We’ve all been there before, your supervisor breathing coffee breath over your shoulder as you click and type away at a computer. Or perhaps your building something, digging a hole, shooting targets, whatever it is, we’ve all had that one supervisor that has made a simple task more difficult by pouring anxiety and frustration into your personal space.
Kids, this is an example of micromanagement, it’s where the manager closely supervises or controls the work of their employees. This can be found in your local grocery isle where the manager is insisting on the best way to stack apples, or perhaps in the military where you have an overgrown teenager telling you the best way to assemble things on a power point slide as you work on a Sunday. If you’ve never seen this in action, beware, it might be you.
Here are some of the problems with this behavior.
Micromanagement destroys trust
Nothing tells your employees that you don’t trust them like telling them exactly how to do their job. Not only do you erode trust, but you are subtly telling your employees that you think they are unintelligent, and couldn’t figure it out without you. Not to get all touchy and feely here, but this leads to feelings of uselessness, frustration, anxiety, and resentment. To further illustrate the problem here, you’ve just let the team know that when there is a problem, you are the one they should go to in order to solve it.
In essence, micromanagement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t trust your team to do it, so you hover over them until they do it “right”, which sets off a chain reaction of other things they have to wait for your consent to do.
Instead try this: explain processes, give examples, or simply communicate what you want the finished product to look like. Bob in the grocery store can simply say “Stack the apples, make sure it looks neat and well organized”. The ape yelling at the screen about the direction my mouse goes, could have simply said “these are the things that are wrong, fix them and bring it back”. Bottom line, treat people like people, they have the capacity to learn and adjust.
Micromanagement fails to develop an environment of teamwork
You can tell the quality of your team by the complexity of questions they ask you. Typically, if your team is brining you simple problems they could fix on their own, you’ve either failed to give them enough maneuver space, or you’ve somehow communicated that their initiative is not welcome. Either way, they aren’t an effective team, because of their lack of teamwork. If they can’t clearly define their roles and responsibilities, understand the bigger picture, or take over when you’re not around, you’ve got issues friend.
Micromanagers tend to dominate the jobs of all their subordinates, hording information, directly synchronizing different parts of the operation, and limiting input to specific data that they can sense. At this point the team functions only as efficiently as your ability to control them.
Instead try this: Communicate the big picture, the goal, and how your team fits in. Describe the goal so that everyone can understand it. This next one could be a problem for the risk averse, give your team guidance and let them take initiative to accomplish your goal. You don’t have to make the whole plan, you just have to shape it, let your team build it. That last one is to give them “buy in” or the feeling that the plan is the team’s plan, not just yours.
Micromanagement destroys relationships
A couple of relationships that micromanagement inculcates are either everyone teaming up against you, or, in some cases, everyone just does enough to keep you away. In either scenario, you’ve lost the loyalty of your team. Amongst the team, resentment could build due to perceived favoritism, or a sense of injustice. Micromanagement, ironically, causes a divide between you and your team. Nobody is going to want to bring you a personal problem, or report bad news about work, if you’re just going to hover over them to find a solution.
Most often when faced with bad news, a micromanaged team will send a sacrificial team mate, or just cover up the information and hope you don’t find out. You can probably figure out why this is a problem, you’ve essentially found the me in team.
Instead try this: Get to know and develop relationships throughout your team. We’re human, and that goes a long way. Don’t call when you can just walk over and talk. Find reasons to interact on a personal level, even if it’s just to talk about last night’s game, or how the weekend went. Here’s the trick though, for you sociopaths, you have to care just a tiny bit about what they say. Don’t sit there thinking about how to escape the conversation, or dominate it, just enjoy the few minutes of social interaction, and let your team know you’re not a complete ass.
So based on all this information… why do people micromanage?
Simple, it works. Micromanagement is only a problem after you leave, so if you’re enough of a workaholic, or if you don’t really care about the organization or the team, there’s not a problem. Micromanagement eliminates unforeseen risk, and ensures that the job gets done to your ridged standards. These are some of the benefits that managers will weigh in on, citing the need for quality control, deadlines, poor employee standards, or simply that they have a direct management style.
The biggest risk you take with micromanagement is sacrificing your team for yourself. In other words it’s a very self-centered practice. You also lose the ability to quickly adapt to change, situational awareness, innovative thought, and synergy. By stepping in and telling everyone exactly how to do things, you lose the ability to guide and mentor as well, so nobody benefits but yourself. If you are one of those sociopathic workaholics, put it this way, the company has been made worse because you focus on the small daily problems and lacked the ability to grow a team of managers and improve the culture of the organization. This will eventually effect your potential for promotion, so you should care you narcissistic ass.
So next time you find yourself getting all hot and bothered at your team because they aren’t getting it right, and you just have to do it yourself, step back and reflect. Are you really helping them, or are you the problem?
Caffeinated Face Punch 