Why Depth of Engagement Is Not Micromanagement
Part 3 of a three-part exploration of how my leadership lens evolved. Part 1 was about wartime at the execution layer, where credibility and delivery determine relevance. Part 2 moved deeper into ownership and the personal cost of leading before a title grants permission. This final part goes to the smallest unit of leadership – the depth of engagement in every moment, and why stepping in is not micromanagement when the purpose is to build judgment.
After publishing my essay on wartime and peacetime leadership, the same question kept coming up: “Isn’t what you’re describing just micromanagement?” No. But I understand why it seems that way. Both hands-on leadership and micromanagement mean getting closer to the work. The difference is not in how close you get, but in what you are trying to protect.
Micromanagement protects outcomes.
Hands-on leadership protects judgment.
It took me years to understand. It didn’t come from books or frameworks. It came from the decisions I made: the ones that changed teams, shifted culture, and created outcomes that I wasn’t prepared for. I learned it by living through them, not by studying it in theory.
People often reduce wartime to urgency. That’s a narrow definition. Wartime is high-consequence density: where small decisions have extreme impact, and the cost of being wrong isn’t just rework, it is losing credibility and conviction.
In those critical moments, staying high-level feels empowering, but in practice, it creates a shallow sense of empowerment, and you sometimes only realize it afterward. When the team doesn’t yet have the decision-making approach you have built over the years, stepping back doesn’t foster growth; it creates confusion. You may be giving space, but what they experience is being left alone, without a map.
Hands-on leadership is stepping into the decision space – not to override, but to show your team what you see: the constraints that aren’t obvious, the downstream effects sitting just out of frame, and the difference between a mistake that can be fixed and one that compounds quietly until it explodes.
A while ago, one of my team members was developing a new concept. I stayed out initially. He worked with other functional teams and refined the design. When we reviewed it together, I saw gaps and assumptions that wouldn’t work in the long term and in edge cases. I could have corrected him, but I recognized this moment (not easy to identify); I’ve been that engineer before. When a senior quietly dives in, fixes the deficiency, and leaves. You get the right outcome, but you never inherit the ability to make the right decisions yourself.
So instead, I opened the thinking. Not to judge it, but to share learnings. We walked through why those gaps mattered. I gave him a choice: fix it now, or continue and document the risk. He chose to continue. Some would call that naive. I call it controlled risk. Because the system could be updated over the air. And the stakes were low. From my vantage, what he earned was a reference point – a lived memory. Hands-on leadership is accepting that sometimes imperfect work is the tuition you pay so someone else gains judgment.
That same individual later led a proposal with far higher stakes. The slides looked correct at the start, but the reasoning and approach had several gaps. I realized the truth: this wasn’t about design at all. It was an accumulating organizational debt.
If I stayed distant, he would “learn” only in the worst possible classroom – under pressure, in production, with executives asking why nobody saw it earlier. That’s not learning. It is organizational debt. A few lessons can’t be learned through failure; you have to protect the system first. So I stepped in. Not to dictate how to build it (that was still his role). But to show the boundaries. The proposal shifted – that noise vanished. Alignment returned.
That day, I learned something I now hold tightly: sometimes leadership is stepping in. Other times, it’s letting the room work on its own without you. The art is knowing which moment you’re in.
Hands-on leadership is easy to criticize because it is visibly slower. In the first example, I could have fixed the gaps myself. In the second, I could have rewritten the proposal in 30 minutes. But speed is a misleading metric.
The key introspection question: Am I building a team that can think without me, or a team that waits for me?
When leadership optimizes for speed, teams rely on you.
When leadership optimizes for judgment, it can appear inefficient until it becomes scalable.
I used to believe leadership had a single posture: either you are involved, or you are not. Now I see proximity as something that must change with scenario – When judgment is still forming, I am closer. As judgment compounds, I step back. If I never have to step in, I am no longer leading; I am creating a succession.
I’ve learned that hands-on leadership is temporary, like scaffolding around a building being constructed. Micromanagement is when the scaffolding becomes mistaken for the structure itself. If you cannot imagine the team standing without you, then what you have built is not capability, it is dependency on a job title.
What makes hands-on leadership hard is not stepping in; it’s stepping back. It asks for restraint at the exact moment when certainty is highest. It asks you to watch someone – take longer, struggle more, and make decisions you would have optimized because that struggle is the raw material from which judgment grows. There is no shortcut past that discomfort. It is the tax of creating something that will endure beyond you.
Hands-on leadership is not about being everywhere. It is about being where judgment is forming and being absent where it is already strong. Control creates compliance. Clarity creates capability. And in environments where consequences compound, it is capability that survives.