The creeping and insidious nature of micromanagement

Micromanagement:

In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes and/or controls the work of his/her subordinates or employees.

Insidious:

proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with very harmful effects.

Micromanagement is insidious, it’s creeping. We never know we have it or it’s affecting us until we are deep in it’s grasps. At this point the organisational change required to undo it is possible too large for anything meaningful to happen.

If we are to avoid micromanagement we need to be able to identify behaviours and characteristics that are indicative of the onset of micromanagement.

Micromanagement stunts growth and hinders one of the 3 key aspects of work-happiness: autonomy (the others being mastery and purpose)

Here’s a list of some of the things that I’ve learnt are bad, it’s by no means exhaustive:

1. Planning work per-engineer

How is work allocated? Is it;

• per-department
• per-team
• per-squad
• per-engineer

Anything at a granularity smaller than per-squad is micromanagement.

2. Design to package / class / component level

How are your systems and applications designed? Are you involved in a design process? Are they handed down at:

• system / responsibility level
• service / implementation level
• package / class / component level
• function / method level

Anything at a granularity smaller than Service (or maybe package) level is micromanagement.

3. Strong views on work that was originally ‘delegated’

How much freedom do you have to implement a change in the best way you know how? Can you investigate the problem and propose a solution to your team?

Or are you managed and orchestrated into a solution by a more ‘senior’ engineer? Does this engineer give the pretence of letting you implement it, but really requires a specific solution to the problem?

If it’s the latter then this is micromanagement. It’s stunting to you learning opportunities.

…micromanagement.

4. Monitored on meaningless metrics

How is your performance managed or monitored? Are you measured on a metric that makes little sense to you, or feels overly burdensome? …micromanagement.

5. Design decisions revisited

If you do finally get to make a decision, is there a team member that requires that the decision is reexplained and trusting that the choices are sound? …micromanagement.

Avoidance

Any single one of these is an indicator of micromanagement. Avoidance before we end up in a situation that’s hard to unwind is far superior.

Consider the analogy of the frog in hot water:

If a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

The same is true of micromanagement. Don’t slowly let the water boil around you!