Tommy Lasorda, the former Los Angeles Dodgers’ manager, captured this delicate balance well when he said, “I believe that managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill it. But if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.”

When bosses get this balance wrong, team performance and creativity suffer, and employee effort and commitment wanes. Get it right, and everybody wins.

The question, then, is what can both bosses and employees do to help the boss get it right – at least most of the time?

The answer is threefold. First, bosses need to understand the damage they do by interfering when they ought to stand aside. Second, bosses need to know when getting out of the way is best and how to do it. And third, employees need to know how they can reduce the damage when a stubborn or clueless boss continues to engage in misguided meddling.

The fundamental problem for bosses is that many fail to recognise when their interjections are, at best, meaningless. In an experiment by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer and his colleagues, M.B.A. students played “marketing managers” who believed they had a subordinate working on a marketing campaign. Those managers who thought their advice shaped the final campaign rated everything – the final marketing campaign, the subordinates and their own skills – as higher than managers who weren’t given the opportunity to offer advice.

But, in fact, the final marketing campaigns rated by both groups of managers were identical in every way – whether they offered advice or not.

In Prof. Pfeffer’s view, this experiment and related studies confirm that bosses are motivated to believe that everything they do and work on, or are simply associated with, is better for their having touched it. And the more effort that bosses put into creating something, the more they will love it, even when they have no impact at all (or even have made it worse rather than better).

Read also: Manage the disruptor boss – The Wall Street Journal

Similarly, even leaders who use the much-ballyhooed practice of management by walking around – known as MBWA – who devote big chunks of time to observing front-line work and asking employees to identify problems and solutions, may do more harm than good.

Anita Tucker, now a professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, and Sara Singer, now a professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, conducted an 18-month field experiment of MBWA in 56 work areas of 19 randomly selected hospitals. They found that, on average, in work areas where leaders used MBWA, employees reported less performance improvement compared with areas where MBWA wasn’t used.

Profs. Tucker and Singer discovered that MBWA was linked to perceived performance improvement only when it was applied to easy-to-solve problems (for instance, moving nurses from a small medication room to a larger one). In contrast, when leaders used MBWA for complex and vexing problems (such as excessive lead times for lab test results), employees reported that chats and meetings with bosses interfered with their productive work and rarely solved the problems. On the contrary: These futile discussions had enduring negative repercussions because they drew attention to their leaders’ failings.

Simply recognising that their interventions may be counterproductive, of course, is only part of the battle for bosses. The next step is even trickier: figuring out when it is best to get out of the way.

Read also: How bosses waste their employees’ time – The Wall Street Journal

For starters, managers can try to understand what it actually feels like to work for them. Bosses who are in tune with how employees feel about them are in a better position to understand when they are seen as overbearing or squandering people’s time. One boss in a nonprofit organization told me that she hones such self-awareness by seeking out and developing rapport with local critics and complainers—people who are quick to criticize her and spread bad news about her missteps. Although it is more comforting to talk with employees who flatter her and deliver only the good news, these grumpy employees provide her with more useful information. That includes tips about meetings she calls that ought to be eliminated or shortened, and about times when she is seen as a micromanager rather than helpful coach. She believes that these naysayers and critics make her a better boss.

My Stanford colleague Kathryn Segovia and I have recruited our students to help new managers get out of their employees’ way. We arranged for student teams to attend meetings led by each boss and record the percentage of time that each leader talked, as well as counting the number of statements each leader made versus the number of questions that he or she asked. One manager, for example, was surprised to learn that he talked almost the entire time during a 15-minute meeting and asked only one question – and that his team viewed this standing meeting as a complete waste of their time. This information, along with some coaching from our students, helped this new boss learn to talk less and ask more questions. His people appreciated it.

Clearly, bosses can do this exercise themselves by recording meetings. It could be enlightening.

Another hallmark of skilled leaders is that they understand their people and the work they do so well that they are masters of “flexing” the hierarchy to fit the situation. Lindred Greer, a management professor at the University of Michigan, finds, that the best leaders don’t hesitate to exert top-down control when quick decisions and immediate actions are essential. And they switch gears and “flatten” hierarchy when they need to solicit everyone’s opinion, develop employee buy-in, and make it safe to discuss uncomfortable truths, criticize others, and generate half-baked and controversial solutions.

This all sounds great, of course. Unfortunately, too often bosses won’t dial down their scrutiny, advice and demands, even when it undermines progress and drives people crazy. It isn’t that they are being malicious, as was evident in Prof. Pfeffer’s experiments. Rather, they think interfering is what being a good boss is all about.

And that brings us to the employees, who are often the only answer to the bosses-who-won’t-stop-interfering puzzle. It isn’t always easy. But one or more of the following strategies can help employees prod an overbearing boss to get out of the way.

• Honesty. Good bosses crave constructive feedback. Especially those who aren’t thin-skinned or massively overconfident, and instead take pride in making it safe for people to speak up. One male CEO I worked with was embarrassed when two female executive vice presidents gave him their tallies of his interruptions during an executive team meeting. He interrupted each woman at least six times, but never interrupted their four male peers. The CEO vowed to change his ways and asked them to keep tracking his interruptions to ensure he kept his word.

• Token obedience. The CEO of a Silicon Valley software firm was besieged by a pompous and pushy board member who insisted on an ever-expanding list of changes that the CEO thought were terrible. The CEO ignored most of the board member’s ideas. Now and then, however, he implemented one of the better (and less intrusive) demands to placate him. Sometimes, if a boss can point to a couple of things that he or she initiated, that is enough.

• Foot dragging. This is a classic strategy for fending off powerful people who make unreasonable demands and won’t back down. My Stanford colleague Prof. Pfeffer and I once interviewed the manager of one of the most profitable branches of a huge bank. The manager said he was successful, in part, because he resisted and delayed participating in the many corporate programs that rained down from on high. When pressed to join a new program, his go-to answer was that people in his branch were too busy right now. But they might have time in four or five months. Foot dragging worked well in his company because senior executives had short attention spans—after the first blush of excitement faded, most corporate programs faded or disappeared in a few months.

• Constructive defiance. Brave underlings may simply refuse to comply with misguided demands from superiors. This strategy requires precautions, as insecure and vindictive bosses are prone to punish insubordinate underlings. But when employees believe they are right and don’t fear their boss (or just don’t care), defiance can be best for all concerned. In “The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company,” HP co-founder David Packard bragged about an engineer named Chuck House who defied Packard’s direct order to stop work on a display monitor.

Mr. Packard wrote, “Instead he embarked on a vacation to California – stopping along the way to show potential customers a prototype of the monitor.” Customers loved the display, and so House “persuaded his R&D manager to rush the monitor into production, and as it turned out, HP sold more than 17,000 display monitors representing sales revenue of $35m for the company.” Mr. Packard added, “Some years later, at a gathering of HP engineers, I presented Chuck with a medal for ‘extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.’ ”

Chuck House was lucky to have a boss who realised, as Mr. Packard says in the book, “I really just wanted a success for HP.” It’s tricky to use him as a role model, but I can assure you that there are other bosses out there who won’t retaliate when employees have good reason to ignore their commands.

• Malicious compliance. This sneaky strategy entails doing exactly what an incompetent and demanding superior wants. The resulting failure is then used to humiliate, and perhaps bring down, the clueless boss. As I reported in “Good Boss, Bad Boss,” a manager at a technology firm wrote me about an ugly and cumbersome prototype his team built – which the CEO savaged. The manager “explained (and documented) that his team had done exactly as the VP of Engineering ordered, and although he voiced early and adamant objections to the VP, he gave up because “it was like talking to a brick wall.” The subsequent malicious compliance cost that vice president his job because “we just said ‘Yes, sir,’ and followed his lousy orders precisely.”

These strategies vary widely, but the motivations of the employees who have used them are similar. They elected to resist, ignore and undermine their bosses’ authority because they wanted to do what was best for their organisations, colleagues, and customers. Not out of a desire to sabotage their organisations or engage in mean-spirited revenge. But because they understood what too many bosses don’t: For employees to do their best work, the best bosses know when less management is better management.

– Dr. Sutton is a professor in the department of management science and engineering at Stanford University and co-author of “Scaling Up Excellence.” He can be reached at [email protected].