With great privilege, comes great micro-managing.

As always, a wonderful episode of House, MD titled "Better Half" (season 8, episode 9). The highlight was the great quote early in the show spoken by Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) to Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps): "With great privilege, comes great micro-managing." While it made for a great laugh, it is also an incredibly sad, but perhaps too often true description of some leaders.

I realize I personally am prone to this leadership sin. There are some tasks I don't mind delegating, but key areas I want to have pretty tight control over... and thus I can see myself micro-managing people so that they are annoyed and quickly lose any desire to pour their energy into a project, never mind make it a success. There are times when another person has been delegated the task and it does not go as well as it expected, and I'm the one responsible... further supporting my false thinking that "I need to control every detail." However, when I allow others to accomplish a task in a different way, frequently I find much more buy-in and participation from others than I could have marshalled.  I can think of times where I've observed individuals in a position of authority "being attentive to the details" - code words for "micromanaging." In the process, an employee quickly loses enthusiasm, energy, and creativity. Likewise, there are many times an employee has been given a task, a budget and the exhortation "go for it" within these boundaries and it is amazing to see what has been accomplished.