The CEO-researcher vs the micromanager
A CEO needs to get to grips with how their firm actually functions, rather than just staring at org charts, KPIs or whatever polished fluff turns up in a slide deck. They’ve got to build a solid mental picture of how work flows through the business day by day, spotting where things grind to a halt, where the gears crunch and where tiny niggles quietly morph into full-blown disasters.
As I’ve said before, if you don’t have that grasp on reality, leadership becomes a bit of a shallow exercise where decisions are based on filtered reports instead of what’s happening on the ground. You’ll end up treating systemic process failures as ‘people problems’, which is a bit like blaming the car for breaking down when you haven’t bothered to change the oil in three years. Your strategy might look brilliant on paper, but it’ll fall flat the moment it hits the real world.
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This is usually where people get a bit twitchy, as there’s a common fear that a CEO who knows too much detail will inevitably start micromanaging. That only tends to happen when knowledge is used as a weapon rather than a tool, because understanding how things work isn’t at all the same as breathing down someone’s neck while they’re trying to do their job.
Micromanagement is all about a thirst for control, manifesting as a leader who’s constantly sticking their nose into execution or overriding everyone’s judgement. It feels like a vote of no confidence, which is a surefire way to kill off any sense of ownership and slow the whole team to a crawl. Deep understanding, on the other hand, is simply about seeing the system for what it is.
A decent CEO should be asking which approvals are a total waste of time, where incentives are accidentally encouraging the wrong behaviour and how handovers between teams actually happen when nobody’s looking. You won’t find those answers on a dashboard; you find them through direct exposure, like sitting in on real workflows or asking someone to walk you through their day. You might even try your hand at a bit of the work yourself, not to show off or judge, but to feel where the friction is.
When it’s done right, this shouldn’t feel threatening at all because the intent is to listen rather than correct. The CEO is there to understand the plumbing, not to evaluate the plumber, and they should leave with better questions rather than a list of new instructions. They aren’t there to flip desks or change decisions on the fly; instead, they take that knowledge away to fix the underlying structure—the tools, the rules and the priorities.
This level of insight also shines a light on the stuff that never makes it into an official report, such as office politics, informal gatekeepers and those subtle status games that can quietly warp a company’s culture. A CEO who stays at arm’s length will almost certainly misread these dynamics and end up rewarding the wrong people.
The irony is that this kind of deep dive actually leads to more delegation, not less. The better a CEO understands the machine, the better they can apply correctives to make it more automatic and, therefore, the more confidently they can step back and let it run. They aren’t suffocating their staff; they’re just clearing the path so everyone can get on with their jobs without tripping over broken processes.