Don't Touch the Task - An Interview with Luis Martins

In today's dynamic business environment, effective management has never been more crucial. It's about striking a fine balance – being involved enough to guide and instruct, but not to the point where you're stymieing growth by overstepping the boundaries of your role. 

So, how do leaders foster a culture of trust, delegation, and enablement without "touching the task"? 

Roster’s Jaclyn Rozkin spoke with Luis Martins to explore these intricacies of leadership and outline ways for leaders to empower their teams for maximum growth, productivity, and progression. 

Luis Martins is a Professor, the Zlotnik Family Chair, and the Herb Kelleher Chair at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Management and Organizational Behavior from the Stern School of Business at New York University. Prior to joining UT Austin, he was on the faculty of the College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the School of Business at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Martins teaches courses on leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation, and change management in the McCombs School’s undergraduate program and Full-Time, Working Professional, and Executive MBA programs. He has won several teaching awards, including multiple Outstanding Professor and EY McCombs Amplifier Awards from the Executive MBA and Working Professionals MBA programs. He has been on the Faculty Honor Rolls of the McCombs School Executive MBA and Working Professionals MBA Programs and MS in Technology Commercialization (MSTC) Program in every semester that he has taught. He has provided consulting and executive development services to numerous companies, including Accenture, Applied Materials, AT&T, BBVA Compass, The Boon Group, Coca Cola, Dun & Bradstreet, Essilor, FBI Crime Labs, Friedkin, General Electric, HNI Healthcare, Hewlett Packard, Lockheed Martin, Lower Colorado River Authority, McKesson, NASA, National Instruments, Ovare Group, Patni Computer Systems, Petrobras, Samsung, Southwest Airlines, State Farm, SXSW, Texas Mutual, Waffle House, and WEG Electric. He is also an active advisor to startups and growth-stage companies, and serves on several boards.

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To set the stage, what does it mean to “touch the task”?

Managers can get into the habit of hand holding subordinates. A manager should ensure their subordinate does work tasks themselves while the manager reviews, provides guidance, and coaches the subordinate. When managers “touch the task”, they are getting involved and doing the work themselves.

Why do managers touch the task in the first place? 

When it is crunch time and the pressure is on, it generates a threat response - in the face of this threat, you try to narrow perspective and focus on the micro-details because that gives you a sense of control. You want to dig into the details rather than trust your managers and employees to figure it out and solve the problem.

Within larger organizations, it’s a limiting factor to an individual’s career progression. Within startups and scaling companies, it’s a limiting factor to the growth of the organization. 

The best way to get through a tough situation is to rely on others who are competent and empowered to work as a team.

What powers your organization are people, ideas, and resources. Your job is to provide the right setting where those three things come together in the right way, and then get out of the way to do more important things.

How exactly is “touching the task” a limiting factor for growing companies?

It inhibits scale, particularly among growth stage firms - firms where the founding team and the CEO have been instrumental in creating the things. As the firm grows, the founding team has to transition from designing the product, getting product market fit, and growing revenue, to now operating through others. As they scale and grow, they default their natural tendency to do the work. 

Ultimately, as you grow your organization, you’re going to need to delegate to people the kinds of things you used to do before so that you can do the things that are required as you scale. That requires you to let go of the task and manage people and lead people to do the task instead.

What are the costs of touching the task? 

There are many disadvantages of touching the task. Primarily, it’s only your brain operating. 

If you are the smartest person in the room, the question I’d ask you is, how good is your recruiting? Why don’t you have smart people doing the things that need to be done? And if you do have smart people that know how to do the job, then why are you getting in the middle of them doing the job? 

Touching the task is tangible and gives you a sense of control, so you default to it. Influencing others to do work is tougher. You have to understand them, you have to collaborate with them, you have to get agreement with them, you have to get commitment from them – It’s much easier to just jump in and provide solutions, but then every time you need that thing, you have to jump in and provide the solution. If you spend time developing the person to find the solution, you don’t have to jump in the next time. 

Among growth stage companies and scaling companies, there's often also disagreement about how things ought to be done. 

As a CEO or a top-level leader, you need to focus on the ‘what’ aspects of what needs to be done - what are we doing and why are we doing them - and use the ‘what’ and ‘why’ to motivate and empower your people so that they can figure out the how.

Every time you touch the task, you are missing out on an opportunity to develop the person who should be doing the task. You’re disempowering your people.

What levers can managers use to get things done the way they want it done without touching the task?

Two things determine the tendency to touch the task and micromanage a particular task: business need and personal preference

If there are three ways to do something, you might like one way more than the other two, but that’s a personal preference and not a business imperative. 

You must separate the business imperative things from the personal preference things.

All of us have preferences and it’s perfectly legitimate to have preferences. What you can do is sit your subordinate down and provide a model example of how you like it. Whoever is doing the work, you can motivate them to work within those preferences, and the clearer you are upfront with them when you’re bringing them in, the easier it will be to get those preferences met.

How should we think about this in the context of performance management - when managers are hesitant to take action on an underperformer?

You need to have a strong sense of ownership of the employee. That doesn’t mean that you allow poor performance - it means you have  high expectations and help the employee meet them. Sometimes it doesn’t work because it’s the wrong fit - it might be that the employee doesn’t have the passion or skills for it.  Leaders must try to train and coach on the skills that are necessary, help them create processes and systems, so that in the end, if the person does not have it or cannot bring it at the pace that is needed for the business, you need to act on them.

You’re suboptimizing on two dimensions when you retain a poor performer beyond the point where you have given them a chance to improve at a speed that is necessary for your business:

1. You’re suboptimizing your time: When you are doing this job and touching the task, you’re not doing more important things. You’re in the position in the organization to do a certain level of things, x level of strategic importance, and your subordinate is doing some fraction of x in terms of its strategic importance. Whenever you’re investing your time in a lower multiple of x than what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re suboptimizing your time. 

2. You’re suboptimizing team performance: When you have this underperforming person, it means that you don’t have somebody else who could do a better job. 

Saying ‘It’s tough to find resources’ is a poor excuse for not doing good performance management.

How can leaders course correct after they’ve already touched the task?

When I coach senior executives, I ask which meetings they’re going to that could be taken by subordinates. One of the things they realize is that the subordinates are perfectly fine with taking on the task, but because the leader is touching the task, the subordinates tend to rely on the leaders’ task touching. 

You extricate yourself by moving more and more of the responsibility of the task to the person and trusting them to do that. 

You extricate yourself somewhat gradually, even though you tend to jump in suddenly. You see a problem, you jump in, and then realize you’re touching this person’s task - you must sit back and talk about what needs to be done, what the subordinate is going to do, and get a commitment and understanding of how they’re going to do it differently.

What about “Player-Coaches” and the need for them to be involved in tasks? 

There are two ways to think about a player-coach. 

There are strategic player coaches - They play a position that is designed into the structure and processes of how things get done. It is defined - for x, we go to the player-coach. That’s fine because that role or x is your task. A player-coach who does that is functioning as a proper player-coach - operating through their people on the coach side and doing the task on the player side. 

There are also ineffective player coaches. When you’re jumping in and doing the player stuff where you should be doing the coaching stuff, now you’re touching the task. You’re not a player-coach anymore, you’re just a coach that’s interfering with players. 

To be strategic about this, you must have a clearly defined player role. Be clear about what is your task and what is not your task.

Non-strategic people will be reactionary and jump in and do everything. 

Firefighting is ok for a short term thing, but if you’re constantly firefighting, who is running the strategy?

What trends have you observed in this management development area over time?

There is an epidemic of touching the task, and I see evidence that it’s getting worse.

Over time we have gained tremendously more control over our lives than we used to have. We can get information instantly - everything is on our phones. The sense of “I want things immediately, now, my way” is bleeding into the workplace and is getting people to operate directly on the task. 

The more we have tools at our disposal to control things, we think we should be controlling everything. There’s a huge difference between control and influence. Technologies we use at work make it very easy to touch the task - you’re simply copying someone or sending a Slack. The readiness of information and proliferation of tools have made touching the task more of an epidemic than it was previously.

We have to keep in mind that leadership, management, and success - all of them depend on having other people do what we want done.

You don’t fly your own plane when you go somewhere. Why do you think you should be jumping in and telling somebody what the marketing tactics should be? Didn’t you hire a marketing person to fly that plane?

Your success in growing a business and running a business effectively really depends on how much you commit to releasing human potential to do the work that needs to be done. 

If you remember that it’s your job to help your people be the best versions of themselves, I think that orientation can help you think more about developing your people and getting them to do the work than thinking that you are the solution for everything and then jumping in and touching the task.

Touching the task is a misguided sense of what your role is and what your purpose is that makes people touch the task.

Your role is to help other people succeed at the things that you need them to do to help you do what you want to do.

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