“Managerial debt” is just as real and dangerous as technical debt. Left unaddressed, it leads to learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness occurs when employees feel that no matter what they do, they cannot influence their environment or achieve success. They stop trying, innovating, and eventually, caring.
This isn’t a personality flaw, but a direct consequence of ineffective management practices that strip away autonomy, mastery and purpose. These three are the crucial components of motivation according to Daniel Pink in his book Drive.
The call to action here is to look at the whole system first, rather than at the behaviors of specific individuals.
The Contributors to Helplessness
A team doesn’t fall into this state overnight. It is built through a series of structural and behavioral conditions:
Transparency Gap
When there is no transparency about goals, decisions, or changes, engineers feel like pawns in a game they don’t understand.
No Psychological Safety
Fear of speaking up, asking and suggesting ideas for fear of being ridiculed or punished. This might come from the manager or from bullying members.
Trust Deficit
Without trust between members or toward the manager, everyone suspects everyone else and needs to double-check everything. People don’t engage in real conversations and conflicts and only come to superficial agreements that are not always respected. This is often a result of ineffective 1:1s.
Lack of Delegation
Managers who don’t delegate leave the team members dependent on them, also reducing business continuity and stalling growth and performance.
Absentee Management
Not making decisions, not providing values, principles or “rules of engagement”, not articulating goals and expectations, or not giving feedback creates constant uncertainty and lack of direction – what “good” looks like.
Micromanagement
Telling people exactly what to do, when to do, and how to do, then redoing their work and making sure they know how bad it was, destroys self-worth. Luckily, this is very rare.
Customer Isolation
When engineers are blocked from talking to customers, with only PMs or Sales acting as gatekeepers, they lose the context needed to make product decisions. They become only an execution arm, aka dependent “code monkeys” rather than problem solvers. This also reduces the bus factor and makes it more prone to political agendas.
Changing Goals Frequently
Having clear goals that keep changing creates a chaotic environment where deadlines start slipping and quality issues emerge because no one knows what “done” looks like.
No Metrics
A team with goals and health metrics that are subjective feelings of a manager, likely to be interpreted differently by each member. They are unable to objectively determine what success looks like and when to stop efforts in a specific direction. A classic example is a goal to “have a reliable system” without any numeric values. Another one is having numeric values that are simply not tracked.
No Coaching
Members’ skills are stagnant, without any functional and behavioral growth. Without a learning culture, no new knowledge finds its way into the team, and with time, the gap from the industry grows.
It Was Always This Way
Managers who don’t realize they have the agency to make experiments and changes.
Addiction
Some managers may get their dopamine rush by putting out fires, “rescuing” team members, feeling needed and valuable.
The “Ghost” Team – Stripping Responsibility
A clear sign is when the team’s core responsibilities are either designed to be part of another team or migrated to another team. When a separate entity takes over them, the original team loses its autonomy, mastery and purpose. This usually takes the form of a platform team that is doing the work instead of supporting the work:
- Building monitoring and alerting
- On-call and first-line support
- Fixing performance problems
- Managing the CI/CD pipeline
- Driving upgrades of dependencies (small and big)
- Fixing bugs
- Owning specific domains (infrastructure, backend, frontend, mobile, data, reporting)
- Writing documentation
When a team is “shielded” from these responsibilities, it is also shielded from growth. This creates dependencies to manage and coordinate, and waste in idle time waiting. Decision-making is slower and involves more participants with various incentives.
Members are no longer the owners, but partially helpless spectators in their own domain.
A supporting platform team would ask for the team’s needs and provide guidance, tooling, modules, governance or some standardization, not doing the teams’ work. For a more nuanced discussion about how such teams can effectively help, check out Team Topologies.
Unlearn helplessness
There may certainly be phases and times that such behaviors are deliberate and necessary, for example, a startup trying to find product-market fit with a lot of experiments and changing goals. When this becomes the modus operandi, it unintentionally encourages being helpless.
Management is a deliberate and continuous effort. Reversing learned helplessness is not something that happens quickly. It requires going over the culprits one by one and fixing them by doing the opposite. Then proving time and again that they are fixed, so members are gradually gaining agency and self-reliance.
Two great questions to ask members when they come with questions:
- What have you tried already?
- What do you think we should do next?
I’ve turned my 25 years of scale-up experience into actionable toolkits for leaders like you.
- New Manager? Check out my Leadership Launch program
- Scaling a Team? See how Leadership Growth can help you delegate with confidence
- Want the cheat sheet? Download my 1:1 Guide
Don’t manage by accident. Start leading by design.