Bill Gallagher explores why leaders micromanage: childhood fears that become adult habits. After his bank threatened his business in 2001, a conversation with his wife freed him to delegate and recover. He walks through how noticing these patterns, starting with your birth order and early anxieties, lets you actually let go.
Chapters
What's the real reason you can't let go? What do you suppose is the real reason that you struggle to let go, to let people do their job, to take a lighter hand on things? I bet you don't really know. I don't think most of us know. 50 Cent talks about it in his book and in his conversations about fear running the show. There's a kind of a fear that each of us has. There are recurring fears and recurring behaviors. And the fear that's running the show probably started at a very young age. There's also extended or versions of fears that we carry out into later parts of life. I think that a lot of these things start early. We have a fear, then that fear is recurring for us. We develop behaviors in response to that fear's patterns, and we use those things and to great result. Like, you got to a particular place, you achieved something in life. Here you are, you, you've accomplished something. And the fear is still underlying things. And that represents a lid that keeps a lid on the way that you operate, the way your team operates, and the results that you get in your business. So how do we figure it out? Well, I think when you figure it out, there's an opportunity to unleash something. I can tell you a personal story. I can tell you a client story. I got a couple examples of this. First of all, personally for me, I was running a business some years ago, and in the Aftermath of the 2001 downturn, we found ourselves in a bit of a bind. I've talked about this many times. And my bank came to us and was going to shut us down. And they wanted me to close out our debt, our loans with the bank, and to take our banking business elsewhere because we no longer fit their profile. We were a little bit off on things. We hadn't missed payments, but we were in violation of the covenant. And anyway, so they wanted to shut us down. And there wasn't really a good opportunity at that time with the business results I had in that environment for me to refinance that debt. So it was going to mean the close of the business. And because I was personally guaranteed it was going to mean they would take my house. And they were very clear about it with me. They said, listen, you have a lot of equity in your house. Just give us your house, everything will be fine. You can go on with your life. And for them, losing the business, losing the house was pretty, pretty straightforward kind of a thing. It was just business to them. They knew that it was triggering for me. So they threw it out there hoping that I'd find a way either to give them the house or to settle the whole thing. Well, I wasn't really clear about what my fear was. I was deathly afraid of the business failing, of losing the house. But mostly, more than any of that, I was afraid that that kind of an event would tear my marriage and my family apart and I would become a weekend dad. And becoming a weekend dad of not having a whole family, keeping my family together, having my whole life come apart, that was deeply upsetting right now, I didn't think about that that much until I started talking about the fear. So first, for a long time, I tried to figure it out on my own. I was thinking, strategizing, imagining I'm an ideas guy. So I'm looking for the way out. I'm trying to figure it out. And I feel like it's not so nice to say, but I feel like, oh, I'm smarter than anybody else on my team. And certainly around ideation and strategy, I should be better than all of them, except I wasn't, and I didn't have a plan. So in talking it out and sharing with my wife about the challenge and my fears about it, I finally said, you know, I'm just afraid that if I screw this up, if this fails, you're going to leave me and then I'll be a weekend dad. Right. And that, like, even surviving a divorce wasn't the worst thing. It was the idea of splitting my family apart. Right. That was the most terrifying thing. Well, having said that, she was able to say, I'm not going to leave you over. That we could have that happen. That's a very real possibility. And if that happens, we'll find a way to start over. Here's a variety of things we could do, whatever. So now my greatest fear is out there, and my ways of operating are now freed up. So instead of just having to be a particular way because I'm afraid of this happen and working so hard on it, I'm now kind of freed up. I have room to experiment with something that was going to cause the thing I worried about the most. So what did I do? I decided I wanted to be the kind of leader. I wanted to teach the kids a lesson. So I went to my team and I said, listen, here's the situation. The bank wants to shut us down like that, on and on. And this is a pretty serious matter. And I understand if you need to go now, but I could use your help. And if you'd be willing and able to stick around like we could work on this together. And I made them a promise. I made them a promise that I wouldn't quit, that that I would be honest and open with them. And that turned out to be pretty magical because people love a good challenge. Human beings love to take on something really significant. So they joined me in the fight and together we actually found a way through. We navigated it, we worked it out, we doubled the profit, cash, we settled the debt. Like it was amazing. It wasn't something that I figured out or they or any one of them. It was together. We figured the whole thing out. And it didn't start until I confronted my fundamental fear and changed my behavior. I had another client very recently, new CEO taking over a company, taking the company through like post acquisition, transition of the founders out of the company and change. This person had developed fear and patterns that they couldn't count on anyone else, right? And that started actually at a very early age. Had always been the sort of kid or student that in the group project would fill in for everyone else because couldn't count on and couldn't, couldn't work with other people. So they just learned to do the extra effort to go 10 times more than almost every other kid. And they carried that through in life now as an adult, as a new CEO of a significant company after and taking over from a successful founder, they were still trying to do that, not counting on anyone else, micromanaging their way through everything, unable to let go. Well, it wasn't so good. It took a long time for this person and it wasn't a profound shift. But as they started to see that this was a lifelong behavior, there was a little bit of opening. They finally started to shift when you start to notice the patterns and the earliest things. So think about what were the transformative experiences? What kind of student, what kind of kid were you? What order were you in the family? What order? Where did you sit in class? Right? Think about these early grade school experiences, right from say, I don't know, maybe seven years old, you might even remember some earlier ones through maybe 13. There's a lot of formative things and a lot of originating patterns. Think about moments of anxiety, of near failure, of overcoming adversity. Think about those things. What were those key lessons that were painful, difficult, embarrassing, shameful? What did you have there? And then what did you do to compensate from that? Those recurring versions of those fears and those behaviors are probably running around now. So that's. I think the thing to think about is look back to your life and start to notice the pattern. Once you notice the pattern, you actually have some freedom to begin to shift it up, to try some new ways of being. You're not limited by the pattern. You can say, oh, I did that pattern starting at a very early age, and now I have a chance to try some other patterns. The truth is, you have lots of amazing people that work with you. You have great people on your team, probably in ways that you don't.
