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By:

Rahul Kulkarni

30 March 2025 at 3:32:54 pm

The Boundary Collapse

When kindness becomes micromanagement It started with a simple leave request.   “Hey, can I take Friday off? Need a personal day,” Meera messaged Rohit. Rohit replied instantly:   “Of course. All good. Just stay reachable if anything urgent comes up.”   He meant it as reassurance. But the team didn’t hear reassurance. They heard a rule.   By noon, two things had shifted inside The Workshop:   Meera felt guilty for even asking. Everyone else quietly updated their mental handbook: Leave is...

The Boundary Collapse

When kindness becomes micromanagement It started with a simple leave request.   “Hey, can I take Friday off? Need a personal day,” Meera messaged Rohit. Rohit replied instantly:   “Of course. All good. Just stay reachable if anything urgent comes up.”   He meant it as reassurance. But the team didn’t hear reassurance. They heard a rule.   By noon, two things had shifted inside The Workshop:   Meera felt guilty for even asking. Everyone else quietly updated their mental handbook: Leave is allowed… but not really. This is boundary collapse… when a leader’s good intentions unintentionally blur the limits that protect autonomy and rest. When care quietly turns into control Founders rarely intend to micromanage.   What looks like control from the outside often starts as care from the inside. “Let me help before something breaks.” “Let me stay involved so we don’t lose time.” “Loop me in… I don’t want you stressed.” Supportive tone.   Good intentions.   But one invisible truth defines workplace psychology: When power says “optional,” it never feels optional.
So when a client requested a revision, Rohit gently pinged:   “If you’re free, could you take a look?” Of course she logged in.   Of course she handled it.   And by Monday, the cultural shift was complete: Leave = location change, not a boundary.   A founder’s instinct had quietly become a system. Pattern 1: The Generous Micromanager Modern micromanagement rarely looks aggressive. It looks thoughtful :   “Let me refine this so you’re not stuck.” “I’ll review it quickly.”   “Share drafts so we stay aligned.”   Leaders believe they’re being helpful. Teams hear:   “You don’t fully trust me.” “I should check with you before finishing anything.”   “My decisions aren’t final.” Gentle micromanagement shrinks ownership faster than harsh micromanagement ever did because people can’t challenge kindness. Pattern 2: Cultural conditioning around availability In many Indian workplaces, “time off” has an unspoken footnote: Be reachable. Just in case. No one says it directly.   No one pushes back openly.   The expectation survives through habit: Leave… but monitor messages. Rest… but don’t disconnect. Recover… but stay alert. Contrast this with a global team we worked with: A designer wrote,   “I’ll be off Friday, but available if needed.” Her manager replied:   “If you’re working on your off-day, we mismanaged the workload… not the boundary.”   One conversation.   Two cultural philosophies.   Two completely different emotional outcomes.   Pattern 3: The override reflex Every founder has a version of this reflex.   Whenever Rohit sensed risk, real or imagined, he stepped in: Rewriting copy.   Adjusting a design.   Rescoping a task.   Reframing an email. Always fast.   Always polite.   Always “just helping.” But each override delivered one message:   “Your autonomy is conditional.” You own decisions…   until the founder feels uneasy.   You take initiative…   until instinct replaces delegation.   No confrontation.   No drama.   Just quiet erosion of confidence.   The family-business amplification Boundary collapse becomes extreme in family-managed companies.   We worked with one firm where four family members… founder, spouse, father, cousin… all had informal authority. Everyone cared.   Everyone meant well.   But for employees, decision-making became a maze: Strategy approved by the founder.   Aesthetics by the spouse.   Finance by the father. Tone by the cousin.   They didn’t need leadership.   They needed clarity.   Good intentions without boundaries create internal anarchy. The global contrast A European product team offered a striking counterexample.   There, the founder rarely intervened mid-stream… not because of distance, but because of design:   “If you own the decision, you own the consequences.” Decision rights were clear.   Escalation paths were explicit.   Authority didn’t shift with mood or urgency. No late-night edits.   No surprise rewrites.   No “quick checks.”   No emotional overrides. As one designer put it:   “If my boss wants to intervene, he has to call a decision review. That friction protects my autonomy.” The result:   Faster execution, higher ownership and zero emotional whiplash. Boundaries weren’t personal.   They were structural .   That difference changes everything. Why boundary collapse is so costly Its damage is not dramatic.   It’s cumulative.   People stop resting → you get presence, not energy.   People stop taking initiative → decisions freeze.   People stop trusting empowerment → autonomy becomes theatre.   People start anticipating the boss → performance becomes emotional labour.   People burn out silently → not from work, but from vigilance.   Boundary collapse doesn’t create chaos.   It creates hyper-alertness, the heaviest tax on any team. The real paradox Leaders think they’re being supportive. Teams experience supervision.   Leaders assume boundaries are obvious. Teams see boundaries as fluid. Leaders think autonomy is granted. Teams act as though autonomy can be revoked at any moment. This is the Boundary Collapse → a misunderstanding born not from intent, but from the invisible weight of power. Micromanagement today rarely looks like anger.   More often,   it looks like kindness without limits. (Rahul Kulkarni is Co-founder at PPS Consulting. He patterns the human mechanics of scaling where workplace behavior quietly shapes business outcomes. Views personal.)

Booth-level managementfetches BJP historic win

BJP

Mumbai: While registering an unprecedented victory and bettering its own past record, the BJP won 132 seats in 2024 Maharashtra Assembly election leaving everybody to wonder about the reasons behind such resounding victory. It is now turning out that the BJP’s micromanagement at the booth level after the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year has won it majority of its seats.


If party workers are to be believed, as many as 126 out of 132 seats were won because of the micro management.


After the debacle in Lok Sabha election in the Month of May, Maharashtra in-charge of BJP Bhupendra Yadav did a quick data crunching and came up with a list of 13,000 booths spread across 130 assembly constituencies, where, he said, startling results can be achieved with minimal efforts and that too within a short time span. Accordingly, by the end of June, 130 young, enthusiastic, tech-savvy, well-educated young men and women who had deep ideological roots in Hindutva were identified and deployed in 130 constituencies across the state. A complete feedback and monitoring system from the state centre to the level of each of these 130 constituencies too was quickly put in place. BJP Konkan regional organizing secretary Shailendra Dalvi was given responsibility of this plan which was named ‘Vistarak Yojana’.


Under this scheme, along with the one chosen tech-savvy young person, who is called Vistarak – one who spreads the party, a team of at least 4 other individuals too was roped in. They included an MLA or a minister or a senior party functionary from other state – who was identified as Vidhansabha Sathi, a local RSS office-bearer who looked after coordination of the team and two individuals from Anulom and Varahi – the agencies that have been formed to take state and central government schemes to the last individual. This team of five individuals was given a single-focus task to energise and vitalize the booth-level party apparatus. They almost never participated in any of the election rallies and hardly met Netas who were campaigning. Most of them also had minimal contact with the candidates and their teams that were engaged in various aspects of campaign management. In a way these 130 teams of five individuals worked like the bureaucratic framework.


These teams were provided with all the data they needed like the number of government scheme beneficiaries in each of the booth areas, past and present members of the BJP and the ideological family etc. The team members were given particular tasks for every day and the data gathered by them throughout the day was collected at the state centre and was further processed to assess the developments on those boots. The teams were also immediately given instructions if they needed to change focus or strategy in case of certain unexpected events. This kind of live and organic connect between all the teams helped them better their performance over the five months that they stayed in the concerned assemblies.


As they say, the devil is in details, senior editor and former Rajya Sabha member of the Congress, while analysing the reasons behind the devastating defeat of the Congress and the alliance it led, said, “While the Congress and MVA worked on Macro level, the Mahayuti toiled at the micro level. Dealing with individual level has become important in the changing world of electioneering today. The Shiv Sena had that advantage of direct people’s connect. However, that was lost by Uddhav Thackeray, while Eknath Shinde built on this natural advantage that he has inherited from the past leaders of the party.”

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