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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.)

Deadly Neglect

Tamil Nadu, long celebrated for its industrial prowess and political theatre, has lately distinguished itself for a far grimmer reason. In a horrifying medical scandal, at least 22 children have died across Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan after consuming Coldrif, a cough syrup manufactured in the Southern State by Sresan Pharmaceuticals. What was supposed to ease sniffles and sore throats turned lethal. Tests revealed that the syrup contained diethylene glycol, a toxic chemical used in printing ink, far above safe limits.


G. Ranganathan, the Kancheepuram-based owner of Sresan, was arrested in Chennai by the Madhya Pradesh police. It came to light that the company had been adding up to a staggering 48 percent of DEG to Coldrif against the legal limit of 0.1 percent. And yet the syrup was allowed to flow into markets for years, leaving behind a bitter trail of grieving parents and children suffering from liver and kidney ailments.


This shocking has exposed Tamil Nadu’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Two senior drug inspectors have been suspended, but the real failure is systemic. Sresan Pharmaceuticals, first registered in 1990 and later struck off the Ministry of Corporate Affairs register, continued operating under a proprietary structure. Unbilled containers of toxic chemicals lay hidden in its factory. Stop-production orders and license suspensions, issued only after deaths occurred, are belated gestures, a bureaucratic fig leaf over a scandal of lethal negligence. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin may trumpet governance reforms, but these words ring hollow when a regulatory system allows children to die from preventable poison.


The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has rightly called for Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda’s intervention, noting that innocent doctors who prescribed Coldrif are being wrongfully targeted. The root cause is the manufacturer’s reckless adulteration and the FDA’s years of oversight failures. The deaths demand a national reckoning on pharmaceutical regulation, stricter quality control and accountability mechanisms that are enforced rather than papered over.


The Tamil Nadu government, predictably, emphasises the arrest of Ranganathan and the dramatic police operation that captured him. Yet. these are distractions. The real question is why a deadly syrup could be produced unchecked in the first place. DEG-laced Coldrif crossed state lines, killed children, and raised the possibility that other batches might have been exported, prompting the World Health Organisation to seek clarifications from Indian authorities. In a state that boasts of effective governance, this is a damning indictment of incompetence.


Oversight in pharmaceuticals amounts to the difference between life and death. If Tamil Nadu wishes to salvage credibility, it must conduct a thorough, transparent investigation into its FDA department, the political accountability of ministers and the chain of regulatory failures that allowe people like Sresan to operate with impunity. Meanwhile, Nadda must ensure that such lapses do not recur nationwide, making it clear that public health cannot be sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic negligence. The federal government must act decisively before another preventable tragedy unfolds.

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