The two sides of the "excessive supervision" coin

In partnership with

Ahoy,

I want to start by saying thank you to everyone that sent in answers to the polls posted in last Monday and Wednesday’s editions.

For those of you that missed them, I’d really appreciate it if you left an answer for the questions below. It’ll help me ensure that I’m able to deliver the best content I can to you.

After I’ve got the answers in I’ll review and share the data with you , as well as keep you informed on any updates you should expect as a result.

Anyway, lets get to today’s topic!

Escaping the clutches of a micro manager, and ensuring you don’t accidentally fall into the trap of becoming one yourself…

You know immediately if your boss is a micromanager however, it’s a little harder to spot if you’re becoming one yourself. In fact, I’ve met people vocalise how much they didn’t enjoy being micromanaged, to just 5 minutes later walk a team member through step-by-step how to solve a fairly simple problem.

They didn’t realise they’d become what they hated!

So how do we avoid it?

To start with, the process of having your manager relax a bit has quite a simple solution.

Simple in theory but it can take a patience.

Before we get there, lets look at why micromanagement happens in the first place:

1. They think they can do it better than you.

2. They don’t think you can do it at all.

Both of these things are inherently a trust issue. Micromanagement happens because they don’t trust that you are able to do it without them micromanaging you- even if they don’t realise this is what’s happening!

Think about it, you don’t talk the mechanic through how to fix your car. We trust that they know how to do it, and that they’ll do a better job than you.

But if you were also a mechanic, you might feel the need to jump in and make some suggestions after they made a small mistake.

So why do we trust the mechanic?

We trust them because they are qualified, they have experience and a proven track record of being able to do the thing without you telling them how to do it.

Therefore, in order to guide your boss to stop micromanaging you, you need to build that trust. You need to build that track record of doing the thing without them telling you how to do it.

I had a micromanager before. However, they didn’t stay a micromanager. I realised fairly quickly that what they were actually telling me is that they needed evidence of my competence.

Therefore, I started feeding them as much information as I could before they asked for it. Because of this, they realised they didn’t need to keep asking me for things, I was building up that track record of doing the thing without them telling me and as a result, they trusted me more and stopped micromanaging.

Now with that covered, what about the other side of the coin?

How do I make sure I’m not a micromanager?

This can be quite hard to see happening in yourself. But I want you to go into this week with the thought:

“I am micromanaging, how can I take a step back here?”

Now you might (and probably aren’t) micromanaging all the time. But if you ask yourself this question over and over, it’ll highlight the areas that you are micromanaging.

I’d be really interested to hear if any of you spot times where you’ve been doing this without realising!

It can be hard not to. It means trusting your team a little more. It means letting go of control. But it also means, becoming a better leader, building a stronger team that runs on trust instead of centralised control.

Drop me an email if you do spot anything in yourself. I’d be really interested to hear your stories.

As always, have a great day.

Reece