Micromanagement is a curse word in the world of business. What is micromanagement? This article is written with the micromanager in mind, if you micromanage you are destroying your work environment. You are standing in your employee’s way. Why do managers get carried away in details? Do you know if you are micromanaging in the first place, and what are the signs to look for? I am going to take a look at the signs of micromanagement presence and the short term and long term effects of micromanagement.

Why is Micromanagement a bad thing?

First I want to discuss the problems with micromanagement. If you go to Wikipedia to look up the word micromanagement you will find the word “symptoms” in the table of contents. Symptoms are used with sickness and illness. Cancer and diarrhea have symptoms. Like cancer MM will kill team spirit and enthusiasm. High morale and enthusiasm are strong driving factors when it comes to motivation. When you MM you will end up killing those forces that really give your employees momentum. If one employee is micromanaged, several will still end up seeing you as a micromanaging boss, as rumors travel fast, and let’s face it micromanagement is easy to spot. It displays a lack of trust, and most employees need trust to thrive.

“Bad Management Behavior”, “Lack of Recognition”, “Lack of Respect” and “Management not allowing the employees to make decisions”. These are 4 out of the 10 top reasons why people quit their job. All are signs of micromanagement. I will get back to you later what you need to do when you feel the urge to micromanage someone.

Why do you Micromanage in the first place?

Let’s think about it for a minute. Most likely you feel dissatisfied with the employees’ performance or results. You feel that you could do a better job yourself, or you want to force someone out of the company by setting too high of standards. You might be under pressure yourself to get high results? Are you insecure about your own competence, or insecure about the employee’s competence?

Internal reasons for Micromanagement
Managers personality, detail oriented, emotional and job insecurity, strong drive for results, lack of trust.

External reasons for Micromanagement
Some external reasons for MM is Company culture, performance pressure, financial hardship and conscious choice of tactics.

The Effects of Micromanagement

MM is a destructive way of leadership and you will destroy trust, you will kill morale, and you will damage your line of communication. I work in Telecom and so I think that micromanaging fills your life’s land lines with noise. You will get disengaged employees and creativity will drop. Employees self esteem will drop, and over time performance will drop as well. All in all you are a large contributor to a hostile and dysfunctional work environment. You need to ask yourself if it is really worth it. I wrote earlier that the employee that is being micromanaged needs to take a look in the mirror before blaming the manager for the micromanaging behavior. The same goes for you, take a look in the mirror and figure out the true reason why you micromanage in the first place. You need to know if you are increasing performance or if you are destroying it.

What should you do instead of micromanage?

What drives employee engagement? This is my spring board when it comes to deciding what you should do at work in any scenario. Engaged employees produce amazing results, there is no doubt about it. Look at Zappos, look at Southwest Airlines, look at any other great company; employee engagement is the main building block of a winning culture. Lack of employee engagement is like building a tower on water, you might manage to build a large one, but it won’t go as high as it would with a good foundation.

Keyword: Trust
Trust is important to drive employee engagement. Have faith in your employees and leave them room to perform. You will soon see an increase in productivity. Trust will also give you valuable feedback, as MM leads to employees shutting down the communication lines to you. If you are satisfied with the overall performance and you want to keep the employee in the future, implement trust.

Keyword: Time
You spend a lot of time micromanaging, is it worth it? Could you be better at time management? Should you focus on growth strategies instead of being detail oriented?

Keyword: Communication
When you micromanage you are shutting down communication lines. Your employees will stop talking to you in fear of becoming micromanaged. Laying low will become a strategy in your office, resulting in no communication, no engagement, no growth and you will not have enough information to do your own job good enough.

Implement Trust, Free Time and Communicate

Display trust, become a better communicator. Try to motivate performance and use positive feedback to accomplish your desired outcome. Be clear about what you want in results. Engage the employee in conversations, and LISTEN, ask questions and listen. Talk with the employee and display trust until you are sure that the message is understood. You need to know that MM is damaging on the work environment and micromanagement is a result of unhealthy communication skills.

You Care

One of the reasons why you are a control freak * is that you care more about the outcome or results than your employees. At least you fool yourself to think so. But is it true that you care? If so, you need to show that you care in a better way. You will think of your own interference as constructive and beneficial, in reality you are in the way. I assume you care, if not you might be driven by the feelings of power and superiority. In that case you might end up losing your own job soon.

* I needed to use the term control freak, because if you read the Micromanagement article at Wikipedia you will find a “see also” section. There is one link: “Control Freak”

Micromanagement is Psychology

If you feel that you lack the trust of your employees and you have been micromanaging for a while, there is hope. You need to know more about motivation, employee engagement, personality traits, human behavior and a bit of positive psychology. There are several books on the topic and the evidence that micromanagement is devastating is humongous! Being humble, apologizing to your employees and being open about your challenges is a good start, as you need to start building trust, and it takes time. Try to find a mentor or coach that can help you before it is too late, after all, you want to do a good job too.

I got a lot of questions about micromanagement after writing a post called ”Dealing with Micromanagement”. I wrote about how you as an employee should deal with micromanagement, but soon realized that you where interested in more views on this subject, and I hope this article will help you to realize your challenges. Or it could help you to understand your boss, if you are the one being micromanaged. I also want to specify that micromanagement does not need to be bad and might be necessary from time to time, good communicators manage to pull this off in a positive style without the negative fuzz.
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What do you fear?  Do you have the answer to this question? Have you ever been in a meeting and afterwards regretted that you bit your tongue? Have you gotten in trouble because you did not face your troubles earlier? Well let me tell you a little secret; Leadership is all about fear and courage.

What do you want to do?

You are probably surrounded by choices and opportunities all day long. Each one of those daily happenings is challenging you courage to deliver. It might be a talk that gets postponed, a disagreement with your boss, (un)reasonable demands from your spouse. Sometimes you might just agree or give in. How many times have you in retrospective been right? You own it to yourself to display the courage to do what you think is right.

What is fear?

Fear is your mind cooking your past experience and negative expectations analytics into a soup of fear of being wrong, being stupid, saying something out of place, speaking up and so on. In a group of people there is always somebody that hopes that somebody else is going to say exactly what themselves are thinking, even if mindreading is a skill few non-fictional characters possess. Fear is what’s keeping you from doing what your really would like to do.

This brings me back to leadership. It is easy to point out something in an e-mail. It is hard to say stuff to someone’s face. Guess what is the best approach? It is easy to overlook someone doing a poor job; it might be hard to fire him, because he is such a fun co-worker. It is easy to find an excuse; it is hard to face the problem. If you can fight your fears you will become a better leader.

Challenge yourself to great leadership

I have had a dream for years; a few weeks ago I decided to promote myself as a public speaker at a future telecom conference. I feel I have something useful to say, I fear speaking in public, I challenge myself. I am 100 percent confident that I will do well. I am challenging my own fears and so should you. I remember a few years ago I was shaking in a dressing room at work. I was about to jump into my batman costume and run crazy around the office. I stood in the dressing room for 10 minutes before my head rushed full of blood and I ran around the cubicles. The morale and mood of the entire department skyrocketed in one tenth of a second! It was amazing, I filled myself with energy and everybody had a blast! Traditional leadership needs weeks to gain the same effect as I did back then in just a few seconds. And it was fun. I’d do it again if I would still fit in my hot batman costume.

As a leader you are obligated to keep challenging yourself, challenge your knowledge, challenge your courage and challenge your surroundings. This is the only way you will continue to develop.

How do you challenge yourself to become a better leader?

I am a soccer fan; I have played for years in the lower divisions until a shoulder injury forced my goalkeeper gloves to be put in the darkest places of the closet. I never became good at this game, but I still had fun and joy playing against the worst soccer players in the Norwegian soccer league. How is your team doing? Today I want to compare soccer and business life to show why you should be the star player always.

The Team – What division are you playing in?
First of all imagine your department as a soccer team. How is it doing in the leagues, are you the premiership or an amateur team? What team do you wish to play for? Are you fighting for the championship or against relegation? Are there star players on your team? Are you acting as a team? Or is everybody just hatching their own balls like it where eggs?

Your team probably has a manager, a coach and a bunch of players. Your field might be top notch or you might be playing on gravel. There might be rules from the league (Board), rules from the team owner (CEO) or other regulations in your game. Some are good, and some you hate. Your manager or your coach might be amateurs. Still you have to be the star player, and I am about to tell you why.

Your dream job!
What does your dream job look like? Is it making more money? Is it at another company? Is it doing something different? Is it playing left field, striker or defense? Whatever your dream job is, unless you have it right now, you are dead wrong! Your dream job is not out there! Your dream job is inside your own head. And you need to create your dream job right now, right here.

Do not be a grump at work, if you are unhappy and if you do a poor job right now, you will never ever find your dream job elsewhere, because doing a poor job now will not get you anywhere. Imagine Manchester United or Barcelona, what kind of players do they buy? YEAH! They buy other star players and great talents. They do not buy the unhappy chubby guy in the lower divisions that won’t run if you poke him with a stick. Star players are recruited for the best teams. This is why you need to be a star player where you are right now! No matter your current working conditions or even if it rains on top of it. If you manage to shine at work, you will be noticed, you will get good recommendations when the scouts shows up. And if you can build your dream job out of manure you will always have your dream job.

The team needs you
Know your role and be a role model. Veteran workers are often the unmotivated workers, while they shall be the once that carry the burden of making your team great. You should strive to create fun around you, make other people happy and make your team mates good. You should always do your best. At the end of the day you must feel good about what you have managed during the day. Do not try to hide or get away with less when you can do more. Run that extra mile. “But my pay is bad, they do not pay me enough…” I do not care is my response, because you will never reach the salary of Manchester United players if you are about to be benched at your own game.

Are you a leader at work today?
As a leader you need to act as a soccer coach in the field as well. If you see a good coach, live at a great team’s practice, you will notice that the good coach interferes as soon as a fault appears. He blows his whistle and stops the game. Why the h… did you not pass the ball now? Why did you not cross it into the box? Next time run fifteen feet further and bend it like a banana into the box. This is what you will notice at the practice field. If the player refuses to do so, they are sent into the shower, but if they do what they are told, they will succeed. But the coach must be in the trenches and deal with trouble instantly. If you can correct a faulty behavior at work at once you will also succeed as a coach of the team. Why did you leave out important information in the reports, they are essential for the project, do it over. Do not get in a situation where you come one or two weeks later and pointing out how the project failed because of this report was inadequate. Teach them now as it happens.

Good luck winning the league! – Remember it starts right now, inside you.

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Do you have a boss that keeps telling you what to do? Are you being micromanaged? This is a severe problem, not necessary for you, but for sure for your manager. The problem with micromanagement issues is diverse. You feel like you can’t breathe, develop and grow in your role at work. You feel supervised and unappreciated. But there is hope, and you do not need to quit your job just yet.

Remember You are Dealing With People

Human behavior is a great thing to know more about when you are dealing with people, and when it comes down to work relations, you are dealing with people. You must get to know this person that is micromanaging you. Why do you think you are being micromanaged in the first place? Is there a certain topic that is causing the micromanagement?

Are you a manager?
You might be micromanaging.
Take a look at this article about Consequences of Micromanagement

So a quick look at human behavior
Ivan Pavlov was a clever man dealing with Classical Conditioning, and researched making connections between action and response. So to be more specific, create good connections with the action you want to see more of. If your manager gives you space, appreciate it by saying how much you appreciate the trust you are receiving, and that you feel that you are working well under these conditions. Appreciate how the manager is dealing with external affairs, and the manager might tend to do more of what is being appreciated. Just do not start to electrocute the manager for the wrong behavior and you are home safe.

Take a Deep Look in the Mirror

Are you completing jobs duties as required? I have met leaders that micromanage when it is necessary to get things done. If your results are poor, chances are that you are either being micromanaged or replaced. If this is the case, first of all make an extra effort to learn your job better and perform as expected.

There are two roles when it comes to micromanagement, the managers and yours. Your boss might not necessarily be the problem. Try to look at yourself. And try to evaluate yourself as if you were your boss. Do you get a bad feeling? You might be looking directly at the problem.

TIP: Be Proactive it Might get You the Slack You Need. Be aware, observe when people micromanage, and try to be one step ahead. If they need to micromanage someone else to get things done, make sure that you get it done first. I have a personal trick whenever any of my co-workers are being criticized for something. I write it down, and make sure that I never do the same thing myself.

The Micromanaging Ghost

Managers are sometime in their history promoted from somewhere. If you are doing the managers old job, micromanagement can be a huge problem, as the old manager is still feeling attached to their old job. It might be hard to fight this one. But try to open up and respect that there is a lot of experience and knowledge to be gained from this manager. Try to praise the job that has been done and seek knowledge from the source.

HOT TIP: Ask for a meeting and discuss what was good, and what errors to avoid. This might disarm the micromanager as he/she might feel trust.

Micromanagement Summary

Dealing with a micromanager is never easy, it is necessary for you to be patient, smart and proactive. Use your eyes and ears as they might give you some clues. Normally, all the micromanager is interested in is getting the job done. So maybe all you need to do is make sure that you do it before the micromanager micromanages? Do you have further advice to help my readers who are coping with micromanagement? Please do comment.

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