What Is Micromanagement?

In the workplace, the specific way a manager conducts themselves and handles their
team is known as their management or leadership style.

This can include the way they plan and organize, assert their authority, give feedback and
ensure goals or objectives are achieved.

Some managers insist on being more heavily involved in the workplace than others. While
it can be helpful for a team to know that they have the support of their manager, constant
supervision and interference can become overbearing.

Managers who feel compelled to control every aspect of their team’s work are known as
micromanagers.

Your boss may be showing signs of micromanagement if you notice that they:

Obsess over the tiny details of a project (especially if they lose sight of the bigger
picture)
Avoid delegating tasks to other members of the team
Have the mindset that the whole enterprise would fall apart without them
Discourage initiative or creative thinking in a team; they believe their way of thinking is
the only way
Are very report-orientated, wanting constant updates and detailed data to be
presented at unrealistic intervals
Seem to have no concept of ‘office hours’ and feel that employees should be available
to discuss work by phone/email at any time they wish
Have a tendency to overreact, especially to minor setbacks, or consider everything to
be an emergency
Interfere in employees’ work and are overly critical (often with little substance to what
they are actually saying)
Become extremely frustrated if decisions are made without them or they are not
included in conversations or email exchanges
Have an unwavering belief in a ‘top down’ management approach
What Are the Pros and Cons of
Micromanagement?

Although not typical of an effective leadership style in business, there can be some
positive outcomes to being a micromanager.

Pros

Micromanagers are usually very results focused and will often strive to achieve positive
outcomes for themselves. They are often highly aspirational leaders.

By being so involved with their teams on a day-to-day basis, micromanagers can be very
empathetic and able to understand their employees well, identifying their strengths,
weaknesses and key skills and utilizing them to attain positive results for the business.

They will often show high levels of engagement in tasks and are willing to make sacrifices
to get good results, such as working long hours or continuing to focus on their projects
outside of the workplace. Higher management will often favor the dedication of the
micromanager to the tasks at hand.

Cons

The obsessive attention to detail and constant scrutiny that is typical of the micromanager
can cause employees to feel stressed and demotivated. This can result in lower output,
increase the frequency of mistakes and cause a loss of morale within the team.

As micromanagers are so reluctant to delegate or allow others to have responsibilities,

staff often feel undervalued and disrespected by them. As a consequence,
micromanagers often have a high turnover of staff and have specific problems with
recruiting and retaining skilled and experienced workers.
The approach of the micromanager does not encourage creativity or critical thinking.
Employees are not challenged to solve problems or overcome issues that they are faced
with if they are continuously told to follow instructions and not deviate from their
manager’s way of doing things. This fails to prepare workers for promotion and causes the
enterprise to lose out on hearing innovative ideas.

Micromanagers are often not effective users of time, either through wasting time by
insisting on overseeing everybody else’s work or because they have unrealistic
expectations. This can mean that work is being rushed and having to be redone later, or
submitted before it is complete.

Why Does Micromanaging Occur?

Managers may micromanage their team for a number of reasons. Although it often has a
negative impact on the workforce, this approach can sometimes be well intentioned.
Micromanagers may feel that their output is highly valuable and that they are helping their
team to achieve great results by becoming so heavily involved.

Some micromanagers have a deep-seated fear of failure. They will scrutinize small details
and interfere with other colleagues’ work because they are either extremely anxious about
attaining the desired results, or under extreme pressure to produce data that quantifies
these results.

This can result in them having disproportionate reactions to small ‘failures’, which then
causes them to intervene too frequently in their employees’ work.

Learned experience can also play a significant role in micromanagement. Sometimes, a

manager who has had an entirely different leadership style may lapse into
micromanagement following a failure, an instance where they feel their team ‘let them
down’, a demotion or negative feedback about their own performance from higher
management.

A narcissistic personality type is sometimes associated with micromanagement. These

types of managers will use micromanagement as a way to establish control over their
employees and they will often micromanage in a very strategic and deliberate way.

By doing this, they are able to identify potential scapegoats to take the blame if projects do
not work out, as well as to claim their colleagues’ success as their own when things do go
well. By micromanaging in this way, narcissistic bosses have the perfect setup to avoid
accountability.

Micromanagement vs Macromanagement

While micromanagers focus on details and giving their team constant direction,
macromanagers allow their employees to work more independently. These two opposing
management styles have their positive points, as well as their drawbacks.

While a micromanager might insist on being cc’d in every email, leading each team
meeting and overseeing each team member’s outputs during a project, a macromanager
would allow them to work with minimal supervision and an abundance of creative freedom,
providing they had a cohesive goal in mind.

What Is Micromanagement?
Micromanagers are focused on identifying (and creating) short-term problems and
solutions; macromanagers focus on a long-term objective.

For employees who value autonomy and are confident working independently with very
little direct supervision, a boss who exercises a macromanagement style would be ideal.
For those workers who perform best under instruction and require regular feedback, or
who struggle with decision-making, having this type of manager could leave them feeling
overloaded and directionless.

Macromanagers will often focus on strategizing and may choose to delegate influential or
decision-making roles to subordinate members of their team who they trust will share their
objectives.

Rather than focusing on the intimate details of a project, a macromanager will see the
broader view while in the planning phase of their strategies in business. They often
concentrate on a conclusion or objective, allowing others to use their initiative and find
solutions to the problems that may occur at the different stages of implementing their
strategy.

The macromanager’s approach can create distance between themselves and their teams,
which in some ways can lead to enhanced objectivity, but can also lead to problems if they
are not immediately aware of issues that are occurring. In this instance, a team may
struggle to enact a solution to a problem that could have been pre-empted or seen earlier
by their manager if they had been more involved on a day-to-day basis.

For a micromanager, in a similar instance, they would have been looking for solutions to
problems that did not exist or that their team could easily deal with.

Both the micromanager and macromanager can encounter issues when it comes to
problem-solving in business.

The distance and objectivity a macromanager develops can sometimes lead to solutions
being delayed.
Conversely, the micromanager becomes too invested in subjective detail and refuses to
use the knowledge base within their team, which also leads to solutions being delayed.

How Micromanagement Can Be Avoided

If you have a job that you are really passionate about and a team that you enjoy working
with, it is a shame to allow it to be made difficult by a micromanaging boss.

Although the problem is rarely about output or results, but more about the boss’s own
personality or learned experience, it might be possible to take back some control of the
situation by adapting your own behavior.

Take a step back – Sometimes it is hard to see what is going on when you are too
close to a project. By taking a step back and encouraging others to, it can be easier to
see exactly what is taking place and how to address it.

Set boundaries – Be clear about your expectations and limitations. If you are
uncomfortable taking work-related calls out of office hours or feel that deadlines are
unrealistic and reports unnecessary, it is vital to speak up. It is also helpful to ask your
colleagues to support you if they are feeling the same way.

Be intuitive – Micromanagers often react badly to being overtly told they are
micromanaging. Try to communicate with your boss by suggesting that you would like
more responsibility or that you feel you really proved yourself on a certain project and
would like to take a more autonomous role on the next one.

Look for the cause – Understanding why your boss is micromanaging will help to
inform the way in which you decide to proceed. If it is because they are under extreme
stress or because they are anxious about a recent failing, a team meeting where this
can be discussed openly may help. If it is due to them having a controlling or
narcissistic personality this is far more difficult to deal with.

Delegate tasks – Micromanagers are often reluctant to delegate tasks out to others.
 Delegating tasks gives other employees responsibility and makes them feel included
and valued. By giving tasks to others and proving they are being done successfully,
you develop a proven track record to challenge your micromanaging boss with when
they refuse to delegate.

Try to make pre-emptive strikes – If possible, try to stay a step ahead. You can
learn your boss’s pattern of behavior and have items ready before they have a chance
to ask for them or start interfering. If they are very data-orientated, you could take the
time to produce a report on the progress of a project so they can see that everything is
going well. By demonstrating that you are on track for success, they may start to focus
their attention elsewhere.

Arrange regular updates – It might help to suggest regular check-in times to meet to
discuss your progress. That way, if you are approached in the meantime, you can say
confidently, “Let’s discuss that at my next check-in appointment”. The guarantee that
they will be receiving regular updates may encourage a micromanaging boss to take a
step back. You could also start to introduce the idea of only needing to update on the
important milestones of a project, rather than each minor detail.

Take ownership – Employees who are willing to be held accountable for their work
(both good and bad) and accept genuine feedback are more difficult to micromanage.
As a team, be willing to celebrate your successes and openly discuss and learn from
failures.

Be organized – Micromanagement can cause chaos within a team as employees

become unsure of what their role actually is, and what precisely they should be doing,
as their manager tries to make every job seem like their own. The more organized and
structured you are able to be, demonstrating that you work cohesively as a team, the
less opportunity the micromanager will have to cause disruption.

Final Thoughts

Micromanagement occurs for a variety of reasons, but more often than not results in
negative consequences for the workforce. Although at the root is the desire for control,
micromanaging often provides only the illusion of control and will, in fact, cause workers to
feel undervalued and stressed, often leading to disorganization and a lack of direction
within a team.

With effective communication and understanding it is possible to stop being

micromanaged; this will be significantly easier if your boss is open to appraising and
reevaluating their own management style and behavior.