Written by Michiel R. De Boer
She was, by any reasonable assessment, an excellent manager. She cared deeply about her team’s development. She gave specific, timely feedback, more consistently than almost any manager I have worked with. She was present in the work, intellectually engaged, responsive to questions. Her door was always open and people used it constantly.
Her team’s performance, measured by outputs and deadlines, was solid. Her engagement scores were high.
And yet, when I spoke to her team members individually, in the confidential conversations that are, in my experience, where the real data lives: a different picture emerged.
“I’ve learned to run things by her before I make a decision,” one of her senior analysts told me. “Not because she requires it. But because if I do it without checking, she’ll catch something and send it back. It’s easier to check upfront.” He paused. “I used to make more decisions on my own.”
Another: “She’s brilliant at seeing what can be improved. The problem is she always sees something that can be improved. So everything goes through a few cycles before it goes out. We’ve slowed down. We don’t ship things imperfectly anymore.”
A third: “She has high standards. I’ve learned a lot from her. But I’ve also stopped suggesting ideas the way I used to, because they go through this process of refinement, and by the end I’m not sure whether the idea is still mine or whether it has become something else.”
This is the accidental bottleneck. Not a controlling leader, but a caring one. Not a micromanager, but a feedback maximiser. A person who wanted to develop her team and did, in certain technical ways, and in doing so, produced a team that could not move without her.
The Autonomy Paradox
Edward Deci’s foundational research on self-determination, and his landmark 1971 study on the effects of external rewards on intrinsic motivation, established something counterintuitive: that external interventions, including feedback, reward, and oversight, can undermine intrinsic motivation when they are experienced as controlling rather than informational.
The distinction between controlling and informational feedback is not primarily about content. It is about who initiates it, and what it signals about the locus of evaluation.
Feedback that says “here is how you are doing relative to your own goals and standards” is informational. It supports autonomy, because the person remains the primary judge of their own work. Feedback that says “here is how you are doing relative to my standards, and here is what you need to change” is controlling, even when it is delivered warmly, even when the standards are high, even when the manager’s intentions are entirely developmental.
Over time, a team that receives the second kind of feedback internalises a specific lesson: the quality standard lives in the manager, not in them. The manager is the evaluative authority. Submitting work to the manager is not a collaborative act. It is an act of deference to a higher standard of judgment. And the rational response to inhabiting that position is to do exactly what the analyst described: check before deciding, because checking is the path of least resistance, and the independence that used to feel natural has been systematically replaced by a more efficient habit of deference.
Teresa Amabile’s research on creativity and motivation in organisations (built across decades of study) demonstrates the same pattern from a different angle. When people feel that their work is being closely evaluated, that they are working under close surveillance, or that their effort is constantly being compared to an external standard, the intrinsic motivation that produces creative work tends to suppress. They shift from exploratory, risk-taking thinking to more conservative, error-avoidance thinking. The feedback does not produce better ideas. It produces fewer ideas, produced more carefully.
This is the autonomy paradox: a leader who gives abundant feedback can produce a team that is technically skilled and motivationally diminished.
The Bottleneck At Scale
At the individual level, this dynamic produces people who are more capable than they were and less independent than they used to be. At the team level, it produces something more structurally dangerous.
When an entire team has learned to route decisions through the leader, not because they are required to, but because experience has taught them that it is the efficient path to a quality output: the leader becomes the bottleneck for every consequential piece of work the team produces.
This is invisible in good conditions. The leader is present, responsive, and invested. Things still move. The quality is high. But the team’s effective throughput is now capped by the leader’s bandwidth. And when the leader is stretched, when priorities multiply, when other demands arrive, everything slows simultaneously, because the decision-making capability the leader has been developing in themselves rather than distributing into the team is suddenly unavailable.
The team, at this point, does not step up. It waits. Because the habit of waiting for the leader’s signal has become the team’s operating system. And habits are not reversed by necessity. They are only reversed by deliberate redesign.
The cascading effect is also worth naming. A team that cannot make decisions independently cannot give its own junior members genuine autonomy. The manager who routes all decisions through herself creates a team whose senior members route all decisions through her, which means the team’s junior members are several layers removed from any real ownership. The autonomy deficit multiplies downward through the organisation.
The APAC Dimension: High Performance, High Deference
In high power-distance organisational cultures, which are common across much of APAC, though the specific expression varies significantly between Malaysian, Indonesian, Singaporean, Thai, and Filipino contexts: the dynamic described above is amplified by the cultural logic of the environment.
In contexts where deferring to seniority is a genuine norm rather than a mere politeness, a manager who consistently positions herself as the evaluative authority is not just producing a bottleneck. She is producing a culture of deference that aligns with the prevailing cultural gravity. Her team members are not resisting the dynamic; they are, in many cases, moving with it, because it is consistent with their prior experience of organisational life.
The challenge is that the organisation may need something different from what the culture provides naturally. Particularly in industries where innovation, speed, and adaptability are competitively required, a team that excels at execution-under-direction and struggles with initiative-under-ambiguity is not equipped for what the business environment actually demands.
The leader who developed their team technically but did not develop their independence has, in this sense, produced people who are excellent at the work that the organisation used to need, and less equipped for the work the organisation currently needs. This is not the team’s failure. It is a leadership design failure.
Why This Leader Is So Difficult To Coach
The leader at the centre of this story is, in almost every case, aware that something is not quite right. They see the team’s dependency. They may even be frustrated by it. “I wish they would just make the call themselves,” one such manager told me, genuinely exasperated.
What they do not see, or cannot yet see clearly enough to change, is their own role in producing it.
Because the feedback they gave was not wrong. The standards they held were not unreasonable. The engagement and presence they brought to their team’s work was, in most respects, genuinely valuable. The problem is not what they did. It is the cumulative effect of what they did at the level of the team’s autonomy development. It is a systemic effect rather than a behavioural one, which makes it much harder to name and much harder to change.
Coaching this leader requires helping them make a distinction that does not come naturally to most high-standard, caring managers: the distinction between developing your team’s technical capability and developing their independence. These are not the same thing, and they require different interventions.
Technical capability development asks: how do I help this person produce better work? The answer is feedback, coaching, and modelling.
Independence development asks: how do I help this person develop the internal judgment that allows them to produce good work without me? The answer is progressive withdrawal of the evaluative role, deliberate creation of space for autonomous decision-making, and the willingness to let imperfect decisions go uncorrected, because an imperfect decision made independently is, in the long run, more valuable to the organisation than a perfect decision made under supervision.
Practical Recommendations
Distinguish between the two roles of feedback. Before giving feedback, ask: is this feedback developing the person’s capability, or is it replacing their judgment? The first is developmental. The second is controlling, regardless of how warmly it is delivered. Over a month, a good manager’s feedback should increasingly develop independence: pushing the evaluative function into the person rather than retaining it in themselves.
Practise deliberate non-intervention. This is uncomfortable for high-standard managers, but it is the most direct way to rebuild team autonomy. Identify one category of decisions that currently flow through you, and transfer it to the team with a clear mandate: “These are your calls. I am available if you want to think it through together, but the decision is yours and the outcome is yours.” Then hold to it. Even when you see a decision you would have made differently. Especially then.
Audit the routing patterns in your team. Ask yourself honestly: what decisions come to me that should not? Not because the team cannot handle them, but because the team has learned that routing to you is the path of least resistance. Every decision that sits with you is a development opportunity the person is not having. Map the decisions that are currently yours, and identify which two or three should be transferred to specific team members in the next quarter.
Build quality into the team, not into yourself. One of the most valuable things a leader can do: and one of the most difficult, is to invest seriously in developing the team’s own quality standards, review processes, and peer feedback culture. When a team can evaluate and improve its own work, the leader’s feedback becomes the exception rather than the rule. This requires investment: teaching people what good looks like, creating structured peer review processes, modelling the quality of observation you want the team to internalise. It is slower than giving the feedback yourself. It is worth it.
Calibrate feedback to developmental stage. A new team member needs more directive feedback. A senior team member needs less. The mistake is giving the same type of feedback to both, or continuing to give directive feedback to experienced team members who should, by this point, be operating with much more independence. As people develop, the role of the leader should shift from director to thought partner: available, but not the evaluative authority.
The Measure Of A Leader’s Success
There is a version of leadership success that is measured by the leader’s outputs. By the quality of what the team produces under their direction. By the effectiveness of their feedback and the development of their team’s technical skills.
There is a better version of leadership success that is measured by the team’s independence. By whether the team can produce excellent work when the leader is not in the room. By whether people in the team have developed the internal judgment, the autonomy, and the initiative to act without waiting for a signal.
The first version produces a team that performs well under good conditions. The second version produces a team that performs well under all conditions, including the ones where the leader is unavailable, promoted, or moved on.
The leader who gives constant feedback and builds a brilliant, dependent team has succeeded at the first version and failed at the second. And the second is the one the organisation actually needs.
The question every leader should sit with regularly is not “how good is my team’s work?” It is “how well does my team work without me?” If the answer to that question is uncomfortable, the feedback that needs to change is not the feedback going to the team. It is the feedback the leader needs to give themselves.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the decisions that currently flow through you that your team could, in principle, be making themselves. Not because you require it, but because experience has taught them that routing through you is the path of least resistance.
If you were unavailable for a month, how many of those decisions would still arrive at your door?
The answer tells you something important about what your feedback has been developing, and what it has been quietly replacing.
This is Piece 4 of an eleven-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece: The star performer promoted into leadership: and the team falls apart: the most common leadership failure mode, and why it was almost certainly predictable.
