"I came to see micromanaging as a failure to let others shine"

This story by Doug Rauch, former President of Trader Joe's, is part of "Failure Chronicles," a section of the April 2011 "Failure Issue" of Harvard Business Review.

I’m a recovering controlaholic, as I suspect a lot of C-suite people are. My failure to recognize this problem nearly prevented Trader Joe’s from successfully expanding.

Bringing Trader Joe’s from the West Coast to the East meant we had to hire an entirely new staff. We had to teach everyone the Trader Joe’s buying philosophy, the organizational culture, the details that made us successful. In my mind, no one could do that better than I could, because no one else had the knowledge I did. I happily micromanaged the expansion.

A year or so in, they’d gotten my message just fine. The culture was instilled, the philosophy bought into. Only I didn’t see it. In my zeal to control everything, I failed to notice that it was time to take off the training wheels and let the new staff members grow into their roles. I kept micromanaging. The effect was stifling, especially on our buyers, the heart of our organization. I had always said that a buying team that doesn’t make mistakes isn’t worth a damn, yet I wasn’t letting them make their own mistakes. They started to be afraid to take chances. It was beginning to affect the business.

Luckily for me, one intrepid senior buyer helped put a stop to all this. She approached me and said, “You’re driving us crazy. You’ve got to back off. We’ll make mistakes, but you’ve got to let us go.”

It was a turning point. I went back to the buying team and admitted my problem. I told them I was “on the wagon” and that I needed them to give me regular feedback or I might fall off. We laughed about it—and the company flourished.

As I worked on letting go, I came to see micromanaging as a failure to let others shine or grow. So instead of fixing problems, I focused on nurturing problem solvers. I turned “Try this” into “What do you think we should try?”

Note the similarities between this story and Stella Moga's.