What’s the happy middle between micromanaging and being too hands off? Amy B and three other experienced mid-level managers describe how they think about when to intervene and when not to so that they are empowering their teams and freeing up their own minds to do more of their most strategic work.
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You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review.
I'm Amy Bernstein.
Welcome to season two of our how to Manage series.
This season is for mid level managers and for those of you who hope to become mid level managers and for those of you who manage mid level managers and who want to be in tune with their concerns and frustrations and their aspirations.
Being a mid level manager myself and having been one for years at different companies, I understand the stress of people on all sides expecting you to coach individual employee performance, make teams successful, and lead in fluid environments.
It's a lot of pressure.
I understand feeling some days as if you have all the responsibility and none of the authority.
And I also understand how great it can be when your team is just clicking over the next four episodes, I'll speak with women about executing strategy, about selling ideas, about rising up.
We're starting with a skill that you'll need to master before any of that letting go of work that's holding you back.
It took me many years to appreciate the importance of this skill of relinquishing my grip on the details and engaging at the right level.
It wasn't until about 13 years ago when I joined HBR as editor and I came in determined to approach editing the way I had for 20 years before that, which was to analyze and polish each article sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.
I tried that when I got here and it became apparent immediately that it was unsustainable.
It was too time consuming and it was exhausting.
But more to the point, what I realized was that the editors at HBR were terrific.
They did that work and they did it really, really well.
They didn't need me to do it on top of them, behind them.
They didn't need that.
So that's when I pulled myself away from that level of work and kind of freed myself up to think a little bit more long term about where we were going to take the magazine.