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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.)

Lawless Maharashtra

Updated: Oct 22, 2024

The recent murder of veteran politician Baba Siddique, a former Maharashtra minister and a leader of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), has sparked a sharp debate over the state’s deteriorating law and order. Shot dead by three assailants outside his son’s office in Mumbai’s Bandra, Siddique’s murder casts a long shadow over Maharashtra’s once-vaunted reputation as a progressive state that was India’s commercial powerhouse and a secure haven for its citizens.


Two suspects have been apprehended, while authorities continue the search for a third. The crime branch is probing various motives, from business rivalry to contract killing linked to a Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) project.


The Opposition, from the Congress to NCP (SP) supremo Sharad Pawar have lambasted the state’s leadership for allowing such a brazen crime to occur in Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Earlier this year, Ganpat Gaikwad, a BJP MLA, was arrested for allegedly shooting a Shiv Sena leader, Mahesh Gaikwad, inside a police station in Ulhasnagar, over a land dispute. The normalization of such violence—where even elected officials resort to firearms in the presence of law enforcement—signals a dangerous erosion of state authority.


For many, the Siddique murder signals something far more ominous than just a contractual dispute gone awry. It begs the question whether Maharashtra has begun to slide into a state of lawlessness akin to the bad old days of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, states infamous for political violence, contract killings, and corruption?


Back then, Bihar’s law and order situation was synonymous with the infamous sobriquet of the ‘Jungle Raj’ where figures like Mohammad Shahabuddin wielded control through violence, using contract killings as a tool for political and business rivalries, as in the 1998 killing of Brij Bihari Prasad, a former Bihar minister, who was gunned down inside a Patna hospital. Similarly, Uttar Pradesh, once India’s equivalent of the ‘Wild West’, saw high-profile murders like the 2005 assassination of BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai, who was killed in broad daylight.


But Maharashtra’s law and order problem has not just been confined to political violence. A growing sense of impunity now pervades society as well, leading to a perception of a broader collapse of the social fabric. The murky attempts at cover-up in the Pune Porsche case, where the inebriated teenage son of a prominent realtor fatally rammed his luxury car into two IT professionals on a bike, underscores how deeply ingrained corruption and privilege have become in the state’s justice system. Despite widespread outrage, the authorities’ handling of the case raised questions about the state’s willingness to hold the wealthy accountable. The breakdown of law and order across Maharashtra, from politically motivated killings to the mishandling of heinous crimes, has led to an alarming perception: something is rotten in the state of Maharashtra, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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