Micro-Management: The Marketing Growth Tax
I think all of us have heard the famous quote by Steve Jobs, "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do".
And I'm sure all marketing departments would love to claim they are doing precisely that.
Unfortunately, there are two micro-management techniques I see manifesting often in corporate marketing departments that are demonstrating the exact opposite.
They've assembled the orchestra. The musicians can read the music. They've rehearsed. They know their parts. And then, instead of conducting, the leader walks over to the first violin and starts moving her fingers for her. Then over to the cellist to adjust his bow. Then back to the violin, because in the meantime she's "drifted."
All of a sudden, the music that comes out of that room isn't a symphony. It's a series of interruptions wearing a tuxedo.
And that level of micro-management doesn't just frustrate people.
It taxes growth.
Every decision that can't be made by a team member elongates the process. Every instinct that gets overwritten, or dare I say ignored, is a piece of expertise the company paid for and then refused to use.
So today, let's explore how this micro-management shows up in marketing teams—in two places that might seem like opposites—and what you can do to eliminate it.
Micro-Management #1: Approval as Performance
Picture a piece of content. A blog. A campaign idea. A single email.
It gets drafted by the person whose job it is to draft it; someone who, presumably, was hired because they understand the audience and the brand. It might seem like something created by a person with an opinion at this point.
Then it goes to their manager, who has some thoughts. Edit #1.
Then it goes to the department lead, who has different, or at least more, thoughts. Edit #2.
Then it goes to the CEO, who makes some more changes and adds people to tag. Edit #3. Oh, and these are probably changes no one is allowed to push back on.
Six weeks later, something gets published.
But it's not a piece of content anymore. It's a compromise.
A weird, schizophrenic Frankenstein where one paragraph sounds like a sales pitch, the next sounds like a LinkedIn influencer, and the third sounds like nobody at all because every distinctive word got sanded off in round three.
The orchestra played. But every musician got their fingers moved mid-note by someone else. So what you hear isn't music. It's just noise.
And the most important thing to note?
The audience can tell.
They might not be able to articulate why, but they can feel that no one is actually behind this content. It was assembled by committee, and committees don't have a voice. They have a vote.
Micro-Management #2: Speed as Performance
Now picture the opposite scene, in the same company (maybe it's yours).
The CEO read something on a flight. Or saw a competitor post something. Or had a feeling on a Tuesday. And by Wednesday morning, there's a Slack message: "We need to be posting about this. Today."
No brief. No audience consideration. No connection to anything the team has been building. Just a directive, dressed up as urgency, that bypasses every system the marketing team set up to do the job well.
So something goes out. Fast. Generic. Untethered from the strategy that everyone signed off on six months ago. It exists because the CEO demanded it exist, and existence was the only KPI.
Same orchestra. Same conductor. Except this time the conductor has decided the symphony should now include a solo kazoo because he saw one at a wedding and it got laughs.
Two Symptoms, One Problem
These two scenes might look like opposites. One is too slow. One is too fast. One is over-edited. One is barely edited at all.
But they're actually the same dysfunction.
In both, the people who were hired to do the work aren't allowed to do the work. The expertise the company is paying for is being overridden by someone whose actual job is supposed to be making sure the conditions exist for that expertise to operate.
What Micro-management Actually Costs
There's a version of leadership that confuses control with contribution. If I touched it, I added value. If I didn't touch it, I wasn't doing my job.
But control isn't the same as conducting. A conductor doesn't play the instruments. A conductor sets the tempo, holds the shape of the piece, and trusts that the people holding the instruments know how to use them. If the conductor doesn't trust the musicians, the answer isn't to grab the violin. The answer is to hire different musicians, or to have an honest conversation about why the trust isn't there.
When leaders micro-manage, three things happen, and none of them are growth:
The work slows down to the speed of the slowest approver. Your competitive advantage is now bottlenecked by whoever has the fullest calendar.
The work loses its voice. Anything distinctive gets averaged out by the time it survives the committee. And average doesn't move markets. It doesn't even move scrolls.
The people stop trying. Not all at once. Slowly. They learn that their judgment will be overridden, so they stop bringing it all together. They learn that bold ideas will be sanded down, so they stop bringing them to the table. You end up with a team that produces exactly what's asked for, and nothing more — which, for a growth-stage company, is the same thing as a team that's failing.
The Conductor's Actual Job
The job of leadership isn't to make every decision. It's to make sure the right decisions are being made by the right people, in the right context, with the right information.
That means:
Setting the tempo (what are we building, and by when)
Holding the shape (what does success look and FEEL like)
Trusting your musicians (the people you hired to play)
Listening to the whole room (so you can tell when something's off)
A marketing leader who can do that gets a symphony. One who can't just gets noise.
And the tricky bit is that both kinds of noise sound like activity. So, if what you're tracking is activity, you're sure to hear something.
But neither of them sound like growth. And if that's what you're going for, you're in trouble.
So, if you're a marketing leader—or an organizational leader—reading this and thinking, "but my team needs me to be involved at that level," I'd gently ask: is that because your team genuinely can't do the work? Or is it because you've never actually let them try?
And yes, letting them try MIGHT end up in them failing. But failing forward in a way that takes all the doing off your hands, is actually movement in the DIRECTION of growth.
And that helps way more than spinning and spinning in one place, where you still have to hold on to everything.
A baby doesn't learn how to walk by you walking for them. They learn to walk by you holding their hand and going WITH them.
That's the activity that lends itself to movement.
That's the activity that lends itself to a symphony.
So, if you're ready to conduct a symphony instead of playing all the instruments, chat with one of the phenomenal members of the Authentic Marketing Fellowship! Or schedule a chat with me! I love to jam on this topic 💞
