What’s the one business leadership skill no one wants to be known for? It’s being a micromanager. Let me debunk this idea. I am so sick of hearing about the evils of micromanagement. Every day we hear another tale about the micromanager who is interfering with their employees’ ability to successfully fulfill their job requirements, while generating unnecessary stress for the individual. I believe that in many cases, this behavior is simply not being represented fairly.
Many employees are convinced that their managers are micromanaging simply because they are control freaks who must make each and every decision, manage the performance of every major task, won’t recognize any thought process but their own and must command every step the employees take. The employees feel stifled and undervalued when their ideas and suggestions aren’t even considered.
However, in some cases, micromanaging is a business leadership skill that an executive believes they had to develop. More often than not, what an employee considers to be micromanaging actually turns out to be an issue of trust. Micromanagers often don’t trust their employees and therefore believe they must oversee everything and ask frequent questions for clarification. Now, when I say “trust,” I’m not referring to an ethical trust, but rather the belief that employees will get the job done well. While coaching executives, I often hear that they don’t know when a task they have assigned has been completed or whether there have been hiccups in the process, so they have to keep asking about the status of the task. Oh, they wish they didn’t have to ask, but they have repeatedly found that these tasks either haven’t been handled or have ‘slipped off the radar’ and somehow ended back in their lap. Their instinctive solution to being unaware of a task’s or project’s status is to ‘micromanage,’ a business leadership skill they would rather not have had to develop.
If you want to be given authority and responsibility for tasks without input on ‘how’, be given the end goal rather than an action-step dictation, be treated as someone your manager can count on…then you need to step up to the plate and demonstrate that you can be depended on to communicate and follow through effectively. More responsibility and higher levels of trust come after evidence of continually high levels of capability, consistency and competency.
Every leader I know would be thrilled to hand off a difficult responsibility and never have to think about it again. They would be ecstatic not to be known as the guy whose business leadership skills include being a primo micromanager. What can you do to build trust with your manager and experience the flip side of ‘micromanagement’?
@ 2014 Incedo Group, LLC
