An Employee's Guide to a Micro-manager

Have you ever been assigned an important task by your manager? You are given a deadline to complete it. Your manager, who assigned you this task, believes in your capabilities. He has assigned this task to you, because he believes only YOU can do it. He touch bases with you at every crucial stage of the task, keeps dropping at your desk and rings you to check the progress. He keeps hovering over your shoulder.

Welcome the Micro Manager. 

The Micro-manager guises his compulsion to interfere under the cloak of “an attention to detail”. My dear friends these control freaks, who “want to drive you to success”  risk disempowering you. There is a very thin line between an INVOLVED manager and OVER-INVOLVED Manager. Agreed,it is a manager’s job to help push the work of the team along – instructing, motivating, guiding, directing, prompting, reminding, and yes, sometimes even doing the work him/herself. The difference lies in whether all that effort is really adding value to the final output or not. If it does add value, great, call it properly applied management. If not – meaning if after all the time and energy spent there is no meaningful improvement above and beyond what the employee would have accomplished alone – then it was indeed micro-management.

The basic tenant of any TEAM is trust, the feeling of shared responsibility and the joys of collective achievement. The veracity of micromanagement and the grievances associated with it increases exponentially, when the job under discussion is sales. While in all other cases of Micromanagement, the pain is restricted to nit picking and very detailed instructions and expectations far beyond the capabilities of the employee, in sales or in jobs where a report is physically alienated from the immediate vicinity of the manager, the problem even aggravates to the MANAGER actually trying to determine the physical mobility of report. In extreme cases verification is resorted too.

But why does one Micromanage? Except of extreme cases where this malady is a manifestation of some deep rooted psychological abnormality, the more common form of micro-management stems from insecurity; insecurity of a Manager, his lack of confidence on his team to achieve its target. It may even be a resultant strategy when TARGETS (both qualitative/quantitative) are not CLEAR, and the management is in REACTION MODE. In such cases micro-management helps to add to the already existing confusion by not letting easy communication among the team members and hence facilitating ambiguity, which legitimizes the fear and hence subordinates the reports to the will of PRACTICING MANAGER. 

Common Behavior of a Micro-Manager :-

• The manager tells direct reports what to do, how to do it and when to do it, giving no space.
• All decisions, no matter how small, must go through the manager.
• Delegation of authority is restricted, or absent.
• Direct reports spend more time reporting on progress than making progress.
• The granddaddy of them all – the input provided by the manager offers minimal incremental value (e.g., nitpicking comments regarding grammatical or typographical errors on documents).

Perils of Micro Management:-

Anyone who had been detail-hounded by his boss knows how frustrating it can be. It is a morale breaker and results in loss of confidence. Additionally, one is constantly plagued by thoughts of how to please that ONE PERSON. Its not just annoying but also a productivity killer, not only of the reports, but also of the Manager himself. At the rate with which micro manager interferes with his team functioning, I am amazed if he finds any time to do the WORK, officially designated to him. At any rate the possible gains ,if any, by the over indulgence of the Manager into his team is offset by disengagement, a state of distance from one’s work. A disengaged employee not only loses his focus, but also is a source of distraction for his colleagues. It increases absenteeism and reduces productivity. An employee looses interest in his work and may suddenly quit.

Managing Micromanager :-  “Bolt” and  run out of his reach. But quitting may not always be the most viable option. In such cases, where report needs to delay the “change” he must-

• ·Speak up-gently and convey your displeasure in the most civil way possible.
• · Improvise and improve, try to adhere to “deadlines” and try not repeating mistakes.
•  Increase intra-team communication and form an informal support system. 
•  Anticipate and act, but do not be subservient to his whims. 
• Focus, only on your work.
• CHANGE, before it stifles the creativity  out of you.