Good Leaders Resist Micromanaging Their Team

Equal, Yet Different: Career Catalysts for the Professional Woman by Anita Bhogle talks about the catalysts that are required for women to reach peak potential-conditions, people, or even mindsets at home, at work, and in the ecosystem. An excerpt:

I dislike the term ‘women leaders’. I think there are only two categories of leaders or founders—good leaders and bad leaders, and that has absolutely nothing to do with gender. The way both genders are wired and conditioned does create certain strengths and weaknesses, but they are not things that define leaders.

When organizations consider candidates for leadership positions, they generally consider three things—the functional expertise of the managers, their team management skills and their leadership capability. A number of research studies show that women generally score high on functional skills. They are often better than men when it comes to things like attention to detail. In fact, at times, attention to detail, which has all along been a strength, gradually starts coming in the way. This is because, as leaders, you need to delegate and, therefore, learn to let go. Leadership is not only about your own performance but your ability to get the best out of your team. Good leaders, you will find,
resist micromanaging their team, preferring instead to trust the capabilities of their subordinates. A cliché that comes to mind, an apt one nevertheless, is: ‘What brought you thus far is not what is going to take you forward.’ Letting go, therefore, is an essential skill and one that is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, leadership roles come up unexpectedly or under adverse circumstances and the requirement is to find a capable leader to take charge of the team, even if she/he comes from a somewhat different functional area. It could be a wonderful career opportunity for a leader to broaden her experience. However, it also involves a high degree of learning in a short period of time to get to some level of subject matter expertise in the new role.

It is then quite likely that you don’t have the answers to all the questions that might come your way. Interestingly, it has been observed that in such a situation, men find it easier to say, ‘I will come back to you on this,’ whereas women feel inadequate if they can’t provide the answer to every question, there and then. I won’t be surprised if this in some way is related to the imposter syndrome or the fact that women tend
to constantly underrate themselves. We must remember that leaders too, like other people, learn every day, and in a complex and uncertain
environment, such situations are more likely to occur. So, one has to learn to be comfortable with it. Anjali Mohanty was a veteran in retail banking when she was unexpectedly offered a role in corporate banking. The CEO said that the energy that she brought to her current role was what he thought made her suitable for the new role being offered to her. ‘You need to know why you are being offered the role.

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You cannot be suspicious of the organization’s intent. I was both surprised and thrilled by the offer and went into it with an open mind,’ she says. It was a lot of hard work and learning but turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime for her. Madhabi Puri Buch had a similar experience when she joined SEBI, being the first professional from the private sector to be one of its full-time members on the board. While she was on home ground as far as capital markets were concerned, the regulatory nature of the job was totally new for her, and she had to hit the ground running. She says that it helped tremendously that the culture that the chairman had set was one of learning and sharing.
Not only did no one raise an eyebrow when she would bluntly declare that she ‘did not get it’, but there was 360-degree support to explain to her how things worked. Organizational culture starts at the top and it helps hugely to have leaders with a learning mindset.

When I used to be in advertising two decades ago, several formidable women headed the media departments of leading agencies. But till recently, Nandini Dias (who has now stepped down) was the only woman heading a large media set-up. When she was appointed CEO at Lodestar Media, Nandini soon realized that her core competence—developing media strategy and innovating solutions for marketing
challenges, where she’d earned most of her accolades—would not be enough. She would have to quickly develop new skills and take a few giant leaps in new areas. She needed to better understand the company’s business aspects, the nuanced details of exhaustive financial statements and learn to connect the dots across multiple developments within and outside the organization.

Excerpted with permission from  Equal Yet Different: Career Catalysts for the Professional Woman by Anita Bhogle published by Penguin.

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