“I just love being micromanaged.”

Have you met a lot of people who would say this? Have you even met one? I’ve been studying leadership and human behavior for the last 20 years, and I struggle to think of a single person I’ve met — ever — who would say they enjoy being micromanaged.

Humans, by nature, seek independence and self-determinism. (If you find yourself skeptical of this, try helping a toddler put on their shoes.) We are wired to want to be masters of our own universe, to explore and push and strive. We crave the freedom to chase what compels us.

But something else is curious to me, as well. As we yearn to pursue these autonomous things that are decidedly human, is there really any practical difference in being micromanaged versus just being “managed?” The former seems to garner almost universal hatred, but the latter somehow seems to be almost completely acceptable.

Should that be the case?

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Almost all approaches to “performance management” are pointless. Why? In a nutshell, they make a fatally flawed assumption about people, which is the belief that we can change our innate wiring.

This is another way of saying if I’m not “performing” there’s something wrong with me. I’m inherently lacking… something— knowledge, skills, effort, tenacity, etc. — and if the organization could simply find a way to fill my deficit, whatever that is, I’d then magically “perform.”

But this approach is the rough equivalent of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on trying to teach fish how to climb trees. Of course fish can’t do this, so the entire asinine process just ends up frustrating you and eventually killing the fish.

Here’s how we do something different…

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