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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.)

Hedging Desk: A New Era in Indian Agricultural Marketing

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In a first-of-its-kind move, the Government of Maharashtra, under its flagship SMART Project, has established a dedicated ‘Hedging Desk’ that has a potential to transform agricultural marketing by empowering farmers against the volatilities in farm prices. Initially, the initiative is aimed at providing price risk management to Farmer Producer Organisations through agricultural derivatives markets, i.e. futures & options in commodities.


The ‘Hedging Desk’ is established in collaboration between NCDEX Institute of Commodity Markets and Research (NICR), a fully-owned subsidiary of India’s top agricultural commodity exchange National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX), and the World Bank-assisted Balasaheb Thackeray the State of Maharashtra Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (SMART) Project.


“This is an innovative market-linked approach to mitigate price risks for farmers in Maharashtra,” said Dr. Hemant Vasekar, Project Director, SMART, at an inaugural session in Pune. “It’s about equipping our farmers with the same financial tools that institutional traders use, but in a way that’s accessible and farmer-friendly. It will ensure the handholding of farmers and FPCs in the initial stage and eventually help them to asses risks and take informed decisions about marketing of their farm produce,” Vasekar said.


While India’s agricultural production has leaped multi-fold in the last three decades, depressed farm prices remained the contentious issue in the country, leading to severe stress in the agricultural sector that provides livelihood to around 60% of the 1.4 billion population in the country. For long, the central policy support remained focussed on increasing the production, while marketing of surplus commodities is still dominated by a skeletal and six-decade-old Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act, a fragmented and monopolistic market structure in the digitally integrated world. This has made the Indian agricultural marketing infrastructure vulnerable to frequent changes in the international market dynamics.


In the domestic market too, farmers are exposed to various risks from weather, pest attacks, policy flip-flops and geopolitical events that can affect the production. Overall poor post-harvest management infrastructure also hurts farmers’ interests, thereby burdening the economy of the nation. The production risk can be mitigated via crop insurance and agronomic solutions. However, managing price risks — particularly after harvest — remains a significant challenge. Farmers often fall prey to distress sales due to sudden price crashes at harvest due to their poor financial conditions amid lack of real-time price information and lack of access to formal markets such as futures & options or electronic auction platforms.


This is an area where agriculturally advanced economies have largely succeeded in protecting their farmers by providing them price risk mitigation opportunities through robust derivatives markets. In simple words, farmers in the US, Brazil or China can lock his one or two-year forward prices by selling his anticipated production today, called as Hedging in the financial markets.


The SMART had already taken a step by creating a Risk Mitigation Cell a few years ago and the Hedging Desk, located in Pune, will act as its core operational arm. The desk has been mandated to create awareness, capacity building and handholding FPOs in using commodity futures & options. Promoting e-Negotiable Warehouse Receipt (e-NWR) ecosystem, which helps farmers to hold their product for better prices, will also be a major function of the desk. More importantly, the entire capacity building and knowledge sharing activities about the complex derivatives market will be made available in Marathi, to ensure accessibility and acceptability across rural Maharashtra.


The concept is rooted in the findings of a comprehensive study by Deloitte India under the SMART project, which underscored the advantages of exchange-traded tools in enhancing price realization for farmers. The study strongly recommended the institutionalization of a risk mitigation framework at the state level. The project faced many hurdles post Covid-19 epidemic. However, it has gained significant momentum under the able leadership of the state Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who has taken the implementation of this initiative seriously.


Hedging Desk is the need of the hour and one will not be surprised to see many Indian states following the example of Maharashtra under the able leadership of Shri Devendra Fadnavis hinting at shift to the new era of proactive market-linked farming from reactive subsidy-based models in Indian agricultural marketing, Mr. Vasekar said adding that in the first phase, Hedging Desk will concentrate their operations around cotton, maize and turmeric which are important for the farmers in the state.


(The writer is a senior journalist based in Mumbai.)

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