You’ve probably seen this — a senior executive managing a multi-billion dollar budget, sitting in a committee deciding what color to paint a conference room that barely gets used.
I once had the managing director of a company sit in on a meeting to put together a deck for an upcoming internal cross-team collaboration event that happened every year. The audience — totally internal. And yet I saw him three times in the month leading up to this insignificant event that had maybe fifty people. Two of the three times he was dozing off. This guy had the reputation of being a slogger — clocking in at 8:30 am and out by 7 pm. Of course, he was exhausted. But what exactly was his contribution to the meeting? That we “use the flying from the left transition?” Mind you, this was the early 2010s. Don’t you have better things to do, boss? Let us handle this.
The cost at the personal level is pure information overload. TMI is a real thing for modern leaders — and the problem is that once they see something, they can’t unsee it. So they roll up their sleeves, get involved, and end up as micromanagers drowning in paperwork, approval requests, and got-a-minute meetings. Sheer exhaustion.
The teams develop a psychosomatic dependency — unable to function without direction from the very leaders who are otherwise capable in their own right. They stop thinking critically. They default to blind compliance, risk avoidance, and upward delegation. Waiting for the nod so they don’t get their asses fired.
And all of this seeps into the organization, making it one slow, expensive robot whose job is just to feed information to the top so leaders can sit on it and take action. What they don’t realize is they’re killing efficiency while setting themselves up to fail against fast-moving competition and shifting market realities.
The reframe that changes everything — stop being a chess master. You’re not one. The organization isn’t a chessboard; it’s a garden, and your job is to maintain and nurture it. Shape the ecosystem instead of worrying about moving pieces across boxes.
There’s a name for this shift — Eyes On, Hands Off. You stay informed, but you stop intervening. And when someone makes a bad decision, your first question isn’t “how do I tighten approvals?” It’s “what context did I fail to set?”
Because the moment you default to tightening approvals, you’ve lost the plot — and you’re back to being the chess master you were trying not to be.