The Omniscience Trap: What It Is and How It Stops You

Who 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? In Truman fashion, we declare that the buck stops with us, and we confuse take responsibility for results with be responsible for controlling everything that happens with a project, department or business unit.

Everyone knows the bottlenecks that occur when too much information is forced to flow through one pair of hands. Typically, managers who take responsibility for all the details spend many hours reviewing associates’ work (which is often administrative in nature), while higher-level functions such as strategy setting are neglected.

On 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 clothes they are assessed to make sure people have the skills and resources they need to perform high.

This 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 omniscient, omnipresent, and 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.

There 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 former bosses. Sometimes people draw on skills, like being on top of the details, that were important in previous jobs, but not in larger roles with managerial responsibility.

If 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 result, succeeding on the first try, or having something happen a certain way. Others are all-or-nothing, treating every setback as a disaster.

The owner of an IT consultancy was having trouble growing the business, in part because she took responsibility for the work of all her subcontractors. She questioned any of her methods that differed from the way 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 exhausting herself trying to wear the hats of company president, director of sales, and director of technology.

By choosing to see herself as responsible for managing the growth of her business, not how people get work done, she was able to re-prioritize. She began to put much more energy into income-generating activities and evaluated her subcontractors on meaningful criteria like bottom line and customer satisfaction. In addition, she developed clear requirements for skill levels and stopped hiring inexperienced people who required close supervision that she couldn’t afford.

Here are some tips if you find yourself in the “omniscience trap”:

● Create a log of all your daily activities over a period of one to two weeks. Organize articles by category and look for areas where you could be spending a lot of time for a small fee.

● See if you can recognize any unrealistic expectations, such as those mentioned 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.

● 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 every “no” from a potential customer with an accusation of her product (“It’s not good enough”).

● Reframe your thinking and replace the 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 to match the right customers with the right product.

● Visualize yourself dealing with 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 are increased if you have someone who can watch when you slip into old patterns or rehearse new scenarios with you.

Finally, 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.