Trust, then Clarify

A theme that I return to on this blog, and throughout my time in people management, is dispelling the notion that leader knows best. It's an expression of the Great Man Theory, that leadership and expertise are imbued into certain individuals within the organization; that their instincts, advice, and proficiency—well, and really, positional authority—give them both the means and the confidence to make critical yet enlightened decisions. This is particularly acute for founder-CEOs, as their elevated stature makes it even more likely for their companies to offer weak, token resistance to their direction and instead look to appease the executive, independent of the quality of their feedback.

Here's a similar take, advising managers to check in and inspect their team's work:

It's honestly not bad advice. Engagement is preferable to disengagement, and it's better to be overly careful in following up on important work instead of getting surprised by a subpar result delivered at the end.

But there's more nuance in checking in; how to confirm progress matters. It's the primary difference between more positive tweaks to a successful approach versus a negative way to micromanage without labeling it as such. Most managers sincerely believe they are doing the right thing by supporting their teams, adding value by offering their perspectives. Yet, it doesn't take much for a check-in to evolve into a sign-off, and the team learns that the work they produce is subject to leadership veto.

One instance I'm fond of citing is the seagull manager. This is someone who enters a tough situation or a project midstream, with just enough information to be dangerous, and then offers up solutions befitting of their lack of context. In the best-case scenario, the team nods along and thanks the manager for their time, thankful that they only lost a meeting; in the worst case, the team is forced to pivot under the new guidance and takes the fall for its eventual disappointing outcome. The latter is how you get the rank-and-file complaining about clueless executives making boneheaded decisions—which, at this point, is a truism in corporate life.

More concretely, this shows up within engineering leadership as directors, VPs, or even the CTO asking for status updates—initially framed as just understanding what the team is stuck on, then providing technical input, eventually mandating a technical solution that the team is forced to implement. It's particularly tricky within engineering organizations since most managers have technical backgrounds, and senior leaders often have experience as strong engineers and architects. It's incredibly hard, and a team-building anti-pattern, to consistently be the strongest engineer in the room who the team relies on to make difficult technical decisions.

That's not to say that leadership check-ins are worthless. There's value in executive visibility and curiosity, if nothing else, as a forcing function to mind the details and apply polish to a delivery. Providing the bigger business perspective and asking tough questions can help sharpen decisions. Connecting the team to other parts of the company, given a manager's broader purview, is almost always welcome and valuable.

The cliché people often use is "trust, but verify." It's a contradiction, impressively expressed in just 3 words, that encourages leaders to distrust their team since they feel the need to verify the work. Instead, a better turn of phrase—one that's worthy of pursuit—may be "trust, then clarify."