Trust = Not Micromanaging Time

Someone said to me recently, “The worst leaders I have ever had have been obsessively concerned about my time — always checking up on me, making sure I was there very minute, reprimanding me if I was five minutes late … and so on.”

The best leaders, it seems to me, don’t worry so much about time — about the “letter of the law” of time, I mean. Of course, they expect the people that work for them to put in the appropriate amount of time, to do the work they’re responsible for, and sometimes even more — but they trust these people to manage their for themselves. If a snowstorm comes, for example, and a woman has to go pick up her child before driving 20 slow miles home on slippery roads, and leaves early to manage these tasks, a good leader does not question that action. He or she does not then fire off a letter to all the employees in the group reminding them that they must not forget deadlines if they decide to leave early, and another e-mail to the woman’s supervisor asking if he had approved her action.

Yes, this incident happened recently where I work. I felt insulted by the e-mail I received after my co-worker left early — and others in my group did, too. The supervisor in question spent the afternoon writing back in defense of his employee’s action. Time well spent? I think not.

In another, similar example, I reported my time one week, and my supervisor said, “What about Thursday morning, when you were late?” (I had stayed home an hour prior to going to the airport to pick up my husband, returning from a business trip.) I said, “No, I didn’t mark that down, but neither did I mark down the six hours I worked at home on Saturday.” She said, “Oh, yes, I forgot about that … well, we won’t worry about the tardiness, then.” Once again, why did she ever think she had to?

What I good leader does, I think, is to set clear expectations about time up front, then turn the subject over to the employees to manage. If a problem arises with one employee, the leader deals with that one employee, and does not extend those dealings to the entire group. He or she errs on the side of trust in this case, rather than on the side of micromanaging time.

For trust, in small matters like this, yields benefits that no accounting of time can equal.