At least once in your life, you might have experienced micromanagement at your workplace, and there is almost a 100% chance that it robbed you of your motivation and inspiration and left you devastated. But have you ever witnessed under which boss you learned the most, the one who constantly pushed you to be better, applied management processes, or someone who was easygoing? The answer will probably be the former, but does this mean micromanaging is good? No, it is sometimes not, and so is our definition of micromanagement.
In this blog, we delve into a deeper understanding of micromanagement to help you determine which leaders to follow and whom not to follow.
Table of Contents
What Is Micro Managing?
When a manager starts micro-managing you, they will notice your activity closely and will start giving you criticism about your work and processes more frequently. Instead of allocating the task along with the deadline, they will start having excessive supervision of you, though this may create immediate results for a while but at the expense of the team’s trust and confidence. We often get perplexed about who is micro-managing us or who is not; because of this, we may label a good manager as a micro-manager. This may be seen as a sign of weaponizing micromanaging and can hamper our growth; now, let’s see signs that indicate that you are being micro-managed.
Signs Of Micromanagement
Among other signs of being a bad leader, micromanagement tops the chart. It can drastically impact your team’s performance and may even make them lose confidence. Let’s now look at the signs of micromanagement:
- If your managers are micro-managing, they will ask you to be CC’d on every email.
- They will start occupying themselves with the work assigned to others, increasing their workload more than they can handle because of their arrogance and false sense of pride.
- As mentioned earlier, they will start looking over the team’s shoulders to monitor each and every activity of their team member
- Under micromanagement, they will constantly ask for updates on your work and where things stand.
- Micromanagers will delegate not only the work they want you to do but also how it needs to be done, leaving no room for the team to take their own initiative.
- You will find them never satisfied with your work and focusing too much on unnecessary details.
How To Identify A Macro Manager?
As we have already discussed, when asked people when they grew the most personally and professionally, they mentioned it under a strict boss. It is easy to get confused between a micromanager and a microleader; since microleaders also closely monitor their team’s work, they can sometimes be confused as micromanagers. Without getting into the details of your work, it is very hard to assess your performance and set clear warning signs for any future mishaps.
What Is Micro Leadership?
As per Stephen Miles, Founder and CEO of The Miles Group, “Micro leadership, as opposed to micromanagement, should be a term that empowers leaders to be detail-oriented and drive the pace and outcomes of their teams’ efforts without feeling dissonance or guilt, especially when someone accuses them of micromanaging.”
Microleaders always set their expectations clearly for their direct reports and are involved at every level of work, not because they don’t trust you. They do so to understand the scope risk of the task and analyze what early signs may lead to bigger issues.
However, if you are experiencing micromanagement at your workplace, there is nothing much you can do about it except raise your concerns to your senior managers or share this blog with them if they can take criticism—Pun Intended.
How Can A Micro Manager Reform Himself?
If you read the blog and are in an executive position and most of these traits resonated with you, congratulations—you are a micro-manager. However, if you felt guilty after reading the blog, there are some steps that you can follow to reform your leadership style.
- Before allocating the task to your teammates, clearly define the couple of metrics that will define the success of any given project and ignore every other detail that is not defined or necessary.
- Trust your teammates more; you should delegate what needs to be done and only tell them “how it can be done” if it is extremely necessary to follow the mentioned steps.
- Most importantly, guide your teammates! Be more of their coach than a leader, and try to have a welcoming attitude towards the team members who want to learn from you.
- Before the allocation, also ensure that you have set a clear deadline for each stage of your assigned project. A meeting with a reasonable time limit should follow to receive updates on the work.
Micromanagement Will Result In Achieving Less, Doing More
Micromanagement may temporarily provide you with immediate results, but it will have an adverse impact on your team and drastically reduce their productivity rate. It may reduce morale, or, even worse, your team members may start leaving the company. We hope you have liked this blog; follow us for more such informational blogs.
