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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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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Imagine getting in trouble at work. Imagine that your project failed or imagine that someone is always opposing you. Are you pointing fingers? Will that solve anything for you? Think about the difference between these two small words, who and what.

How would you react if Paul Projectmanager always disagree with you and makes your day miserable by being negative and destructive? Is Paul a problem? Are your ideas better if you get rid of Paul and fire him?

Stop thinking about who is causing the problem; start thinking about what to do to solve the problem.

By removing the person behind the “who”, you might just get a new problem as a new alpha member of the tribe steps up and becomes the new head of annoyment and source of all evil around the office.

What is causing the problem might give you a total different answer. It might end up with a who, but at least you are displaying ability to think first. Paul Projectmanager might just feel ignored; maybe you are being a bad manager? It might be an Andy Accountant that is being the problem because he smells and this is so annoying to all the other co-workers and nobody can fathom why you’re not doing anything about it. Or you might just need a candy bar vending machine to get the sugar levels rising?

I figure you have gotten the point by now.

I have been reading about Employee Engagement lately, like this post; What, Really, Is Employee Engagement? From Steve Roesler at Allthingsworkplace.com. This post is great because it includes 8 key drivers of engagement, and other recourses on the topic.

Employee engagement is extremely important, and as a leader you must know how to lift the spirit amongst the employees. Engaged and happy employees are proven time and time again to be higher producers and to get great results. One of the 8 key drivers at Steve Roesler’s blog post is “Relationship with one’s manager” – This might be one of the most important keys that you as a leader should learn from. I tried to find out more about this one specific key and found a video that I want to share with you. This is Bill Benjamin having a great intro to exactly this key.

The employees are extremely important for your own success as a leader. You must find a way to get their morale and joy up into the sky. I have experienced unhappy employees producing 15-20 % below average, after empowerment, coaching and training the same employee doubled her amount of work, had better quality of work and became very happy. It is not just about to get them happy; being able to feel safe about how to handle your job is also a key point. I believe she is happier because she does not need to ask for help, she now produce above average and this gives her self-esteem.

Pride and joy
Another key given in Steve’s blog is “Pride about the company”. Employees that feel proud at work also tend to give the extra little effort to create great quality work. People would want to work with them and they will feel important to the company. Raising pride is on the other hand hard. As their closest manager you might find yourself trapped between the employees and upper management. But remember as a leader you are a role model, you must also feel proud. And you must show your employees that you are proud of them. I think Bill Benjamin’s video gives a great lecture on how you as a leader should interact with your employees. This is a example to follow, as many leaders for sure does the exact same thing that he used to do, focusing on the tasks of the day, instead of the relationships of the day.

I find this blog post from Steve Roesler and the video from Bill Benjamin to be the hand and the glove. As a resource for you as a manager or leader this is absolutely a lesson to learn. Do not forget about the relationships.