How to deal with Micro-Managers?

Gökhan Toka tarafından 21/06/2010 tarihinde İşletme ve Yönetim konusunda yazıldı | Yorum Bırakın

Having spent long working years with micro-managers, i believe i developed a sense of understanding these difficult people (unfortunately). I must also admit that understanding these people doesn’t help very much in the end When you are working for a micro-manager you shouldn’t expect your life to flourish into heaven all of a sudden. Actually, working with a micro-manager is one of the hardest conditions that you would face in your professional lives. In the end, if you know how to deal with them, you may only succeed to lower the size of the flames a little bit.

What are the characteristics of a micro-manager? How can you know them?

The most distinguishing characteristic of a micro-manager is the way he/she describes the targets:

The normal manager tries to give you a clear picture of the outcome, the target itself;

Whereas the micro-manager describes you in detail how to reach that target, the solution

This will prevent you from taking initiatives, limit your creative energy and will minimize your joy on work. You will feel yourself like a hand without a brain. If you are a senior or mid-senior employee, working with a micro-manager becomes a very hard and tiresome challenge that would prevent developing your skills on the job.

The second characteristic of a micro-manager is his/her disbelief in the performance of the subordinates.

Again a very badly motivating characteristic. The micro-manager likes to control every single thing going around in the company / department. However by logic, it’s not possible for a manager to control every single detail. The work naturally will be done by the subordinates without the presence of micro-manager and the micro-manager being not an active part of this process, will be tending to develop an overall disbelief in the work done. If the communication ties between the micro-manager and the subordinate is (or becomes) weak, the disbelief in the performance will eventually evolve into an even worse state of mind: mistrust in advance on the subordinate’s professional capability.

How to deal with Micro-Managers?

Here’s a bullet list that i would suggest. However please keep in mind that these can only ease your life up to a certain level; the best thing to do when you are working with a micro-manager is definitely to quit! If you are believing in yourself, if you want to fully utilize your professional capabilities, want to take initiatives on the job, would like to be a part of strategic vision of the organization: then you should be in a different environment. You can not achieve these with a micro-manager around!

Try to expand your communication with the micro-manager into detail levels. Try to involve him/her in every step. You may need to develop a complicated reporting mechanism sometimes / sometimes long hours spent on ineffective meetings / sometimes informing the micro-manager on CC will be enough. However you need to be ready to spend some hours to do that.

Know your micro-manager better! He might look like he has strong knowledge on every different subject. You need to look more deeper into him/her to find out his/her weak points. On some topics you will realize that his/her knowledge level is not that strong. Try to focus yourself on those topics, try to develop yourself on those subjects. Try to create professional safe zones for yourself. On those zones, the micro-manager will be more respectful to you…

If you are working under a micro-manager and if you are also running a team… Do not hire senior employees. Try to hire junior employees instead. This may sound a little bit weird. However the way the manager behaves, effects all the subordinates; Not only you but also the people working under you. Micro-management becomes like a spreading disease, badly effecting the motivation and killing creativity from top to bottom. If you work with a junior team the team will be less effected compared to a senior team, therefore you will have to spend less effort trying to motivate your people.