group. Treat it like the second group and your team ends up waiting a month for a disk array. How many disk arrays is your team waiting on right now?

Then write the threshold down for your people. Tell them which decisions they can make on their own and which ones need you, and keep the second list short. I’m a big believer in delegating authority. If you’ve hired well, the person closest to the problem already knows more about it than you do, and your signature adds nothing but delay.

Otherwise, what are you paying those people for?

Leaders can make the damn decision.

The perfectionists I’ve worked for don’t hope for a flawless answer. They expect one. The wait can stall progress forever. That kind of delay can kill a project. A good-enough decision made on Tuesday and corrected on Friday beats a perfect decision that arrives after the window has closed.

How do you get a fearful boss to approve a decision?

Make the risk of saying no bigger than the risk of saying yes. With one old boss of mine, we learned to tell him the risk of no was much higher than the risk of yes. It had to be personal. A request that says “this will improve performance” goes into the pile. A request that says “if this array fills up, the system goes down during the busiest week of the year, and you’ll be the one explaining it” gets signed.

Put your recommendation in the first sentence. Don’t make a nervous boss read three pages to find out what you want, because every page is another place for him to find a question. State the decision and the cost of waiting in two sentences, then give him one paragraph of support. Offer the rest of the file as an attachment he can open if he wants it. He won’t open it.

Give him an exit, too. A boss who’s afraid of being wrong relaxes when he hears how the decision gets reversed. “If the new hardware doesn’t fix it, we return it within thirty days” turns a scary permanent choice into a cheap experiment, and cheap experiments are easy to approve.

None of this fixes the boss. It gets the work done while you decide whether you want to keep working for him. If the paperwork demands spill over into watching every move you make, you’re dealing with something bigger, and I’ve written about how to deal with a micromanager separately.

Nine months later, the same mistake

Every company I worked for did the same thing at review time, and I suspect most companies still do.

You sit down across from your manager. The first few minutes are praise: you did good, you did good, you did good. Then the tone shifts, and your manager says, “And now we’re going to focus on these things you did wrong.” Out comes a mistake from nine months ago. I’d made it, and I’d fixed it months before. It came back anyway, as if it had happened yesterday.

It’s annoyed me my whole career. Who does that help?

I’d have killed for good feedback, something I could use about the work I was doing that month and the work coming next. Instead I got a list of old failures and a 2 percent raise. A system like that leaves no room for anything except looking good, because looking good is the difference between a 2 percent raise and a 1.5 percent raise. That’s awful. Grown professionals spend weeks polishing their image to win half a point, and the company calls it performance management.

Why do annual performance reviews focus on weaknesses?

Because the annual review protects the company, and a list of weaknesses is documentation. If somebody gets fired next year, the file is already built.

I’ve never worked in a company where the HR person was somebody I could trust. Their loyalty was always with the company, and it should be. That’s their job. But anything you told them got used against you, and most employees figure that out fast. So the review becomes a deposition with coffee. Why would anybody tell the truth in a meeting like that? People admit nothing and walk out with their guard higher than when they walked in.

I hate what that costs. A team that’s afraid of the record stops reporting problems early. You’ve got several things going well and one thing going wrong, and the one going wrong is the one nobody wants to bring up. It’s the one they’re avoiding, and it’s the one that sinks the project. A review system that punishes old mistakes guarantees you hear about the new ones last.

A manager who dredges up a fixed mistake also tells the employee that fixing it didn’t count. Is that what you meant to teach? The person did exactly what you’d want and corrected the problem, and the reward is having it read back to them in a formal meeting tied to their pay. What lesson would you take from that? I’d take the lesson that the safest move is to hide the next one.

Feedback has a shelf life

I don’t ever focus on the weaknesses. Fix a problem when it happens, and once it’s fixed, it’s closed.

Why would you wait eleven months to tell somebody something useful?

Give feedback the week something happens, in a short private conversation. Say what went wrong and ask what the person plans to do about it. Once the fix is in, that mistake has a statute of limitations, and it never shows up in a review. If it comes back as a pattern, you’ll know, and you’ll have a fresh example to talk about with no need to dig up a stale one.

A review written this way contains nothing new. Everything in it has already been said out loud, in the moment, while it could still do some good. The annual meeting turns into a conversation about the next year: where the person is strongest and what you can clear out of their way. That’s the conversation people want. It’s also cheaper, because you’re building on strengths that already exist and spending far less effort trying to drag weaknesses up to average.

Pay deserves the same plain treatment. If the budget allows 2 percent, say so, and don’t pretend a forty-minute review produced the number. People can handle a small raise. What they resent is the theater. I’ve written more about what motivates team members, and none of it involves a list of last spring’s errors.

Are rah-rah team meetings a waste of time?

For anybody who already knows they’re doing good work, yes.

I’ve been on one project for years now, renewed every year at the same time, on a fixed price. That project has meetings where everybody gets together to rah-rah each other, and I skip them. I know that sounds cruel. There’s no value in that meeting for me. I don’t need somebody patting me on the head and telling me I’m doing a good job, because I’ve got better indicators than that, and the best one is getting hired again next year.

Employees don’t have my option. They can’t decline the all-hands, and they pay for it in hours. Put twenty people in a room for an hour of applause and you’ve burned twenty hours of work, plus the half hour each of them loses getting back into whatever they were doing. A pep rally doesn’t decide anything or tell anybody something they need to know. Its whole purpose is to make management feel like it did something about morale. That kind of theater drives me up the wall.

So who’s that meeting for? Not the people sitting in it.

And the people in that room can tell what’s going on. A pat on the head from somebody who couldn’t describe your work in two sentences feels like being handled. Would you feel appreciated by a manager who praises “the team” in a conference room and then sits on your budget request for six weeks? Of course not. You’d feel managed.

Run every recurring meeting through one test. Does it decide something, or does it tell people something they need and can’t get from an email? If the answer to both is no, cancel it and give everybody the hour back. That hour is worth more to a good employee than any amount of cheering.

What good recognition looks like instead

Recognition only counts when it’s specific and earned. Name the person and the thing they did, and say why it mattered. “Thanks to Maria for catching the licensing error before the audit and saving us a fine” lands. “Great job, everybody” disappears before people get back to their desks.

Better still, recognize people with the things they can use. Approve the request. Fund the training. Take the stupid task off their plate. Give them the next interesting project, and give it to them because they earned it. A senior engineer would trade a hundred rah-rah meetings for one manager who clears the road. Which would you rather have?

I’ve got my own sins as a manager. During a crisis I’ve micromanaged people who weren’t doing their job, and I told them that if they didn’t want to be micromanaged, they could do their damn job. That was a crisis. These three habits are something else. They’re what a manager does on an ordinary Tuesday, to people who are doing their jobs well. How do you forgive that?

The habits a good manager drops first

If you manage people, start with the decisions. Write down which calls your team can make without you, with the threshold set low for anything cheap to reverse. Stop asking for one more number on purchases nobody doubts. Then move feedback out of the annual review and into the week it belongs to, and let fixed mistakes stay fixed. Finally, go through your calendar and kill every meeting that exists to make people feel good about work they already know is good.

None of that costs money. It costs some pride, because each of these habits protects the manager more than it helps anybody else. My book My Boss is Insane covers the worst of what happens when nobody ever drops them, and the tips for new managers I put together cover what to build in their place. If the way you talk to your people is part of the problem, look at the hedge words that kill a leader’s credibility too.

I’m tired of so-called leaders burning through talented people with habits that cost them nothing to drop. The leadership hub collects the rest of what I’ve learned about running teams, and if you’re a leader with hard-won lessons of your own that belong in a book, my executive ghostwriting process is how I’d help you get them out of your head. Your people are the engine. Release the parking brake and see how fast they go.

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