The omniscience trap: what it is and how it stops you

Website design By BotEap.comWho among us hasn’t fallen into the trap of believing that to be worth our salt as managers, we must be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent at work? Truman-like, we declare that the buck stops with us, and confuse take responsibility for results with be responsible for controlling everything that happens with a project, department or business unit.

Website design By BotEap.comEveryone knows the bottlenecks that occur when too much information is forced to flow through one pair of hands. Managers who take responsibility for all the details typically spend many hours reviewing associates’ work (which is often administrative in nature), while higher-level functions, such as strategizing, are neglected.

Website design By BotEap.comOn the other hand, managers who take responsibility for results are performing a leadership role that involves setting a vision, setting goals, designing a strategy, and managing resources. Instead of focusing on how each task is performed, the process is evaluated. Instead of reviewing everyone’s work, work clothing they are evaluated to make sure people have the skills and resources they need to perform at a high level.

Website design By BotEap.comThis distinction is crucial for entrepreneurs, the newly promoted, and the currently overwhelmed. I often find with coaching clients that unreasonable or unrealistic expectations are at the heart of the all-knowing, all-pervading, all-powerful syndrome. Hopefully, he at least smiled when he read the title of this article, because he recognizes the impracticality of literally striving to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

Website design By BotEap.comThere are a number of reasons why people fall into the control trap. They include anxiety about being held accountable, perfectionism, lack of confidence, and repeating bad habits learned from old bosses. Sometimes people draw on skills, such as being on top of details, that were important in previous jobs but not in larger roles with managerial responsibility.

Website design By BotEap.comIf you find yourself bogged down in details that drain your energy and prevent you from doing activities that add value to the bottom line, you may be working with unrealistic expectations. The most common include insisting on a particular outcome, being successful on the first try, or having something happen in a certain way. Others are thinking all or nothing, treating every setback like a disaster.

Website design By BotEap.comThe owner of an IT consultancy was having trouble growing her business, in part because she took responsibility for the work of all her subcontractors. She questioned any of her methods that differed from how she would have done the job and often had to correct mistakes made by two inexperienced technicians that she used on smaller jobs because they charged relatively low fees. Meanwhile, she wasn’t spending enough time attracting new clients, raising concerns about billable hours in the coming months. She was wearing herself out trying to wear the hats of company president, chief sales officer, and chief technology officer.

Website design By BotEap.comBy choosing to see herself as responsible for managing the growth of her business, not how people get their jobs done, she was able to reprioritize. She began devoting much more energy to revenue-generating activities and evaluating her subcontractors on meaningful criteria such as bottom line and customer satisfaction. And she developed clear requirements for skill levels and stopped hiring inexperienced people who demanded close supervision she couldn’t afford.

Website design By BotEap.comHere are some tips if you find yourself in the “omniscience trap”:

Website design By BotEap.com● Create a record of all your daily activities for a period of one or two weeks. Organize articles by category and look for areas where you could be spending a lot of time for a small fee.

Website design By BotEap.com● See if you can recognize any unrealistic expectations, such as those listed above, that you have of yourself or others. Seeing ourselves objectively can be difficult, so you may want to enlist the help of a coach, mentor, colleague, or friend.

Website design By BotEap.com● Try to associate your thoughts with the behavior you want to change. Let’s say you’re not hitting a sales goal because you’re not making enough cold calls. What goes through your mind while you look at the phone? A budding businesswoman realized that she was associating each “no” from a potential customer with an indictment of her product (“Not good enough”).

Website design By BotEap.com● Reframe your thinking and replace unwanted behavior with one that is more realistic. Your new thought pattern should be one that you truly believe is more effective than the old one. The entrepreneur mentioned above decided to look at cold calling as a process of matching the right customers with the right product.

Website design By BotEap.com● Visualize yourself facing the situation in a new way. Do this in as much detail as possible, imagining how you feel, what you are doing or saying, and the results you want. Then practice. Your chances of success increase if you have someone who can watch when you slip into old patterns or rehearse new scenarios with you.

Website design By BotEap.comFinally, be careful not to create unrealistic expectations of change. Changing ingrained behaviors takes time, practice, and patience, so start small in one area. A simple but often very effective reinforcement is to reward yourself with something meaningful once your goal is achieved.