Micro-management is the scourge of productivity and staff development in all industries or business, either private or public sector. Period. Micro-managers can take a forward looking organisation with good visionary leadership at the top and keen willing staff looking to improve and progress, and turn it and them into static and unmotivated organisation drifting rudderless on an increasingly stormy business ocean.
And its a common phenomenon, this micro-management. It usually indicates a lack of confidence, an unwillingness to lead change for fear of risk-taking, insecurity and therefore a lack of trust in the team doing the grunt work. The problem can be that many leaders and senior managers fail to spot the micro-manager in their middle-management teams, and the micro-manager certainly tries to hide their methodology, and therefore, if a job (of sorts) is appearing to be being done, than the trait can be hard to spot. Its almost as if the weak manager can't afford to let the boss see this weakness any more than he or she can allow the team room to manoeuvre or freedom in their allotted tasks.
In this day and age, organisational hierarchies are getting flatter and flatter, with decision-making devolved from traditional top-down levels of organisation to a more project-based responsibility. Of course, there’s a delicious irony with this and this is younger career-oriented ambitious folk, who are stoking the pressure for hierarchical change do themselves expect recognition and promotion as a reward for the work they do. Extrapolate this out over a forty year working career and at a promotion every two or three years, that's between sixteen and twenty steps ‘up’ the corporate ladder. In an ever flattening organisational hierarchy, those steps may be rapidly disappearing, leaving many senior mangers and HR directors with a bit of a headache !
Devolving responsibility to project management level, as I’ve already said, is the way which many businesses are going, however, this approach is not without its problems. Does this result in a lack of overall strategic leadership? will there be competing demands for senior ,management time from project managers eager to be noticed ? and will this looser structure really appeal to everyone, most of whom have been brought up in a command/control structure? Maybe not. For as the reins of perceived power loosen up, very often the response is confusion, uncertainty, lowering levels of morale, and even grumblings of leadership ‘vacuum’. The signs might be quite overt, such as arguing and power struggles, or less overt such as lower productivity and increased sickness absence. Usually a lack of leadership is blamed for these organisational woes, but maybe its not a lack of, but the wrong style of leadership which is to blame in such cases.Maybe, just maybe, its leadership being practiced in the ‘old style’ and grafted on to a new set of operating circumstances rather than adapted for times of change, that is the real culprit in these situations. To take this a stage further, perhaps middle managers are clinging to their traditional styles of management in order to cause change to fail and so preserve the status quo. And so we see that in these cases and many others like them, its the leadership ‘skills’ being practiced which are actually stifling change.
As a leader, its your responsibility to develop your staff, strengthening your teams. The most important job of a leader is to create more leaders, not gather followers. So how can you do this effectively if your view of your teams' strengths and weaknesses and overall performance is blocked by micro-management ?
Here are the four steps to beat the micro-manager, build effective teams of well managed people and develop the leadership capacity of your organisation..
1. Aim to build up channels of communication. Paulo Freire, the education theorist once wrote that without dialogue there can be no communication, and that without communication, there can be no education. So dialogue within your organisation is essential. Encourage this dialogue by having an 'open door' policy. Let everyone know that they can come and see you for a talk, or just pass the time of day with a brief chat. That they can bring their concerns to you, and that you will listen. And talk to everyone without passing either comment or judgement. Active listening is the key to getting folk to open up to you, but its important not to make decisions and communicate them to people in ways which will subvert the business hierarchy and undermine your middle managers.
2. Have the courage to address the problem. If you don't deal with it firmly and decisively, the culture of micro-management will become ingrained in your organisational hierarchy as an acceptable way to do business. So invest in your middle managers. Mentor them and support them by modelling good business and management practice. Allow them time to change and room for trial and error. They will fail as much as they succeed at first, but given the time, spacer and encouragement, they will change. Let them no that its ok to fail, because we all learn from failure, and more importantly, behaviours change because of failure.
Identify potential problems and issues by listening to them talk about their teams. Listen out especially for third person pronouns in these conversations because this is a common way that a micro-manager separates themselves from their team's performance or lack of achievement.
3. Develop all your people. Despite the challenges posed by micro-management, do not let it affect your staff development programmes. High quality training need not be expensive. Use your contacts and professional learning networks to support you in this. They nay be able to help by offering workshops and training, and of course, you will be able to reciprocate. Remember, the role of a leader is to create more leaders, so be on the look out for potential in people. The early bird catches the worm, so they say. So be on your guard and try to spot the micro-manager before the behaviour becomes an issue, and starts to affect productivity, and above all, and even though you are busy with a thousand and one things to do, avoid the temptation to think that if you can't see managers with problems, that there is no problem. Good quality training is the key to avoiding this pitfall. Provide the resources and be creative with training and development budgets as there are many cheap ways of motivating and developing staff and managers. Give your managers time, resources, confidence and encouragement.
4. Have confidence in your people. Expect them to overcome their weaknesses. After all, people micro-manage because they fear the consequences of failure due to giving their staff freedom, so give your middle managers time to change and room for trial and error (see point 2 above). Staff are not free if they don't understand their role in the business, have an interest in it's success, and just what is necessary to achieve that success, so convince your managers that their teams can do the job and put courage into them to give their people the freedom to get on with their work without the dead hand of micro-management constantly on their shoulders. Your managers will know that you expect them to create a positive working environment and atmosphere for their teams, and the business will be all the better for that.
If you persevere and show persistence, most managers can be encouraged out of their micro-management ways. However, where you encounter the odd one who can't, decisive and firm action is required to remove the problem before it spreads and becomes institutionalised. Where you allow a culture of micro-management to become embedded in an organisation, only those who need to be micro-managed will remain there. The rest will be off to pastures new very quickly; to an organisation that allows its employees to flourish and succeed.
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