If you’re getting second-hand reports (they’ll rarely tell you to your face) that the people in your organization have been complaining about your micromanaging ways, maybe it’s because you’re doing it wrong?
This instructional video might help:
Is Micromanagement Ever a Good Thing?
Is there a proper way to micromanage (or nanomanage, or picomanage…) IT people? Or, is all micromanagement just plain bad management?
As with most of the people-oriented mistakes that people make, the answer lies in the unconscious intentions that misguide our behavior.
Bad Intention #1: Ego Defense. “I was the best there ever was, I’m the best there is, and I’m going to make sure that everyone knows I’m the best there ever will be.”
Before you became a manager, you were technical, and, if you do say so yourself, you were darn good at it. You really miss those daily opportunities to prove yourself, by coding rings around everyone else on your team, by amazing end-users with your uniquely excellent tech support skills, or by being the first to adopt the latest and coolest product releases to design, install and configure your organization’s IT infrastructure.
So, as a manager, you compensate by competing with your subordinates, by repeatedly teaching them the one and only right way to do their jobs: your way.
Bad Intention #2: Managing Up by Micromanaging Down. “To climb my way up within my Company, I need to be seen doing things the Company Way.”
Your company’s developed or adopted some methodology to help ensure that the highest-quality technical work will be done on time and within budget. As a middle manager who’s on the move, you want to be perceived as ready, willing, and anxious to do whatever it takes to please upper management.
So, you breathe, eat, and sleep every detail of your company’s mandated quality and productivity programs. You make sure everyone under you does, too, by regularly comparing their work with your company’s published methodology templates. When you find employees who aren’t doing things right, you criticize them as loudly and publicly as possible – not just to correct their unprofessional behavior, but to maintain and strengthen the widely held impression that you’re the ultimate professional “company guy.”
Bad Intention #3: The Boss Knows Best. “I’m the boss, which makes me responsible for everything my people do. And, as Spider-man’s Dad said: ‘with great responsibility comes great authority.’ (umm, no, wait…)”
When your people fail, you fail. And, left to their own devices, people will always fail, won’t they? Well, in your organization, failure is not an option.
So, you map within your mind every task and sub-task of every technical project for which your team is responsible, and, at the many team meetings you call for this purpose, you require that everyone review their progress on an intricately detailed task-by-task basis. This exposes, before one and all, the slackers and malingerers, and makes clear that, in your organization, such behavior will never be overlooked or tolerated.
Micromanagement: Be honest. How’s it workin’ for ya?
As one of the hallmarks of the authoritarian personality, micromanagement can trigger the kind of passive-aggressive organizational behavior that stalls collective effort and inhibits collaborative progress. That’s a pretty steep downside risk for a technique that, on its face, seems to promise the upside of a job well done.
Is All Micromanagement Bad?
On the other hand, people sometimes lose sight of the goals their organization sets for them. Talented and experienced technicians can sit, utterly disengaged, in a state of professional torpor, for days or weeks on end, unable on their own to find their way back to productivity. If ignored for long, this malaise can spread, infecting others in the organization.
Foundering employees need to be identified quickly. In a calm and organized way, perhaps with help from HR, they need to be confronted (privately), and either helped or reassigned. Reminding them of the goals of the organization they serve, and reacquainting them with the details of their jobs, can help get their efforts back on track. In this context, while it can – and should -- feel uncomfortable to the manager who has to do it, micromanagement is good management.
Is micromanagement bad or good? Perhaps that’s the best test: Effective micromanagement should always feel uncomfortable. When micromanagement feels good, it’s self-serving rather than others-serving behavior, and self-serving micromanagement is always bad.
Questions
- For managers: when has micromanagement worked for you? (Extra credit: can you admit that you do it? Can you explain how it’s hurt you?)
- For recovering micromanagers: tell us how you overcame your compulsion to micromanage?
- For everyone: have you ever needed micromanaging in your job? Was the situation handled well by your manager?
