What is wrong with micromanagement?

One of the basic management functions is the provision of the execution of processes, projects, tasks, etc. Monitoring and control are some of the tools for managers to implement this function. Excessive control is an extreme that tends managers to micromanagement. How to specify micromanagement and why it’s bad? Let me share my thoughts because the truth is nobody wants real micromanagement.

Experienced managers often say “I have to do micromanagement” in a negative way. It can be told about an individual contributor or group of contributors, about a team, or even about a client. They say “we have to do more control, more explanations, more communications” because “they don’t do well enough”. I say it’s not micromanagement, it’s managers’ job to control, explain and communicate … without excessiveness.

Contributors say “these managers control every step and suppress our initiatives” and they leave companies where those managers work. But it is a well-known principle that people do their job efficiently and effectively when they know their job is controlled.

So, what’s the issue? Managers don’t like to control contributors. This is really hard work for a good manager to do excessive control (micromanagement). They would like to assign tasks and obtain results without any effort. If they don’t spend effort, they detect low performance and compensate it by increasing monitoring and control. I mean if managers don’t do their job in the beginning, then they forced to micromanage further.

Managers’ job is to implement answers for the questions What? How? Who? When? There is Why?-question that helps managers to resolve this imperative and to sell the answers to contributors. Managers almost always are not experts and they have less control over How?-question. Managers often are under the pressure of time and have limited control over When?-question. The usual way to take the imperative under control, especially for inexperienced managers, is to turn on authority. This is thin ice and managers hardly know when their management is over exceeded. But if they do that, the most negative thing appears between a manager and a contributor. It’s mutual distrust. Contributors don’t understand why they’re so controlled. I mean micromanagement is not only a function of excessive control but also a function of clarification of the necessity of that control. If the manager and contributor accept the case, it’s not micromanagement.

The effect intensifies if managers are overwhelmed, lack resources, or burn out. A common behavior is to avoid any systematic controlling actions. Managers become firefighters. Another way is to demand the result as hard as they can. And the manager becomes a boss who thinks that controlling everything. It’s not even micromanagement, it’s an illusion of control. And the boss becomes a firefighter anyway. The problem here is that almost always managers rely on common sense and expect contributors to guess the meanings of tasks. At the same time, contributors don’t guess and expect the detailed linear flow of tasks. And here it is, the manager (firefighter) comes to answer How?-question and demands the contributor to execute the task in a certain way. There is no explanation and specification of the task, no communications enough … and no control. This is micromanagement. As a result, the manager cannot understand why the contributor doesn’t perform the tasks … and often increases the pressure instead of clarifying the problem.

There are enough techniques that help managers to avoid micromanagement

• Delegation. Managers have to build the system. Correct delegation of responsibilities is a background of the control system.
• Team building. Managers have to highlight team roles for delegation and assign those roles to the right persons. Managers have to make hard decisions about who will get their time and who will not.
• Team development. Managers have to widely and wildly educate their teams to synchronize common senses. So, if something goes wrong, the team is proactive and helps the manager to find a solution to the problem.
• Mentoring. Managers have to understand the reasons for underperformance and help contributors to remove obstacles. But not to tell them how to execute the tasks.
• Expectations clarification. Managers create a huge influence if they can correctly explain their expectations about contributors’ behavior and results. It’s a good way for contributor growth path development.
• Tasks specification. It’s almost always a game-changer if the manager is able to provide the flow of correctly specified tasks.

The problem with these techniques, they are long-term. But despite this, it is the manager who is responsible for the result and it’s the manager’s job to implement the control function and he or she has to spend time on it. And this is an art of management to control and to avoid micromanagement.