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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.)

Deep Discontent in Congress, candidate calls Patole RSS agent

Updated: Dec 2, 2024

RSS

Mumbai: All is not well in the state Congress after the debacle in the assembly election. Bunty Shelke, a Congress candidate who lost from Nagpur Central constituency, has accused state Congress chief Nana Patole of secretly working for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideologue.


Shelke accused Patole of conspiring against him and blamed him for his defeat. Shelke lost the poll in a close contest with BJP candidate Pravin Datke, by 11,632 votes. Speaking to reporters, Shelke said, “Nana is a RSS agent and destroyed the party. It is because of him that Congress slipped to fifth position in the state. In my constituency he had directed the local leaders not to support me. He even did not recommend my name despite the fact that I lost the seat only by 4,000 votes in 2019”.


Shelke also said that Patole’s entire focus was on how to become the chief minister if the MVA comes to power. Shelke’s allegations virtually created flutter into the political circle. So far Patole has not issued any clarification over these accusations. Shelke was elected as a corporator in 2017 from the constituency that houses the RSS headquarters and the residences of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and union minister Nitin Gadkari.


ree

As the state Congress party reviewed the reasons for its poor performance in the Assembly polls in an introspection meeting at its office, the top leadership faced serious accusations from its workers.


Meanwhile, Nana Patole, after meeting the newly-elected MLAs as well as the defeated candidates accused the election commission of robbing the people of their votes by pointing at the last-hour rise in voting percentage.


Referring to the data released by the election commission, Patole said that the voter turnout at 5pm on polling day was reported as 58.22 per cent. By 11:30pm, the same night, it increased to 65.02 per cent, and by the next day, November 21, it rose to 66.05 per cent. This shows a clear increase of 7.83 percentage points, or 7.6 million. “The rise is doubtful, and the poll body should release video footage from the polling centres where such a rise was recorded,” he demanded.


As many as 85 candidates of Congress were defeated in the assembly elections, with 17 candidates losing by more than 50,000 votes.


It may be recalled that the Congress had in its manifesto for the 2024 Lok Sabha election mentioned the “efficiency” of EVMs. The setback for the Congress-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) in the Maharashtra election, which has sparked the latest controversy, shouldn’t have come as a surprise, at least to the Congress. Internal surveys for the Congress suggested that the BJP-led Mahayuti was gaining over the Congress-led MVA. Now the party leaders have trained their guns on the Election Commission.

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