Well-respected leadership coach, Marshall Goldsmith, in his best-selling book, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There,” states, “The higher you go the more the problems are behavioral.” I agree. The challenges of many of my high-level executive coaching clients is not that they don’t have the smarts, the knowledge, or the drive to succeed, it’s their controlling behavior that prevents them, their people, and the organization from reaching full potential.
This need for control manifests itself in micro-managing. You know the routine. Every comma, calculation or speech is audited and massaged to death with the top person having knowledge of and comment on every aspect of the project down to the smallest detail. Comments are not suggestions but criticisms and always their perspective.
My first question to this person is, “What are you not doing, at a higher level, while you are busying yourself with your staff’s job?” My guess is the visionary work suffers. This leader gets so into the weeds that the future looks like tomorrow rather than a year or a decade forward. There is no strategy, only tactics.
The problem when a leader is a micro-manager is they are not allowing experienced employees to think for themselves and produce a product they can call their own. Nothing is more demoralizing than to have a great project you have been diligently working on come back to you with a zillion minor corrections that do nothing to the content but manage to deprive you of having a unique voice. These over-audited works often lose their clarity of thought after having been through so many renditions. The true meaning is obscured by the irrelevant corrections.
Micro-managing doesn’t allow people to fail. Let toddlers fall and they not only learn to walk but also how to get up and try again; the same is true for adults. The ever-present leader forces people to play it safe, be timid, and ask for permission when none is required. Few of us do our best in front of a critical audience, especially if it’s under the eye of the auditing boss. Rather than catching them doing something right, these managers are forever looking for what’s wrong. You and I know there is always something wrong for them to correct. It’s discouraging. It pushes people to satisfy rather than risk and create.
Micro-managing wastes everyone’s time. Thankfully most of us are not in such critical strategic positions that each and every word has to be parsed or every calculation triple-checked before hitting “SEND.” I find when people are working extraordinarily long hours, day-after-day, there is often a micro-manager at the helm telling them how to row.
Micro-managers breed followers, not leaders. They tend to hire staff similar to themselves in their need to put everything under the microscope and trust no one. They promote people who only know how to do it their way. They have no succession plan for the organization and place everyone at great risk should things change or the unexpected happen.
Micro-managing, whether it’s in the office or the home, is a need for control issue. There is a lack of trust (in the manager of themselves, as well as others) and a fear of making mistakes or being proven wrong. They want to run everything. We know that’s impossible.
It takes time and effort to wean a micro manager off of this counterproductive behavior. The higher they rank the more entrenched they can be and the more destructive the results. As a person who works for such a leader the choices can be difficult — comply and compromise your sense of self and probably give more to the cause than it deserves. Balk the system and you find yourself in another job maybe in another company. (That might not be the worst thing that could happen.) Or be in a constant battle with your supervisor — never much fun.
Thankfully, some micro-managers actually want to, or have to, change. They often don’t know how. The thought of not being on top of everything is terrifying and almost inconceivable. Building trust, slowing detoxing off of their need to act this way is slow but possible. It begins with trust. It trends through positive experiences practicing a new behavior and results in relief and greater satisfaction on the part of all involved.
Are you a micro manager? Think again.
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