How to Stop Micromanaging Without Lowering Standards
- Richard Raven
- Aug 18
- 6 min read
Micromanagement rarely begins with a leader deciding they want to control everything.
More often, it begins with responsibility. The leader cares about the outcome and they know what good looks like. They can see problems developing and believe stepping in will protect the team from failure.
The more capable the leader is, the more tempting this becomes. They can probably solve the problem faster themselves. They may also feel their credibility depends on knowing the answer whenever someone turns to them.
But constant intervention carries a cost. When leaders keep making the decisions, prescribing the method and correcting every deviation, their people gradually stop thinking for themselves.
Former NZSAS operator and America's Cup winner Marius van der Pol has watched this pattern play out inside some of New Zealand's most demanding high-performance environments, first in the military, then aboard Emirates Team New Zealand.
His conclusion is simple: strong leadership isn't about having every answer. It's about creating the conditions in which other people can perform.
The Capable Leader's Trap
Marius admits his early view of leadership was shaped by a need to have all the answers.
Whenever there's a question I sort of felt like I had to quickly communicate that I knew what I was talking about, even though I might not have been a hundred percent on the money with that.
That instinct is common among capable leaders. Their reputation is usually built on competence and personal reliability. Moving into leadership can feel like taking on more problems while still being expected to solve them personally, but the job has actually changed. Your value stops coming solely from the quality of your own work. It increasingly comes from your ability to help other people think, decide and deliver.
Marius saw the alternative in action when he joined Team New Zealand. During early discussions about the cockpit layout for the new America's Cup boat, veteran sailor Ray Davies turned to him, a new arrival still finding his feet in the team, and simply asked:
What do you think?
“That really created a massive sense of buy-in for me,” Marius says. Davies had the standing to make the call unilaterally. Instead, he brought in a perspective from someone with far less experience in the room, and it cost him nothing in authority. If anything, it earned him more.
Asking for Help Is Part of Accountability
Marius confronted the same idea from the other direction when he took over the communications system aboard Team New Zealand's America's Cup boat. He'd used radios in the Army, but this was a different problem entirely: design changes meant walls of water were now hitting the boat, and the comms gear was getting torn apart.
On his first day on the water, he was told the system wasn't working.
He took full ownership of the problem, and instinctively reached for the approach that had carried him through most of his career.
A lot of my career has evolved around some physicality element to it, when you're confronted with a problem, it may not be the smartest or most efficient way to get through it, but you can usually just mongrel your way through it.
This time, that didn't work. There was no way to force his way to a solution; he needed expertise he didn't have. The lesson that came out of it:
I had to realise that asking for help wasn't seen as failure.
Accountability means ensuring the problem gets solved. It doesn't mean personally holding every skill required to solve it. Strong leaders stay responsible for the outcome while bringing in the people and knowledge needed to get there.
Why Micromanagement Removes Accountability
Micromanagement creates an illusion of control. The leader hands someone a task but keeps making the decisions: what to do, how to do it, when to adjust. If the result falls short, the leader blames them for not showing ownership.
But the person never actually owned the work. As Marius puts it:
The more they try to assist with the micromanagement piece, it's almost taking away the accountability, because you've got someone calling the shots all the time, and you think, well, I'm not even going to start thinking for myself, because I'm being told everything.
That produces three predictable results: decisions slow down because everything funnels back to the leader, people stop developing their own judgement, and accountability gets murky because responsibility and authority sit with different people. Giving someone real ownership means accepting they'll approach the work differently than you would, and letting them make calls without checking in at every step. It's a question of being clearer about which elements genuinely matter, not lowering the bar.
Replace Control With Clarity
Leaders often micromanage because the outcome, the boundaries or the decision rights were never made clear in the first place. The fix isn't to disappear and hope for the best. It's a stronger operating framework. Before handing over responsibility, clarify five things:
1. The required outcome - What must be achieved, and why it matters. End state, not a step-by-step script.
2. The non-negotiable standards - The safety, quality, ethical, financial or operational lines that can't be crossed.
3. The available authority - Which decisions the person can make alone, and which need consultation.
4. The agreed checkpoints - Proportionate to risk and experience. Support, not surveillance.
5. The support available - Make it clear that asking for help is expected, not a weakness.
Once that's understood, the leader needs to step back far enough for genuine ownership to actually develop.
Calm Leadership Protects Performance
Stepping back doesn't mean going passive when pressure rises. One of the clearest examples Marius saw at Team New Zealand was how consistent the sailors' communication stayed, whether the boat was leading by a mile or trailing by one. Commentators picked up on it, and other teams started trying to copy it.
That composure was tested directly during one race, when the boat began tipping further than intended and Marius was on the leeward side watching the gap between water and air close in. The call over the comms system was blunt:
Right boys, we're going over.
No denial, no panic, just the information, delivered flat. Everyone stuck to their drills.
The same pattern showed up after the team lost two races back-to-back in Barcelona. Skipper Nathan Outteridge didn't sugarcoat it, but framed the losses as learning rather than disaster. When that message reached a visibly tense member of the shore crew, Marius watched him change in real time, and the effect rippled through the rest of the team. Pressure travels through a group. So does composure. A calm leader doesn't minimise reality. They communicate it clearly, set out what happens next, and keep their own anxiety from becoming everyone else's problem.
High Standards and Trust Are Not Opposites
Some leaders resist stepping back because they assume trust and performance trade off against each other, that standards only hold because someone's watching.
Marius defines discipline differently:
Having those standards where they don't really change regardless of setting, who's there, who's looking, what time it is, how you're feeling, that's just a solid structure you stick to no matter what.
That matters because standards that only hold up while the leader is present aren't discipline. They're compliance. The strongest leaders combine two things: clear, uncompromising expectations about the outcome, and trust in capable people to work out how they'll get there. Standards define the destination and the boundaries. Trust gives people room to navigate between them.
Take a Chance on Potential
Marius traces several of the biggest opportunities in his life back to people who backed him before he had a track record to justify it: SAS selection, the comms role, a seat at the design table barely two months into a campaign. That trust created its own pressure to perform. He wanted to prove the judgement calling him up was right.
If every meaningful opportunity only goes to the safest, most proven person, potential never gets tested. Sometimes the decision that builds the deepest commitment is handing someone real responsibility before their résumé makes them the obvious pick. Not a reckless appointment, but a considered one, based on character and drive rather than a track record that doesn't exist yet.
The Shift Leaders Can Make Tomorrow
Stopping micromanagement doesn't mean lowering expectations or ignoring risk. It means being more deliberate about where your involvement actually adds value, and where it's just getting in the way of someone else's ownership.
Three questions worth asking:
What outcome does my team need from me, not another set of instructions?
Where am I still holding decisions someone else is ready to own?
Who has the potential to handle more, if I'm willing to back them?
As Marius put it, talking about the sailors who ran the boat with almost no oversight from above:
If you just let people own their own lane entirely, then they'll own it.
Marius van der Pol is a former NZSAS operator and America's Cup winner with Emirates Team New Zealand. Watch the full conversation on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.
The article captures the central idea. The full episode shows how it played out, including the moment the boat nearly went over, and what nine years of staying in the middle of the pack cost him before he changed his mind.
Want more conversations like this one? Check out the full range here.
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