Manager Trap -- Adding too much value.

One of the easiest traps for hands-on leaders is to “Add Too Much Value,” for example by offering suggestions to improve every idea you get from a direct report.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There has a great quote here:

The problem is, you may have improved the content of my idea by 5 percent, but you’ve reduced my commitment to executing it by 50 percent, because you’ve taken away my ownership of the idea. My idea is now your idea—and I walk out of your office less enthused about it than when I walked in. That’s the fallacy of added value. Whatever we gain in the form of a better idea is lost many times over in our employees’ diminished commitment to the concept.

This failure mode is more pervasive than just improving ideas. Every time a manager fills a gap in a project they deprive a direct report the opportunity to grow by filling that gap themself.For an example of how this delegation might look, check out Leadership Micro-vacuums.

Every time they write a design doc, send status updates, or even run a sprint planning meeting they should ask “is there a direct report who would learn from this opportunity”If the idea of a direct report doing a task scares you because you know they won’t do as good a job as you, you should really check out Manager Tools on The Art of Delegation.

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People grow by doing; managers will get the most growth out of their team by letting the team do.