Unlocking Micromanagement With Colin Fisher

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Chapters:
00:00:00 – Cold Start & Intro
00:04:09 – Meet Colin Fisher
00:05:03 – Life Is Improvised
00:09:12 – Why Help Can Feel Like Control
00:18:28 – Checking In vs Checking Up
00:25:41 – Remote Work and the Trust Gap
00:29:43 – Why Creative Work Looks Messy
00:35:54 – Your Leadership Brand Speaks First
00:43:33 – The Team Size Problem Nobody Names
00:55:20 – The CLEAR Way to Set Expectations

Colin Fisher (00:02)
We, as a leader, don’t have a mindset of what it looks like when we’re doing these kind of discovery-based, novelty-based, creative and learning tasks, then we’re going to mistake that for inefficiency.

It was only 7% of senior leadership teams had perfect agreement on how many people were on the team. 93% had disagreement about who’s even on this team? Who are we supposed to be working with?

Skot Waldron (00:37)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

My next guest is someone that sparked something in me. I’m on my bike, I’m riding my bike, and I listen to a lot of podcasts when I’m cycling. And I’m out there and I listen to his podcast called Choiceology with Katy Milkman. And it’s all about behavioral psychology and the idea of why we do what we do. And I love that stuff. Anyway, this guy came on. He was talking about some of the coolest stuff and the idea what he was talking about was so intriguing to me that I noted it. I said, you know, I told my Apple assistant, I’m not going to say it because then she’ll pop up, is that I wanted to remember this person.

So, I wanted to ask them to be on the show. And Colin Fisher graciously accepted to be on my show. And that’s who I’m going to talk to today. He has done some extensive research in the idea of micromanagement, and that is a little bit, well, actually a lot of what we’re going to talk about today. He is very into this idea of improvisation as well. Being a jazz musician and playing the trumpet and kind of playing in that world has really made improve a huge piece of the way he thinks about work and culture and leadership. And we’re going to kind of tie those things together because it was really interesting while we’re talking about it, how they blend and how they kind of are the thing that fights the other thing, when we’re getting into discussing micromanagement and what that means.

Colin M. Fisher, Ph.D., is a professor. He’s an author, speaker, and occasional jazz trumpet player. He is the author of The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, which has been translated into eleven languages, is now available in the UK and paperback. Colin is a professor of Organizations and Innovation and Ph.D. Programme Director at University College London’s School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University. In his prior career as a jazz trumpet player, Colin was a long-time member of the Grammy-nominated Either/Orchestra, with whom he toured extensively and recorded several critically acclaimed albums.

So, you know, here we go. We’re going to talk to Colin a little bit here and it’s going to be awesome. Here we go. Yep.

Colin, welcome to the show, man. It’s good to see you.

Colin Fisher (04:12)
Great to see you, Skot. Thanks so much for having me.

Skot Waldron (04:14)
Well, I wanted to go ahead and start off with a 5-minute, totally improv jazz solo on the trumpet. Could you please proceed with doing that for us?

Colin Fisher (04:26)
Yeah, just let me go grab the trumpet. Gotta change our recording settings here a little bit, but–

Skot Waldron (04:31)
Sure. I mean, that’s so cool. I mean, improv’s been a part of your life for forever. That’s what, you know, jazz is built on this whole idea of improv and what we do. And, you know, let’s tie, I want to tie that into this idea of leadership just at the beginning of the show, right? How do we think of that of improv as leadership and leadership as improv and human behavior and what we do?

Colin Fisher (04:59)
Yeah, but I mean everything’s improvised, right? That’s life is improvised. And to me, I think it’s an unusual path to say, oh yeah, I was a jazz musician and I got really interested in how not only you know we improvise in the arts, but how it’s everywhere that like all of our conversations, our social interactions, our days are improvised. And that, how can we use that idea more broadly and not just in the arts? And that’s actually what led me to discover the field of studying organizations and management that at I actually did this master’s degree at NYU in what I like to call Crap I Made Up, where they have this program where they let you propose whatever degree you want. And I said, “I want to study improvisation across different art forms and different musical traditions.”

And as I was writing my master’s thesis for that, I stumbled on the work of a social psychologist named Teresa Amabile, who was studying creativity. And I was really interested that, you know, there was someone out there who had really actually figured out a way to think rigorously and do some high-quality social science on a really squishy concept like creativity. And so, I looked up, you know, where she was and if she was still studying these things. And it turned out she was in this field called organizational behavior at this place called Harvard. And I was like, hey, I like what you’re doing. I’m interested in studying the conditions under which teams can improvise creatively. Do you think I could come get a PhD with you? And to my everlasting surprise, delight, and fear, they said, “yeah, hey, that would be great.”

So, I ended up in this field, because I thought improvisation was such a more broadly applicable concept, and that it’s something that even in these kind of highly bureaucratic, allegedly rational organizations that we are often a part of in our work lives, we’re improvising all the time. We just don’t acknowledge it. And so, I think, you know, this idea of how, you know, people who are very conscious of their own improvisation and that they’ve prepared themselves, they’re structuring their teams and their work around it. There’s a lot to learn from them for the times, especially now when everything’s changing so quickly, about how they’re able to adapt so seamlessly and collaborate in even the most turbulent of times.

Skot Waldron (07:42)
This is so interesting to me. I mean, number one, I love jazz. I’m super jealous of jazz musicians because I could just never quite get it, right? Like I was classically trained and I was just like, those jazz people. They’re so hipper. There’s so much more hipper. No, they’re way hipper. They’re hipper hipper than I am. So anyway, I made up a bunch of words there.

But I think that like there’s something there that was so intriguing to me about the improvisation idea behind it and what I think is really cool too is talking about your work with micromanagement too, because I want to dive into that a lot too, because I think that there’s an interesting intersection there. How you studied this idea of micromanagement and what’s going on there. My work’s revolving around a lot of that right now. But also pivoting into writing some other information about improvisation. But the whole basis of improvisation is I can’t control the outcome. And isn’t that what micromanagement is about? Is being able to control an outcome?

Colin Fisher (08:54)
Yeah, it’s certainly, I think, at least the illusion of it. But I think actually when people feel micromanaged. So, when we think from the perspective of the employee, of the person who’s on the receiving end of what they see as micromanagement, it’s often not the outcome that makes it feel micromanage-y. It’s the process. And it’s so it’s this feeling that somebody’s not just telling you where it is we should go, what mountain we’re supposed to climb, or what destination we’re supposed to arrive at. And actually, usually people like a lot of clarity and direction on the outcomes that we’re supposed to achieve, especially when we’re working in a team or a bigger organization. But where people really start to rub up against these more these feelings of direction and control is when it’s directed at the process. So, you’re saying, you know, here’s step one, here’s step two, here’s step three, and you’ve got to hit those. That’s where we feel micromanaging.

And so actually, I think this, you know, micromanagement, I think you you’re absolutely right, does kind of come at the expense of improvisation because improvisation is inherently a process that, you know, while it’s got constraints and while it has borders, that we get to choose what actions we’re taking. But I think this relationship, though, is really interesting in that my interest in improvisation was what led me to do research on help and kind of its flip side micromanagement at work. Because what I was originally looking at was leader interventions into teams. So, when did leaders feel the need to jump in, you know, say, hey, there’s something going wrong with this team, and I’m going to try and help them somehow.

And that to me, that idea of we have to diagnose a problem, we have to figure out what’s going on there, and then we figure out when to act in this timing of when to jump in. That was actually my PhD thesis that my doctoral dissertation was called the timing of team coaching interventions, because I was looking at this phenomenon. But as I was looking around for this, I thought it was going to act kind of, there were going to be these leaders who were like chess masters or something, where they could look at a board really quick and know exactly what was going on and what the problem was and jump in.

But when I actually started studying this in more detail, and I did a study where I was looking at these consulting firms and I asked them to nominate the people who were the best team coaches they have, the people who were, you know, seen as being great coaches, and other leaders who were seen as being not such great coaches. And I was comparing the kind of behaviors of the two of them. And I was looking for these kind of like diagnostic cues all the time. But what I actually found was it wasn’t that the best coaches were going in there and looking at it like a chess master and knowing every piece on the board and what was supposed to do. Instead, they would come in, and they would ask questions and they’d really listen carefully to the answers. And what seemed to differentiate these great coaches from these not-so-great coaches was mostly about question asking and listening, and not about some amazing diagnostic schema.

So, I mean that really set me on this path towards, you know, looking at people who were coming in and assuming they knew the answer and the best way to do things. And those were the people who were seen as micromanagers. Whereas the people who were asking, what’s going on? What do you need from me? And really listening to that were the ones who could be helpful, even though they were just as involved. It’s not that the involvement levels were different between these two groups, but they weren’t seen as micromanagers because they were asking these questions and they were listening a lot more actively.

Skot Waldron (13:10)
There’s a quote thrown out there, and you’ve probably heard this before, by Anne Lamott. She was an author, right, “Help is the sunny side of control.” And it was really interesting, and how she wrote this that our urge to fix or assist others is often a masked way to manage our own anxiety or exert, you know, almost manipulate others. And then she added, stop helping so much. Don’t get your help and goodness all over everybody, you know, I just thought that was really interesting. What do you think about that?

Colin Fisher (13:47)
Yeah, I mean I think the idea of only helping those people who are ready for that help is a really powerful one. And that’s where I think this…

Skot Waldron (13:59)
Sorry to interrupt you, but how do you know? ‘Cause that every leader just asks that question.

Colin Fisher (14:02)
Yeah. Well, I think this is exactly it. Like I thought, I really believed when I started this research, it was going to be, there was some secret sauce that you know more discerning leaders would see. But it really was them asking. You know, just asking, what do you need help with is going to give you a lot of information on where people are willing and able to receive that help. Because once they’ve asked you for it. Now you’re creating that readiness. You’re in a dialogue that’s in that process. And it helps you, you know, it’s not that people either want help or they don’t. That I think almost everyone at work wishes they had more help. But not everybody is willing to have help on every dimension of their work. That they, you know, might want help with the parts that aren’t as close to their own identity, that aren’t, you know, giving them meaning. But the parts that they want to keep really for themselves are those parts that they identify with.

So, if somebody’s saying, you know, yeah, I really need more, you know, administrative support, or I need, you know, help processing all this communication and email, or I need help getting these resources, that’s different than saying, I need help with the ideas, I need help with the core work. And that is a more sensitive, a more sensitive thing. And so even, you know, these leaders who were great coaches when they would hear people, you know, they would look at the work and go, you know, maybe this work isn’t as good as I would like it to be. But if they’re not going to ask me for my feedback on this, I’m going to have to be a lot more gentle in giving that feedback. I’m not going to be able to just go in there and point it out because they may not be ready for that.

So, I think the idea of how do you know they’re ready? The first thing is, you know, if they’re not asking you, they may not be ready. And you may need to, you know, go through a longer process, go through a process of helping them to see things from your perspective or to getting that help on other dimensions of the work before we tackle that kind of core work. Now, obviously the problem with this is assuming that there’s not a deadline tomorrow and I can’t just, you know, that it’s okay if I let this go for another day or two. And this gets back into this idea of timing. That it’s not so much that, you know, some leaders had this amazing sense of timing and kind of intuition about when to get involved, but that the leaders who were able to provide help that didn’t feel micromanaging counterintuitively were checking in more often and saying, hey, how’s it going? What do you need from me?

Now the trick there is to make that not feel like checking up, right? Like that the idea of am I, do I perceive the intention behind this you know request for an update to mean you don’t trust me? Or do I perceive the intent to be you really want to help me, and you just really want to make sure I have everything I need? And you do have to go out of your way to make sure that people see your requests for updates as really checking in with people to find what they need and not checking up on them.

And I think the best way to do that is to really think of your role that way. That if you, you know, that we’re pretty good at perceiving inauthenticity in these requests and other humans. And if you really are going there, you know, not trusting people, I think that that’s a hard position to be in as a leader when you don’t trust your team. And that’s where we get these cycles that end up being micromanagement, where, you know, it kind of comes back to you not trusting people, them perceiving that you don’t trust them, and then exerting more and more control over the process. Or at least that’s how your attempts to help get are experienced by the people on your team.

Skot Waldron (18:21)
Okay. This has opened up a can of worms for me, Colin. Yeah. I want to dig into some of this. The checking up versus checking in thing, I think is really like I love that phrasing. It’s so easy to remember and there’s a big difference between the two. And oftentimes, and I’ll do this with leaders all the time, and they’ll be disappointed about some kind of outcome. This is just an example, right? And I’ll say, so let’s talk about your expectations and were they realistic? And they’ll say, yeah, all day. Of course they were realistic.

Like their perception of their behavior is, yes, I have realistic expectations. And I look at this too and I say, okay, so you, walking into their office, I’ve heard from them because I’m also working with your team, your executive team, and they hear you popping in, going, hey, how’s it going? Cool. You need anything? All right, just checking. And then, like, hey, just seeing how it’s going. Just want to make sure you’re good. Are you good? And then coming back. Hey, just like they will say, hey, I’m just checking up. I just want to make sure you know you’re supported here. But the people feel and they’ll throw the label, I hear this, I hear the micromanagement label so much in the past 2 years of my career. I don’t know what’s happened in our society, but it is happening. People are like, I just feel so micromanaged. They’re micromanaging me. And I’m going, like, are they really just or did you burn them on another project recently? Or do they just really care about the outcome of this particular project? Or like you’re misdiagnosing maybe the behavior and just labeling it misdiagnosed micromanagement because it’s easy and that’s what we do on people.

But I guess I want a, long thing here. I want to know the difference. How can I really make sure I’m checking up versus checking? Yes, it’s a mindset. Yes, it comes out in my behavior. But on the other side, that it’s being received as checking in versus checking up. Like that it’s received as checking in, not checking up. Like what’s the difference there? How do I make sure it’s being communicated correctly?

Colin Fisher (20:35)
Yeah. I mean, it’s a tricky thing and that there’s no, not going to be a perfect solution. I think it starts with making your intent explicit. So that and I know this won’t do the whole job, but if you’re really just there to help and you’re worried that people are going to see that as checking up on them, say, I’m really just here to help. The reason I, you know, I really haven’t you know, like I’m not up to date on everything that’s going on or I’ve forgotten. I’m sorry if you already told me, but I can’t remember if there was something I was supposed to do to help you. Can you tell me again? Or if you know that you’re not doing it very often, to say, you know, I really, I’m not here to check up on you. I trust you. I know you’re going to do a great job. I just want to make sure that you’ve got everything you need, that there’s nothing I should be doing to support this project.

And so, I think that there’s a lot of power in making your intentions explicit. And this goes for a lot of things in teamwork where most problems in a team either come from a team that’s just, you know, structured wrong and people don’t know why they’re there and you don’t have the right people, or it comes from these misalignments and misunderstandings about the assumptions we’re making about what other people think. And so the number of times where my answer to, you know, how do I fix my team is to make our assumptions about teamwork and collaboration more explicit, to say them out loud, say our intentions, say what we’re, we think we’re doing more often. And that, you know, we’re all on a billion teams, we’ve all got a ton of meetings and it’s stunning how much people just forget or their perceptions just move apart a few degrees over the days and weeks and months and years of working together.

So, I mean, one military leader I was talking to as part of talking about my book said, you know, this reminds me it’s like I was taught in the military academy that we should be the repeater in chief as a leader. That we keep saying these same things over and over, you know, why are we here? How are we going to work together? And I think a lot of problems can be avoided by just, you know, saying these tacit things that we think we don’t really need to say a little more often. Like, I’m really here to help. And so, I think that’s part of it.

And then the other part does come from, you know, people’s kind of expectations about you and the norms we have in our relationship. And so, if I suddenly start acting really differently towards you and I’ve never, you know, come into your office every day before, but now I’m doing it, you know, that change gets coded. And that, you know, from our own position, we know why we’re doing what we’re doing. And this is, you know, very fundamental to all human relationships, right? We know our own intentions. And we think it’s obvious to everyone else what’s going on. But it’s not. And that, you know, other people make sense of our behavior in ways that we wouldn’t want.

So actually, I have another research stream about unsolicited advice. And that, you know, unsurprisingly we find people don’t like unsolicited advice at work because they often perceive the advisor to have kind of a self-serving motive for providing this advice. And we thought, you know that’s all well and good. But when somebody’s like a close friend or you have a really good relationship with that person, we’re not going to see that kind of attribution of self-serving motives. But actually, we still see it even with family and friends, that even when it’s your mother or your brother giving you the unsolicited advice, there’s still this, you know, hint of saying, well, yeah, they’re telling me that, but you know, maybe they’re telling me for some reason other than my own best interests. And that’s going on in every single social interaction. That there’s this hint of, why are they doing this thing that they don’t usually do? And if you don’t tell them why you’re doing this thing you don’t usually do, the unfortunately we tend to make sense of each other’s intentions, not always in the most generous way, especially when those people have power over us and have, you know, other kinds of instrumental connections to us at work. So, we need to just say those things explicitly.

So can I ask you one question though, Skot, about before we go on flip, not to flip it around too much. But you were saying you, you’re seeing more about this micromanagement at work in your work. I mean, how much do you think this has to do with remote working? Because I think the sort of culture of monitoring and actually knowing what’s going on with everybody else does seem to have changed now that we’re not together in the same place as much as we used to be.

Skot Waldron (26:01)
Well, I, this is interesting, this going off a little bit of my work, and I’m yeah, I think it does have something to do with it. But let’s back it up a little bit. So, in some of the research I’ve been looking at, I was talking about you know, and you know, early nineteen hundreds, Frederick Winslow Taylor, you know, stood there with a stopwatch and measured people’s productivity, right? How quickly they were shoving iron into the furnace. And he wrote that book, The Principles of Scientific Management.

And, you know, Henry Ford built his whole assembly line off this idea of clocking productivity and managing the visible work that we could see and that visible work became very important for making sure that we documented a widget and how that widget was getting produced and how much time it took to build the widget. And that became very important for manufacturing in the industrial age and how we built all the stuff. And over the past, you know, 50, 60 years, as work has shifted into less of that and more to the invisible work that we do. The thinking, the strategizing, the reading, the researching, all the other things. I think a lot of the people that were raised in that mentality, I will say the silent generation, the baby boomers, some of those early Gen-Xers that built companies that became the most productive, you know, entrepreneurial generation ever, built those companies, built everything that we have now.

And now the generations that come along, the millennials are taking on a lot more responsibility and management roles and things like that. There’s a big trust gap. But I think there’s more of a, I’m going to go back to the improv mentality. I think there’s more of an improv idea or way of working with the younger generations that’s clashing a lot with the older generations. The older generations are looking at clock in, clock out. I see your timestamp. I know when you’re working or when you’re not working and that produces these many widgets in this much time. And I think that mentality is built around also this idea of accountability. And that’s a big thing too. I hear there’s a huge problem with accountability now. That’s what a lot of leaders are saying.

And so, the way I think they solve that is “tightening the leash,” right? Or, you know, hunkering down, or whatever phrase they want to use to try to control the outcome or control that situation a little bit more. That means, hey, we’re bringing everybody back to the office because if I see you, I know you’re working. And so that’s based on some of the research and the work I’ve been doing. But that’s kind of my theory of what’s going on right now. I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Colin Fisher (29:11)
Yeah. No, I mean I think there’s definitely a lot to the shift to more knowledge intensive work, but not only knowledge intensive work, so where the products of it are often less tangible and more socially constructed, but that there’s more and more value being put on us doing creative work, even in this age of AI, right? Like the real value is where people who really know how to make new stuff, whether they’re new businesses, whether it’s new products, whatever it is, you know, those are the things that you know most organizations need the most now. And that process looks much messier. And that it’s really, you know, a lot of it’s at odds with these ideas, you know, like you’re referencing, you know, Taylorism and all these things of rational bureaucratic control. Because parts of the creative process when we’re going off and we’re reading or we’re doing user research or, you know, we’re even as a leader, we’re, you know, doing a listening tour, or we’re going around trying to really diagnose what the problems in our company are or what our stakeholders think. Those things are going to look a little bit inefficient and messy by design because we’re venturing into the unknown.

And that they require exploration, they require trial and error learning. And that if we’re not set up for those things, if we, as a leader, don’t have a mindset of what it looks like when we’re doing these kind of discovery-based, novelty-based, creative and learning tasks, then we’re going to mistake that for inefficiency.

And I think this idea of accountability is absolutely right. Like we need, we still need a lot of accountability. And where we go wrong from, you know, my mentor Richard Hackman, you know, has influenced my thinking a lot on this idea of what good work or good tasks look like. And that when we’re doing these kind of new creative things, we often don’t know what the interim outcomes are supposed to look like. And so, we have to, you know, as if we’re trying to design work that people can be accountable for, we have to figure out what do some milestones in this process look like that we can have real conversations about? And that those often, you know, to come back to our conversation about micromanagement, those are the times where we can naturally help.

So, I did a lot of work with the design firm IDO when I was studying help and micromanagement. And, you know, one of, obviously IDO at this point is as known for its process as it is for anything else that, like it’s influenced the whole design thinking movement, you know, what they teach at Stanford and the in the d.school, and that often, you know, they essentially sell process consulting now to a lot of organizations. Because they’ve done a good job of saying, like, here’s what interim outcomes at the end of defining a problem look like. Here’s what an outcome looks like at the end of idea generation. And they have, you know, a way to say, we’re going to have a meeting that’s about synthesis, about bringing together all the ideas we’ve generated into something more coherent. And we know that’s a time where the team who’s been working on it, they’re going to have lost perspective a little bit. They’re going to be down in the weeds; they’re going to need somebody from the outside to come in and give them a new way of thinking about it.

And because this is, you know, not completely routinized, but is expected, it doesn’t feel like micromanagement when somebody from the outside comes in and says, oh yeah, I’m going to help you guys out with this really hard part of the process, because everyone needs help at this really hard part of the process. And everyone’s confused. And it’s just known and it’s part of how they do the work. But if we don’t make, you know, if we say, you’ve got 6 months, I just want to see a report on my desk at the end of 6 months, that’s a very difficult way to work. Right. Like, I mean, we’ve got to go in there every day. And if we don’t have these natural touch points with our managers and our leaders for, you know, those really long-time horizons, it’s hard to have accountability, right? That we need and so usually I’m saying, if you want to report in on your desk in 6 months, well, you know, what would you expect them to be doing in between there? Can we have a meeting in 3 months? Can we have a meeting every month and a half where, you know, we’re going to see and that we’re going to have very clear expectations about the kind of thing that’s going to allow us to have a good conversation about making this project better.

And that’s where I think, you know, a lot of managers underinvest. The kind of coming, you know, to go back to your example earlier, if I’m coming in your office every day and going, how’s it going? How’s it going? How’s it going? That’s going to feel a lot different than setting this expectation up front that’s like, hey, you know, 3 weeks from now, I’d love to just have a conversation where we’re going to have an update. I’d love to see, you know, maybe 3 different directions you’re considering and have a conversation about, you know, how, whether we’re aligned on those. And you know, it’s going to be hard for that to feel like micromanagement as long as again, you’re setting, you know, you’re making your intentions with that clear and say, you know, I’m trying, I’m trying to be more helpful. I’m trying to put a process in place that’s going to work for both of us. How does that sound?

Skot Waldron (35:19)
That’s, I mean this is, I think you’ve solved the issue, I think, in the sense that it’s about being clear about your expectations and your intentions. And the other side of that is what I talk about often when I was doing, I was you know, I studied, did brand strategy and design for 20 years in 12 of those in Chicago and knew the IDO people and worked in the same world as they did in that space. But it was really interesting, and looking at brand strategy, as you look at what, what creates a strong brand foundation, number one is the first impression. Number two is consistency in how we show up. If I show up differently every single time, then it’s, you know, you’re breaking some brand loyalty right off the bat. But you’re trying to build that brand loyalty.

And the work, when I come in and tell you my intentions of what’s going on, what I’m doing this for, why I’m actually showing up in your office every day, if that’s what it is happening or whatever’s happening, is have I done the work before that happens for them to know that my intentions are true and valid and authentic? Or have I not done the brand work beforehand to where my reputation is, why are you checking in on me? Like, what’s going on? You know, like and I think that that goes back to your kids, like, is the behavior you never did it and now you are.

And so, I think all those things are starting to come together really well in this conversation, which is really cool. I really appreciate making those connections. And I think something that leaders can really take away from this is being clear about your intentions. I don’t think we state them enough. I think we just kind of like, behave and then assume everybody knows that our intentions are good. You know?

Colin Fisher (37:13)
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and I love the idea of thinking of you know, the metaphor of your brand as a leader, right? That’s what people are expecting from you and if you’re giving them something that’s not, you know, incongruous with that, they’re going to wonder what’s going on. Right. And I think I had one interview with a leader who told us he just experimented with a different leadership style one day with his team and yeah was just met with complete confusion and it’s like, what are you doing, man? This is not how you’ve been acting. We’re very confused by what you’re doing right now and why you’re doing it.

And I think that is something that it’s this hard line to straddle where we don’t want to demand absolute consistency from our leaders because we do want people to learn and grow and be able to experiment with their own behavior, but that there’s a spotlight on you when you’re a leader, especially when you’re, you know, you’re evaluating other people where you’re directing them, where you have some influence over their career progression.

And that there is a lot of research that says we like leaders better who are consistent. And that I think so when you’re doing these kind of learning and experimenting with your own leadership and development, it does help to share that. Say, hey, you know, I’ve gotten the feedback in the past that maybe people see me as micromanaging. So, I’m going to be experimenting with that. I don’t want to be seen that way. I really want to be helpful. And here’s what I’m going to try. And here’s what I could use from you to help me help you. And I think, you know, because you know, when once you know that people are expecting this level of consistency from you, you do have to set it up and lay the groundwork for big changes in how you’re interacting with your coworkers.

Skot Waldron (39:19)
So good. Yeah, man. I mean, this is really great because I keep every, you know, everything we’re talking about here, I keep going back to like a jazz trio, right? I’m sitting here, I’m thinking about a jazz trio, and I’m going, when does it become micromanaging? Is it when the, you know, the person playing the piano keeps trying to dictate, you know, the trumpet player every time with every single thing that’s happening? Like, what’s the goal of the trio? Is that we’re going to have this outcome and then each person’s going to have their thing. And we all have a vision of what that is. And then it goes. And then you have, you know, you as a trumpet player are watching the, you know, the piano player do his segment right there, his solo, and you’re going, that was brilliant, man.

Like when you exert too much control, then you don’t, I think you miss out on that brilliance, those brilliant moments of like where did that magic just come from just now? Right. That inspired me to want to play even better for my set, you know? So yeah, I think I keep thinking about that.

Colin Fisher (40:27)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think what I think the deep lessons that come from jazz and other improvising arts are how much norms and culture and constraints are doing the work that make this possible. And this is where I think it gets a little bit you know, it seems like anything goes, but that we do have very strong norms about what you do and what you don’t do during other people’s solos, depending on what instrument you play. And so, you know, if you’re really part of the world of jazz, as a pianist, you know, what largely what’s expected of you.

And yeah, there are, you know, just like in life, there’s people who are too overbearing at a party or in conversation or anything else. There’s people who are more or less overbearing. But because the norms are so strong, you’re not going to ever have somebody who’s just, you know, stomping all over your solo as a trumpet player. Like there’s not going to be a professional pianist who would do that because there’s this shared culture, there are these shared norms, and there are very strong role definitions.

And that, as you say, the biggest thing that makes this whole system work is that we all know we’re going to have our turn, that everybody’s going to get their own shot to, you know, really shine and have their own artistic voice heard when we’re in a small jazz combo like a trio. And that, because of that, there’s not so much pressure to make sure that like, everyone’s seeing me the whole time, because I’m going to have my turn and you’re going to have your turn. And that we have this deep trust and understanding that that’s a case. Where I think we get into trouble, especially in teams, is where we don’t have that sense that everybody’s going to get their turn. And that’s where we get these, you know, I think this is actually a big reason that most top management teams are insanely too big. Because we can’t have sort of, you know, task forces where some people are excluded and some people are included, because we don’t trust that we’re going to get our influence then if you’re not on this particular iteration of the top management team.

So, one of my favorite studies that was done by my co-authors and mentors, Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman, along with the Hay Group, they studied senior leadership teams. And my favorite finding from this really huge study of 117 senior leadership teams was they asked everybody on the senior leadership team how many members do you think are on the senior leadership team? Now, what percentage of these senior leadership teams do you think agreed on how many people were on the team?

Skot Waldron (43:28)
Wow! What an interesting question. I can’t even imagine.

Colin Fisher (43:32)
Yeah. So, it was only 7% of senior leadership teams had perfect agreement on how many people were on the team. 93% had disagreement about who’s even on this team? Who are we supposed to be working with? And this was symptomatic of, you know, how big everything got that, you know, is the senior leadership team, you know, the core strategic decision-making team that’s like 11 of us. Or is it, you know, 57 of us, or is it even some bigger iteration of 90-some-odd people?

And I really do think this comes back to this idea of a culture where we all know that we are going to have a chance to say our piece, that we’re going to have a chance for our perspective and our voice to be heard. And in groups where that’s true, we can actually break off into smaller meetings and say, yeah, that’s okay. These guys can take care of this part of the work. I’ll get my shot later. That’s okay. And then we can actually have the optimal size of groups I talk about in the book is somewhere between 3 to 7 members. That when we have 3 to 7 people in a room, we can have a conversation where we hear everybody, where we know what their perspectives are, where we know what they think, where we can really like, generate new ideas. We can, you know, challenge each other. We can have really deep, important discussions.

But once we get into this range of 10, 15, 20 people, it gets really hard. And we know this intuitively, right? Like if I said we’re going to have a dinner party and it’s only going to last an hour, and we’re going to have a rule where we only have one conversation at a time. Everybody’s got to be focused on the same thing. I’m going to invite 15 people, like, we know that’s a bad idea, right? Like we know if we have 15 people gathered around a table for one hour, there’s no way we’re all going to have a meaningful voice or meaningful conversation there. That we know we need to keep that as this kind of small round table, 5, 6, 7 people. But we do this all the time in business. That we get 20 people in a room, we schedule an hour and we have an important decision, and we’re using that as a way to try to get everybody’s input on it and it’s just structurally impossible that there’s no way we’re going to do a good job once we do those things.

And I do think this comes back to the idea of, you know, when we have this trust in each other’s intentions, but also a trust in the structure and the roles that we have set up, then that opens the door to all kinds of new ways of working, collaborating.

Skot Waldron (46:28)
And I realize we’re going a little long here and I really appreciate it, but I do want to hit on this one last point. And you’re talking about groups and collective ideas and culture. We were talking about the individual, you know, whether it’s micromanagement, whatever it is. Do you think that that is a, let’s see, an outcome of the culture that’s been built because of the group and the collective nature of the group. Like, can you take a perfectly healthy leader and put them into a culture and then all of a sudden that changes the way they lead to be more negative and or I guess overbearing or micromanage-y in that sense? Is it I guess what I’m saying is it a result of the system or is it a result of the person just being who the person is.

Colin Fisher (47:28)
No, I think, you know, this debate is obviously the debate for psychologists for decades, right? Like how much is the person, how much is the situation? And that, you know, they’re both always important, and that but that we consistently underestimate how powerful situations are. So, I think, you know, looking at sports or something, we get really great examples of this, right? So, Bill Belichick, who is arguably the greatest NFL coach of all time, worked for the Cleveland Browns. They have bad players, they had dysfunctional management, and he was seen as a bad coach and got fired very quickly and did very poorly, right? Was he really that different when he went to New England? I mean, I’m sure he was different, but that he was in a much better situation as well. And I think this kind of thing where if you’re given, especially a bad goal, right? You’re given a goal that is hazy or that maybe isn’t that important in the first place to do, you’re going to have all kinds of problems there. Or, you know, one of the examples I use in my class sometimes is a new product development team where they were told they had to pursue a direction for political reasons. And this actually part of this case is a leader who ends up being seen as very micromanage-y because he was trying to manage this process to appease his superiors and to document it in certain ways. So, he was getting in everybody’s business and saying, oh we need to write this report this way and this report this way, because it was all for politics. But that if you’re doing a project for political reasons, it’s going to be hard to be a good leader of that project. That people don’t like that. People want their work to matter. People want their voices to matter and their labor to be, you know, making the world a better place, whatever that means.

So, when we’re given bad tasks, when we’re given, you know, a team that doesn’t have the right expertise or a team that’s way too big, when we don’t have these kind of enabling structures of roles, of resources, of things like that. Yeah, a lot of times we start getting desperate, that, you know, that we get up against the deadline and we start doing things that maybe the best version of ourselves wouldn’t do. This is actually something so I, when I teach about micromanagement, I give two cases and one’s an example of a leader who’s clearly very seen as very, very helpful by his direct reports and he’s, you know, doing all these wonderful things. And the other one is seen as this horrible micromanager who’s coming in and going over everybody’s calendar every day and telling them how to write reports. But at the end of class, what I ask people of these MBA students to reflect on is the times where they’ve been the person who is acting like that micromanaging leader. And that everybody’s got them.

Everybody can think of a time where they’ve acted at least a little bit like that. And then to say, well, what was going on then? Well, you know, I was up against the deadline. Well, our team was short-staffed, and we didn’t have enough people. And that it always comes back to these things about the structure in the situation that weren’t ideal. And then that snowballed and we got into an even worse situation. And you start behaving like a worse version of yourself.

So, I think we don’t want to underestimate the importance of situation in this. Of course, there are people who are just not great communicators, who aren’t great at making their intentions clear to others, and that, you know, those people probably need train, as much training and support as we can give them, or maybe not to be in positions where they need to be helping and coaching others. But just as often there’s perfectly capable, perfectly good people who are acting not like the best version of themselves because they’re in bad situations. And so, when I’m asking an organization to really think about this problem, I want them to look first at the situations that they’re putting their leaders in. And only when we’re sure we’re putting our leaders in good situations can we be sure that the problem is the person, not the work that we’re giving them to do.

Skot Waldron (52:09)
I thank you for saying that. I think we spend a lot of money on trying to fix people instead of fixing the friction built within our systems, of what’s going on and really without seeking to understand what’s going on in that person’s life or in the work environment they’re working in or whatever. I think that that’s, that does us a lot of disservice as organizations and hurts a lot of cultures around what we try to do. Spreads a lot of shame and guilt and distrust and all kinds of things that the icky words that we don’t like that end up destroying our profitability and get driving people away.

Colin Fisher (53:54)
Absolutely.

Skot Waldron (52:55)
So cool, man. So, “The Collective Edge” is out now on paperback in the UK. So that’s super great. You’re going global. That’s amazing.

Colin Fisher (53:06)
Yeah. No, yeah, I’ve been, all the translations are coming out. It’s been really fun. People send me the pictures from other versions of it. Yeah, it’s been really fantastic. I’m glad people are so interested in getting the most out of their groups and teams.

Skot Waldron (53:20)
That’s so cool. Dude, give me a 30 second spiel on “The Collective Edge”, just for those who don’t know what it is.

Colin Fisher (53:26)
Yeah, The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, is about how to get the most from the groups and teams in your life, whether those are your work teams, and it’s mostly about that, but also how these come from really fundamental things about being a human being. And that a lot of the problems that we’re talking about in the world today, whether we’re talking about loneliness, whether we’re talking about the kind of fragmented political environment, come down to not getting our groups quite right. And that most of that is about thinking more systematically about the structure of groups and how that influences group dynamics, how it influences the how hard we try, what, how well we coordinate with one another. And that this is really a book that covers everything about how we can make better groups and why so often our experiences in groups aren’t quite what we would like them to do and how we can be more like the best version of our groups and less like the worst versions.

Skot Waldron (54:31)
So, unless you work in a hole by yourself with nobody around ever, then this is probably for you.

Colin Fisher (54:39)
Yeah. Absolutely.

Skot Waldron (54:41)
Y’all, if you haven’t gotten enough here, I would strongly encourage you to go listen to Colin’s interview with Katy Milkman from Choiceology. That’s where I was introduced to Colin and his wisdom. And I was just like, What? Who is this guy? So go check that episode out on Choiceology. It’s a great, great episode. Thanks, Colin, for being on here, man. Good luck with the book and you know, flooding the world with brilliance and collective knowledge about how we can work better as groups and just how we can work better as humans in general.

Colin Fisher (55:15)
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Skot. Let’s stay in touch, man.

Skot Waldron (55:20)
When I talk to a lot of leaders who have been disappointed, I talk about how, you know, disappointment is a result of missed expectations. Your expectations were here, the thing that happened was down here, and they missed each other. And you, the result is disappointment. And when I talk about expectations, I talk about how can we make that, how can we help mitigate missed expectations a little better. And I go through this, what I call a CLEAR Framework and one of the steps in the CLEAR Framework, it’s an acronym, is explain the logic. It’s the L word, the logic, the L letter, logic. Explain the logic, the why behind what we’re doing. If I just come in and give you an expectation, hey, I need you to work on this by Friday at two, and then I leave, there’s a little bit of a hole there of like, well, why am I doing this and why am I working on it? Do I need to do Friday at two? And who else could do this? And I’ve got other stuff on, like all these questions come up.

So, be more explicit about your intentions, I think, is a really brilliant way to go about not being labeled a micromanager. There are many people that I’ve worked with that are like Skot, I got called a micromanager in my review, and I don’t understand these people. I don’t understand why they’re labeling me that. And we talk about it and sometimes it’s justified and sometimes it’s not. And I think we throw around the label quite a bit.

The repeater in chief. I love that. Repeater in chief, repeating. We have to hear things. We have to, sometimes we don’t like it. We’re like, I’m not an idiot. I heard you last time, but it’s important that we keep repeating the thing over and over again. Checking in versus checking up. Really good. Check yourself. Am I checking in or am I checking up? And the intent behind that. Are you doing the work before that in order to make sure people know that this is a check-in, not a checkout? I think that’s really smart.

Thank you, Colin, for being on the show. All of you go out and listen to that Choiceology episode. Go out and get The Collective Edge by Colin. Colin’s a smart dude; he’s done some good stuff. And yeah, I’ll see you next time on Unlocked.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

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