I keep seeing too much micromanagement in organizations. That's where managers decide for the people they lead and serve, not with the people they lead and serve. Micromanagement creates several problems:
- People stop learning how to solve problems because the manager steps in to tell them what to do.
- That leads to much lower throughput, which leads to increased cycle time and increased WIP. (See Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers.)
- Worse, because the managers focus on the tactical, they lose sight of the manager's strategic decisions. That creates the problems in Why Minimize Management Decision Time.)
Worse, because the managers don't see people solving the problems, the managers step in again and decide on tactics. That creates a reinforcing feedback loop that does not give anyone what they want. And the managers lose sight of their strategic work.
Too often, micromanagement and the reinforcing feedback loop starts at the top of the organization and filters down. That has the effect of all managers being intimately involved in the tactical work and much less strategic thinking and actions. That increased focus on tactics continues—unless someone sees this and stops it with an intervention. The first intervention is to notice when you are micromanaging.
Notice Your Micromanagement Actions
How do you delegate work to teams? Do you delegate problems and outcomes? Or, do you tend to delegate tasks? To increase everyone's problem-solving capabilities, delegate problems and outcomes to a team. That has the effect of increasing the team's collaboration, which is one way to finish work faster. Here's the stabilizing feedback loop when managers delegate more:
You might wonder how to get from where you are to this “nirvana” of being able to delegate more. That requires saying no to more work, and extending trust to your team. (See Leadership Tip #9: See & Stop Micromanagement—Learn to Trust Instead for more details.)
What if you can't trust people to do the work? Make sure you start by delegating problems and outcomes, never tasks. You can say this:
“I would like you to collaborate as a team to finish this outcome. I'm nervous about your ability to finish by our necessary date. However, instead of me asking you, I want you to let me know where you are, every day at noon. I will wait for you to tell me. But please do not leave me hanging, waiting for an update. I need to know where you are. Then, if you have problems, I can support your problem-solving.”
I only ask for daily reports for an emergency. Otherwise, I ask for weekly demos because demos build trust. In addition, I explain why team-based collaboration is so necessary with the flow metrics. (There's plenty more discussion here, especially if your organization loves resource efficiency instead of flow efficiency.)
What if you don't think you're micromanaging? Here are some micromanagement examples.
A Few Micromanagement Examples
For all managers and teams:
- When you say to people, “do it this way” and you are no longer responsible to do or finish that work.
- Divide-and-conquer thinking: Slicing the coherent work into tasks that you think a single person can do and then stitch that work together at the end.
For first-level managers:
- Assigning individual tasks to single people instead of asking the team to collaborate or assign themselves work.
- Telling the team how to solve the problem. That includes architecture, design, test decisions.
Mid-level managers:
- Assigning people to teams or organizing the teams or changing how the teams organize to do the work.
- Changing backlogs or backlog items.
Senior-level managers:
- Adding more work to the project portfolio.
- Changing roadmap or backlog items.
- Back to office mandates without recognizing the teams do not have sufficient work spaces. (More on this later.)
But managers who micromanage less reap significant benefits. One of those is much more autonomy, mastery, and purpose in the team (or the people “below” you in the organization).
More Autonomy from Less Micromanagement
Review the stabilizing feedback loop again. (That's the second image in this post.) Notice that when the managers focus more on the environment, the team is more capable? They work together to solve problems. That makes all the team's flow metrics better (the feedback loops are shorter).
Managers don't have to be perfect with stopping micromanagement. Especially if they explain that they are nervous about the team finishing something and why. But the more a manager can stop micromanaging, the more the team increases its capabilities. (My teams used to yell at me when I started micromanaging. I laughed and explained why I was nervous. That recognition helped me stop micromanagement and the team to suggest what they could do to reduce my nerves.)
We don't need management “perfection”—as if that's even possible. But we do need management awareness. And delegation awareness might be the most important thing of all. With less micromanagement, the teams achieve much more autonomy, which helps them deliver better products. And isn't that the point?
More Reading
I've written a lot about this in the past.
For power:
- Three Possibilities to Move from Power Over to Power With
- Leadership Tip 16: Decide When to Choose Power-With or Power-Over
For delegation:
- Practical Ways to Manage Yourself (the other two Modern Management Made Easy books focus more on team empowerment.)
Portfolio Management