Micromanagement is one of the fastest ways a leader can kill trust at work. I learned this the hard way: people don’t like being told what to do when they’re perfectly capable of figuring it out themselves.

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This is Part 5 of a 7-part series on how toxic leadership behaviors manifest in the workplace, what is going on emotionally for the leader engaging in the behavior, and how they affect team performance. See the links below for the other sections:

1.      Introduction

2.      Dishonesty

3.      Bullying

4.      Scapegoating

5.      Micromanagement

6.      Conflict Avoidance

7.      Favoritism

What Is Micromanagement?

Micromanagement in leadership occurs when a manager takes decision-making power back from employees who are fully capable of handling it.

Micromanagement can exist in overt and in subtle ways. Here are some examples of overt micromanagement:

• Demanding to be cc’ed on every email
• Requiring approval for routine or minor decisions
• Constant check-ins to “monitor progress”

And subtle:

• “Editing” someone else’s work to the level where it amounts to a wholesale rewrite
• Disguising directives as “suggestions” (is it really a suggestion that the employee can take or leave, or is it an order?)
• Withholding full ownership—assigning responsibility, but retaining decision-making authority

I liken it to training wheels. Micromanagement is like taking someone who already knows how to ride a bike and forcing them to use training wheels.

Why would mom or dad do that?

Why Leaders Micromanage: The Emotional Roots

Micromanagement, fundamentally, is about control. This can be about control of a person, but is usually more about control of an outcome or an environment.

Imposing control on our environment usually comes from a sense of discomfort—fear—about a disordered, chaotic environment. This isn’t necessarily a bad emotion. I’ve noticed that I feel more anxious when my house is a cluttered mess, and feel more relaxed when it’s clean. This is natural.

The danger comes when a leader’s tolerance for messiness is too low relative to the baseline messiness of the situation. Human beings, and by extension relationships, are inherently messy. In a work environment, it is a guarantee that people will have disagreements, people will make mistakes, and people will have good-faith misunderstandings. It’s like having a child—your house might be tidy and spotless at all times right now, but do you really expect it to stay that way once you have a four-year-old and a two-year-old running around?

If the leader becomes too fearful of the consequences of the inherent messiness of collaborating on work with other humans, then the leader’s impulse is to control the actions of the other humans in order to reduce the messiness. This approach manifests as micromanagement and is doomed to failure. It’s like telling a two-year-old to sit still. Not gonna work.

How Micromanagement Damages Confidence

In my view, the most dangerous thing about micromanagement is that it undermines the confidence of my team.

We’ve all observed that when we feel confident, we do better work than when we feel self-doubt. Although most confidence (belief) is internally generated, our environment and the people around us also influence our sense of self-doubt or self-belief.

When I micromanage one of my team members, I am basically saying to them some version of the following:

• “I don’t trust you to do this on your own”
• “You are going to screw this up”
• “I’m better than you”

In effect, the subtext I’m giving them undermines their confidence. Some people will retreat—become passive and accepting of the subconscious message. Other people, perhaps most people, will become angry. Their internal reaction is “I’m not a moron, don’t treat me as if I am” and that’s why most people resent micromanagers. And as with most forms of toxic leadership, the ultimate consequence is that the good people will leave and mediocre ones who lack better options will stay.

Micromanagement Harms Work Product

In the end, all this touchy-feely stuff comes down to: does this behavior make the organization more, or less, effective?

Micromanagement can work when the organization needs to move tightly in-step, like a marching band. For work that is more creative, akin to an improvised jazz session, micromanagement stifles the cognitive freedom that leads to breakthroughs.

To me, it’s very clear that micromanagement greatly harms productivity in most of the types of work that readers of this blog do. Here are some ways:

• Every ounce of mental energy I spend micromanaging my subordinate’s work is an ounce I am not spending on doing my work, which theoretically should be much higher value. (If my work isn’t actually higher value, that’s a flaw in the organizational structure and I am the one that needs to move to a different role.)
• If my organization’s hiring practices are sound, that means that people below me in the organization should be of roughly similar talent to me. If I micromanage them, I am denying a person of similar intelligence to mine to present ideas and methods that have the potential to be just as good as mine. This is a loss of collective intelligence. (If I am much more capable than the people below me, that’s not their fault, that’s my fault for hanging out in a lousy organization.)
• Even if I am more competent than my subordinates, when I micromanage them, I deny them the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from their mistakes. If I think learning has positive returns to productivity, I want them to be learning, even if it means making some mistakes. (Obviously, I do want to tightly manage when a mistake might be fatal. Don’t let the intern be the only one that looks at the pitch deck for the final sales meeting with the client CEO.)

The Opposite Problem: Absentee Managers

I want to conclude with a thought on the mirror-image evil twin of micromanagement: absentee managers.

Like neglectful parents, managers can also be too uninvolved in their team’s work. Just like micromanagers, we’ve all experienced this as well and it doesn’t feel good either. Same as with our parents, in a work environment, we all need some guidance, some guardrails, and some feedback.

From the manager’s perspective, this can come from a lack of care or interest (which employees can feel) or an unwillingness to get messy and solve difficult problems (which is an abdication of responsibility). This will affect employees negatively in the same way that a lack of attention from parents will. Ultimately, it’s demoralizing and the organization will suffer because of it.

Over-control is bad, and so is under-control. A good leader learns to find the right balance.

Next week, in Part 6 of this toxic leadership series, we’ll explore another destructive behavior: conflict avoidance.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Noticing

When I give direction to people below me, if I had to guess, do I err on the side of giving too little direction or too much?

If I lean towards too much direction, what am I afraid will happen without my involvement?

If I lean towards too little direction, what am I avoiding getting into?

2)      Reflection

What have people told me in the past about my leadership style? Does it lean towards under- or over-control?

If I can’t recall any specific feedback on this subject, can I ask for it?

(It’s important to understand how we are perceived by others, regardless of what we feel we’re doing.)

3)      Action

If I lean towards over-control, can I experiment with giving my employees a longer leash? What might be one way I can try exerting less control this week?

If I lean towards under-control, can I try getting dirty and into the details with my employees? What is one area where I can test that out this week?