Many managers want to increase engagement, ownership, and commitment to the team and organization. This is becoming a huge crisis as retention, innovation, service/quality improvement and the like, become major organization performance issues.

A common complaint of people who aren’t highly engaged or don’t feel very committed to their team or organization, is micromanagement. Micromanagement shows up in many ways to convey a perceived lack of trust or too much “snoopervision.” One way that low-engagement managers often don’t recognize, is the trap of “The Final 10 Percent.” That is when I, as a member of your team, come up with an idea or plan that you, the manager, is in about 90% agreement with. But many managers want to make it perfect by adding their ideas, or restating it in their language. In doing so, they often reduce ownership and commitment because they have shifted it from ‘my’ idea/plan to ‘your’ idea/plan. The extra 5 or 10% improvement in the idea often comes with a 30 – 50% reduction in ownership and commitment to seeing it implemented.