Manager Overload Is a Training Problem, Not a Time Problem

When managers feel overwhelmed, a likely problem is that all of their team’s hours, including their own, go to getting things done and to correcting what went wrong, and none go to ensuring that, next month, things can get done better, faster, and without the manager’s direct involvement.

Most managers already know this, yet they rarely spend time training their teams, citing a lack of time. I ask them to check where their work time went last week: how much was used to move things forward, and how much to fight fires, correct errors, and misunderstandings? If the latter is more than a couple of hours, it’s not that they don’t have time for training: it’s that the lack of training is the reason they don’t have time.

Short- and long-term productivity

If all you care about is getting the most done this week, then training is useless. Doing a task yourself is faster than teaching someone to do it, and patching an error is faster than fixing its root cause.

But if what matters is getting your team to be able to do next year much more than what it can do this year, then training is a necessity. If you never upskill your people and address root causes, your team will never be able to produce more than it does today.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should spend all your time on training and other long-term activities. But it does mean that if a week goes by without you spending at least a couple of hours upskilling your team to work more smoothly, with fewer mistakes, and without you, your situation will never improve.

The firefighting loop

Untrained skills and unfixed processes produce errors, misunderstandings, and rework. Errors, misunderstandings, and rework produce fires. And the fires consume exactly the hours the training investment needed.

Worse even, the longer you are in the loop, the more rational firefighting feels, because there is always something burning.

Two amplifiers tighten this vicious loop. First, every fire you absorb teaches your people that obstacles get escalated rather than solved, which is precisely one of the ways in which low agency is learned (agency is largely trainable, but firefighting trains the opposite). Second, feedback given under time pressure degrades into feedback on methods: “Do it this way.” It fixes today’s task while building none of the judgment that would prevent tomorrow’s.

The outcome is that the gap between what is needed and what your team can do gets filled by the only person left to fill it. You, at night.

The solution is not to work even longer hours to make time for dedicated training sessions; it’s to bake training into the hours you already spend on delegation, feedback, and performance review.

Every delegation is training in disguise

There are two ways to delegate: delegate to get something done, or delegate to get something done and upskill the delegee.

Here are some tips:

1. Be superclear when assigning. Don’t be just clear enough to be understood; be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood. Be concrete, give examples, and ask them to rephrase what they will do. Every misunderstanding you pre-empt is rework that never happens.
2. Check in one or two days later. Questions surface only once someone starts the work, and by then, asking feels awkward, so people guess instead. A brief, informal check-in catches the questions they didn’t know they had, before they convert into expensive mistakes to fix.
3. Give feedback on outcomes, and do it frequently. People need to know whether they are doing well or badly, and they need to know it often. Whenever someone pours effort into something, and their manager doesn’t seem to notice, they learn the lesson that it was a waste of effort, and won’t care as much next time. Similarly, whenever someone underperforms, and their manager doesn’t notice, it’s a sign that that level of low performance was acceptable, so why waste energy doing anything more than that?
4. Assign tasks that stretch. Good managers do not delegate merely to get tasks done, but to develop their team members’ skills. A task that only empties your plate buys you a week; a task that stretches the person buys you every week after.
5. Expect agency, explicitly. Pick a small task, state that you expect obstacles to be tackled rather than escalated, give a concrete example of what that looks like, and follow up without rescuing. The full protocol is here. And if they can’t yet, train the skill first: you cannot demand behavior that competence does not yet support.

None of this should be extra work on top of managing. Seen from the employee’s point of view, it is most of what managing is.

Every error is a process improvement in disguise

As a manager, it’s common that when one of your delegee’s deliverables contains mistakes, your immediate reaction is to fix it. But if you always act on this instinct, they will never improve.

This doesn’t mean you should never go into execution mode. Sometimes, if there’s a true urgency or a business-critical task, it may be the right reaction. Problems begin when execution mode becomes your standard reaction.

A better approach is to ask yourself which skill or process would have prevented the error. If the answer is a skill, you have found a competency gap to fill before it produces the same error again. If the answer is a process, write it, fix it, or create the checklist that was missing.

A mistake that happens twice is not a discipline problem. It is a skill nobody taught or a process nobody built.

Three objections

“I don’t have time.” That’s precisely because firefighting consumes too much of your week, and that’s due to a lack of training or processes within your team. Fix that, and you’ll fix the lack of time.

“It’s faster to do it myself.” True this week, false every week after. The comparison repeats forever; the teaching repeats only until they learn.

“Isn’t this micromanaging?” Maybe parts of it are, in the short term, but if you never train your people, their work contains lots of mistakes and misunderstandings, and fixing those will result in a lot of micromanagement anyway. Better instead to do today a bit of the type of micromanagement that upskills your people and frees you from the need to micromanage them tomorrow.

The change

Within weeks, the same questions stop being asked twice.

Within a month or two, fewer things come back wrong, and fewer fires reach you.

Eventually, work that used to require you no longer does.

Want help putting this into practice?

Getting a team out of the firefighting loop and building the skills and processes that keep it out is one of the most common problems leaders bring to me. If your weeks are full of work your team should be able to do without you, that is the kind of problem I work on with leaders. Here is how to start.