How Managers Stifle Growth: Alvin Huang on Empowering Your Team

In a recent LinkedIn post, Alvin Huang discusses a common but often overlooked managerial habit that can stunt the growth of high-performing employees, ultimately limiting team potential. Huang argues that well-intentioned managers can inadvertently create dependency by over-supervising and failing to delegate true ownership, preventing their best people from developing into future leaders.

Huang highlights a specific scenario where a manager, instead of allowing a top performer to correct their own mistakes, steps in to fix them. This, according to Huang, teaches the employee to wait for intervention rather than developing independent problem-solving skills. “A manager hands their best performer a task, checks the work before it goes anywhere, but then fixes anything that isn’t quite right themselves, rather than asking them to do it,” Alvin Huang writes.

The Cost of Micromanagement

The core of Alvin Huang’s argument centers on the idea that constant oversight, while seemingly efficient in the short term, builds a team of followers rather than leaders. This approach, he contends, creates a ceiling on team growth, as the team’s progress becomes dependent on the manager’s direct involvement. “All because they were never given the room to build it,” Huang states, underscoring the missed opportunity for development.

Huang outlines several key strategies for managers aiming to foster genuine leadership within their teams:

• Hand over the decision, not just the task: Instead of providing a set of steps, managers should present the problem and empower their employees to find the solution. Instructions, as Huang points out, keep the manager in the role of the thinker.
• Let people be wrong first: Huang suggests that allowing employees to make and learn from their own mistakes is more instructive than preemptively correcting them. “A decision they made and got wrong teaches more than one you corrected in advance,” he notes.
• Give credit publicly: Associating an employee’s name with a win in front of others helps them to be perceived and grow into a leader faster, according to Huang.
• Watch who’s asking better questions: Huang advises looking beyond mere busyness or capability to identify individuals who are thinking ahead. “The ones worth developing are already thinking a step past the task in front of them,” he observes.

Building a Self-Sufficient Team

Alvin Huang emphasizes that a team where members are constantly waiting for instructions can only advance as quickly as the person giving those instructions. Conversely, a team empowered to make its own decisions has limitless potential.

He contrasts the approaches of different leaders, suggesting that while some leaders may build followers for immediate speed, truly effective leaders understand the necessity of developing a team that can eventually surpass them. “Some leaders build followers because it’s faster in the moment. Although the good ones never do because they know the team has to outgrow them eventually anyway,” Huang concludes.

Huang’s insights offer a clear framework for managers seeking to cultivate a more empowered and growth-oriented team environment, shifting the focus from task completion to leadership development.