The Fear of Micromanagement Prevents Active Management

“I trust my team to do it the best way possible.”

“If something’s wrong, they’ll tell me about it.”

These are comments I hear from managers talking about how they empower their teams. Sadly, they are doing the opposite. A lot of this comes from the fear of micromanagement. Who hasn’t read or heard a story of a horrible boss that micromanages everyone? No one wants to hear that about themselves! In fact, if you were to ask managers what their largest fears are, a common response is the fear of being known as a micromanager. That’s why I’ve observed so many potentially great managers handicap themselves. They stop actively managing due the fear of micromanaging.

To understand this difference, let’s first define micromanagement vs. active management:

• Micromanagement: “excessive supervision and control of employees’ work and processes, as well as a limited delegation of tasks or decisions to staff”
• Active Management: “tracking the performance of employees’ work and providing feedback and guidance on how to improve.”

Both of these definitions involved overseeing and reviewing work in detail. The difference is that a micromanager will state, “get out of the way, I’ll just do it.” or “just do it this way.” Whereas the active manager will say “while this way worked, have you thought about handling it in this way? Do you see how while that response, while correct, could be offensive?”

To give another example, while leading the support team at a collaboration software company, I was working on making the support team more scalable. We had left the team to their own devices to manage their queue, and how to solve tickets to individuals themselves with just high level goals. Here is the breakdown on what we found:

• 10% of individuals averaged between 90-110 tickets a week.
• 25% of individuals averaged between 60-70 tickets a week.
• 30% of individuals averaged around 50 tickets a week.
• 25% of individuals averaged between 25-30 tickets a week.
• 10% of individuals averaged between 15-25 tickets a week.

Knowledge, tenure, and hours worked were all similar. CSAT was actually highest with the top producers (so not only highest quantity, but highest quality as well). What this proved, was that left to their own devices, while everyone can find a way to get their work done, only 10% of people will find the ideal way to get their work done! From this lesson, we started shadowing the top 10% to see what they did differently, and started training the rest of the team on these best practices. This change management was surprisingly difficult as some individuals were so entrenched in their belief that “their way was the best way,” due to us not having set this expectation before. While this training did not achieve the desired nirvana of getting the remaining 90% up to the top 10% of performance, it did move everyone up at least one category with everyone above the 50 tickets a week level–a massive performance boost for the entire organization!

Additionally this kind of feedback should be delivered in a near real-time fashion. Each individual is different in how they like to receive feedback, so I typically do this on a weekly basis in my direct reports’ one on one meetings.

For those that still do not believe, I will end with this quote from a direct report who I started managing for about a month: “Thank you for the feedback. I have been asking for years on how I can improve, and what I need to do to get better. You are the first person to have the courage to actually tell me. Now that I know, I can actually work on these items.” Top performers want and need this feedback on how to improve. It’s bottom performers that don’t want the feedback and challenge this model.