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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.)

Sweet Power Plays

BJP

In Maharashtra, the political landscape is deeply entwined with the sugar industry, a sector that has historically bolstered the ambitions of political figures from Vasantdada Patil to Sharad Pawar. With less than a month to go for the Assembly polls, Ajit Pawar’s hold over sugar factories and cooperatives in western Maharashtra will now be put to the test with the Mahayuti coalition, particularly the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), banking on the Deputy CM to score big for the ruling alliance in this region.


It is almost axiomatic to note that the cooperative sugar sector has been the backbone of the state’s rural economy in western Maharashtra, traditionally dominated by the Congress and the undivided Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). The BJP’s ascent in 2014 and the subsequent decade was marked by shifting allegiances in this belt, with former Congress leaders such as Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, Vijaysinh Mohite-Patil and Harshavardhan Patil (to name a few) switching allegiances to the saffron party, reflecting a trend of fluid political loyalties among sugar magnates. Harshavardhan Patil recently switched back to Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP) as did Mohite-Patil, Pawar’s old confidante who has served as the state’s Deputy CM in the past.


As Ajit Pawar’s faction emerges from a split NCP, the political stakes have transformed. Ajit Pawar, with his extensive ties to both private and cooperative sugar mills. has previously held influential positions within entities personifying the prosperous economy of this region, like the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank. The cooperative sugar network is crucial for electoral success here, holding sway over more than 70 of the state’s 288 Assembly seats.


Until the 2009 Assembly elections, the Congress and NCP held a dominant position in Western Maharashtra, both in terms of seat count and vote share. However, since 2014, the BJP has made significant inroads in the region, although it has not yet surpassed the combined seat count of Congress and NCP. In the 2019 Assembly elections, out of the 70 seats in Western Maharashtra, the undivided NCP secured 27 seats, the Congress 12, while the BJP managed to win 20 seats and the undivided Shiv Sena took five.


Today, Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP) faction has only seven MLAs from the sugar belt as opposed to Ajit Pawar’s faction, which commands 26. Yet, the Lok Sabha election, which saw Sharad Pawar administer a severe drubbing to the Mahayuti, particularly Ajit’s faction and the BJP, sees a buoyant NCP (SP) confidence of reasserting its dominance in this belt.


To break Ajit’s stranglehold over sugar cooperatives here, the canny Sharad Pawar is now promoting fresh faces to combat the ruling NCP. In Ambegaon, after Dilip Walse-Patil shifted to Ajit’s faction, Sharad Pawar is now promoting Devdatta Nikam, a longtime manager of the Bhimashankar cooperative sugar mill founded by Walse-Patil. Likewise, in Kolhapur’s Kagal constituency, Pawar senior is fielding royal Samarjeet Ghatge to challenge the Ajit camp’s senior leader Hasan Mushrif, while in Ahmednagar’s Akole, he has picked Amit Bhangre.


For it is in western Maharashtra that the stakes for Ajit are the highest and the outcomes uncertain—much like the fluctuating price of sugar itself.

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