Vikram really liked his new director Rita at first.  Rita seemed very personable, and when she introduced herself she talked about how much she valued teamwork and collaboration.  Vikram and his fellow managers had been a high-performing team under their departing director, and he hoped this would continue.

During Vikram’s first one-on-one meeting with Rita, he mentioned in passing a few of the minor problems his team was dealing with, and how he had solved them.  To his surprise, Rita scolded him for taking action without consulting her first.  She told him that she needed to approve any such actions, even though he had been taking care of these problems for years successfully without supervision.  Then things got worse.

Rita began demanding frequent updates, about even the most minor things.  She asked to be copied on every email sent in the department “so that she could see what was going on”. Vikram found himself spending more and more time writing updates, and less and less doing his job.  Rita set random deadlines, and arbitrary demands for her staff to be in the office on specific days, even when they’d be spending the day teleconferencing.  In her staff meetings she’d cut off her staff when they tried to directly support each other, rather than going through her.  She’d listen politely to recommendations, and even thank people for their contributions, but those contributions were ignored.  She never asked for help, and showed no curiosity about her staff’s work except in how they were carrying out her orders.  Soon Vikram stopped speaking up at all except to answer questions and give status updates.

Vikram and his colleagues felt in the dark about what was going on in the larger organization.  When he or his colleagues asked Rita questions about strategy or the work she was assigning, she’d take it as a personal insult, or question their competence.  “If you have to ask that, I can see why they needed to bring me in from outside to fix this team.”

When Vikram completed work that Rita had asked for, she’d say it was “close” or “almost there”, but when Vikram asked how he could improve it, she’d brush him off and never answer, leaving him wondering if his job was in danger.  Rita started to bypass Vikram to give orders to his staff directly, even though she had far less experience than the specialists she was talking to.  Two people on Vikram’s team quit just to avoid dealing with her, since she was overloading them with work and kept changing her mind about what she wanted. 

Vikram and his fellow managers started holding secret meetings to complain to each other about Rita. Instead of spending their time together collaborating to solve work problems, they were figuring out how to manage her so that they could get actual work done.  They discussed speaking with Rita’s boss, but they judged the risks or reprisal too high – Rita would say her staff were just being resistant to the changes she was brought in to make.  So Vikram, feeling  diminished and demoralized, quietly started to look for a new job.  He wasn’t surprised when his fellow managers one by one started to announce their own departures.

The above story is fiction, but everything in it is true many times over.  It is an amalgamation of stories people have told me about the micromanagers they have reported to over their careers. When you hear enough of these stories, they start to blend together because the elements are so similar, even across industries.  Almost anyone who has been in the workforce for a decade or two has a story like this.  (I myself have had three micromanagers in my 38 years working in software development.)

Micromanagement happens when a manager treats skilled, experienced employees as if they are unskilled novices who require constant oversight, instruction, and correction.  Instead of strategic direction, micromanagers give only tactical instruction.  They don’t trust their staff to make decisions or act autonomously.  It’s paternalistic, infuriating and demoralizing for team members.

Years of organizational research has shown that micromanagement has a terrible impact on employees, teams, companies, and the micromanagers themselves.  So why is it so very common?  What is stopping companies from preventing it, or rooting it out?

How Micromanagement Ruins Everything

It’s bad for the employees:  For employees to be engaged and happy at work, a few things need to be in place.  They need to have some degree of autonomy.  They need to have good relationships with their peers, and psychological safety on their teams.  They need to find meaning in the work they do.  And they need to have opportunities for growth.

Micromanaged employees have no autonomy – all meaningful decisions are made by the micromanager, and any attempts at autonomy are crushed.  Employees are made to understand that their skills and insights don’t matter, which can lead to lower self-esteem and depression.  Micromanagement also prevents employees from growing, as they are not given the opportunities and autonomy needed to acquire new skills and confidence.  And without collaboration, peer relationships break down, or are replaced by a sort of shared-trauma support group.

The impact is so bad that micromanagement is one of the top three causes cited for why people quit their jobs.

It's bad for team performance:  Micromanaged teams are only as smart as one person – the micromanager.  The brainpower of the rest of the team is not brought to bear (except to update people’s resumes).  Studies in the medical field show that micromanaged medical trainees make the same number of errors as more autonomous trainees – but learn less.  Micromanagement was also associated with “low employee morale, high staff turnover, reduction of productivity and patient dissatisfaction”.

As one person told me:  “It was just so sad.  Under <the micromanager> I was only working to a fraction of the capacity I had before.  She was the bottleneck for every decision, which slowed everything down unnecessarily.  I was getting paid a strategic position salary for basically being her messenger boy and writing status reports.”

It's bad for the micromanager:  Micromanagers spend far too much time tracking and controlling things that could be easily handled by others, leaving little or no time for them to do their own job.  They don’t benefit from all the skills and creativity that their team could provide.  Their focus on operational details and lack of strategic vision put their department at risk when changes occur (and make them look bad to their bosses).    Trying to own everything in the team puts them at a high risk of burnout.  ‘Failure to delegate’ is cited as “the leading cause of managers retarding their professional growth”.  Micromanagement as a practice is just not scalable with team size.

Why do People Micromanage?

If micromanagement is so terrible for everyone, why is it so common?  And why don’t companies weed it out?

There are a lot of different reasons that people might micromanage:

1.     They are being micromanaged themselves.

2.     They have never had any kind of management training, mentorship, or good management examples, and lack basic management competence.  Some people simply don’t understand what the job of a manager actually is and is not.

3.     They mistakenly believe that bullying will make their workers more productive, or that their staff will slack off unless constantly monitored and controlled.

4.     They have deep insecurities, such as a fear of competition, or fear of not being recognized for their accomplishments.  (Another common micromanager trait is claiming credit for whatever the team does.)  They might also be insecure about their own abilities and therefore assume that others cannot be trusted.

5.     They are coping with job anxiety or pressure by staying in their comfort zone (the job they were doing before they were promoted) to avoid their scary new responsibilities.

6.     Narcissism – they believe that they are smarter than everyone else.

Micromanagement problems may be missed by senior staff because:

1.     The behaviour isn’t reported by front-line staff (for fear of reprisal)

2.     Micromanaging behaviours aren’t visible to the micromanager’s superiors. (Micromanagers can be very adept at managing their public image.)

3.     Senior staff, who are usually swamped with their own work, may not take the time to hold skip-level meetings, or properly evaluate the management style of managers who report to them.  Often the first sign of trouble is the continual loss of staff, and by the time that is noticed the damage is long done.  (And the micromanager will always have a good story about why it was good that each person left – underperformance, bad attitude, etc.)

In addition, micromanagers (unlike other kinds of toxic bosses) often come across as nice people.  They don’t necessarily shout at their staff, call names, or belittle them.  That surface niceness can hide the constant erosion of confidence and autonomy they are causing, but doesn’t make it any less toxic.  Just harder to report to HR.

Micromanagement and Psychological Safety 

“I worked on a team that had fantastic psychological safety and teamwork”, one correspondent told me.  “When our old boss left and our new micromanaging boss started, I was stunned at how quickly we lost it all.  Teamwork became impossible, because everything we did individually had to be boss-approved.  Our productivity plummeted.  No one bothered to speak up in meetings because New Boss wasn’t interested in anything we had to say.  We all pretty much stopped talking to each other, except for a new secret meeting we created just to vent to each other.  That helped us keep our sanity.”

Micromanagers continually undermine a team’s psychological safety, by overtly or covertly communicating that the opinions of staff are irrelevant, and that the quality of their work is never quite good enough.  Constant monitoring moves their staff’s focus from their actual work to status reporting and trying to look good.  

Dr. Amy Edmundson’s validated questionnaire for team psychological safety asks respondents how much they agree with seven statements.  Looking at these statements one by one, it is clear how micromanagement practices impact psychological safety:

• "If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you"*:  Micromanaged team members are always stressed about updates and worried that their work is substandard.
  
  

• "Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues":  Any critique or questioning is unwelcome and may get a harsh response from a micromanager.
  
  

• "People on this team sometimes reject others for being different"*:  Everyone is expected to stay in line
  
  

• "It is safe to take risks on this team":  Risks are absolutely not permitted.  Everything requires permission
  
  

• "It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help"*:  Asking others for help is discouraged, or seen as incompetence by the boss
  
  

• "No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts":  Boss actively undermines any independent efforts or thinking
  
  

• "Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized":  Unique skills and talents are ignored

*Agreement with this statement indicates less, not more psychological safety.

Similarly, you can look at micromanagement through the lens of Timothy Clark’s Four Stages of Psychological Safety:

• Stage 1:  Do I belong on this team?  Micromanaged employees continuously get the message that their skills and abilities are not valued, leading them to be axious about their position on the team.
  
  

• Stage 2: Is it safe for me to learn and ask questions?  Micromanager behaviour says:  "I’ll tell you what you need to know and do.  Your questions show you lack competence."
  
  

• Stage 3: Is it safe for me to contribute?  Micromanaged employees are only safe to do what they are told.  If they try to do more they are forced back into their individual "lane".
  
  

• Stage 4: Is it safe for me to challenge the status quo?  Challenging a micromanager's way of doing things is absolutely not safe, and can lead to reprisals.

On one team I spoke with while researching this article, a top-performer continued to (very politely) challenge the new boss’s ideas by asking clarifying questions about strategy in team meetings.  After a couple of months, the boss fired her, sadly citing performance issues that everyone knew were bogus.  The message to the team was clear – don’t question me.  This killed whatever psychological safety remained in the team, and three other team members quit within a few months.

It is clear that micromanagement is fundamentally incompatible with psychological safety.  And without psychological safety, teams don’t innovate, learn from their mistakes, or grow in ability.  And good people quit.

Dealing with Micromanagement

If you are a senior person with managers reporting to you, it’s incumbent upon you to ensure that your staff is providing the leadership that their teams need, and to root out any micromanagement that may be happening.  If you don’t already, have occasional skip level meetings with their staff (individually or in small groups) and ask about their manager’s style and performance.  Employees might be reticent to say something bad directly, so some probing might be required.  You can ask people about their own scope of responsibility, and decisions that they’ve made recently, or ask them so share some recent work that they are proud of.  Don’t expect teams to tell you that they are being micromanaged.  Among the people I interviewed for this article, almost no one raised the issue spontaneously with their manager’s manager, even on exit interview.  Some blame the manager’s manager for putting them in the position of having to leave, or bear so much bitterness about the company that they don’t want to help out.

It's also a good idea to occasionally measure psychological safety on your subteams.  Low safety doesn’t necessarily mean that a team is being micromanaged, but a micromanaged team will never show high safety.  (And if your teams have low psychological safety, you’ll want to address that no matter what the cause!)  All managers should have to demonstrate that they can foster psychological safety in their teams as a condition of any kind of promotion or raise.  Front-line staff may not trust a survey coming from their boss’ boss, so you might want to bring in an outside party to do the assessment.

If you discover that a manager on your staff is micromanaging, you need to take action quickly.  The right action depends on the cause of their micromanaging.  You may need to provide coaching or management training, or possibly you may need to fire them, or move them to a non-management position at least temporarily.  It’s important to show their teams that you take this seriously and value them.  Leaving a known micromanager in place is actively harming your business.

If you are promoting someone into their first management position, ensure that they understand the difference between their previous job as an individual contributor, and their job as a manager.  Often management training is just about the mechanics of the job, but not about the goals and methods of nurturing, supporting and growing a team. Make sure they have a coach or mentor to support them.  And check in with their teams after a month or two.

If you are being micromanaged, then you are probably already polishing up your resume.  If you are thinking of leaving anyway, why not raise the issue with your manager’s manager?  Join forces with others on your team to document specific behaviours, then ask for a group meeting with your manager’s manager to discuss your concerns.  It’s a lot harder for them to dismiss concerns coming from multiple people.  And if your concerns are dismissed, then at least you know that changing jobs is absolutely the right option.

If you are a micromanager, then congratulations for making it this far in the article.  You need to do some serious self-reflection, and reach out to a mentor or your own manager so you can start to learn to delegate and trust your team before you lose your best people.  If you don’t have a management mentor or coach, consider getting one.  You may need to do some work on your anxieties.  Consider whether you might be happier in a senior individual contributor position than in a management position.

Wrap up

Micromanagement is team cancer.  It reduces capacity, learning, growth, psychological safety, and tears teams apart through lack of retention.  And yet too often it sits undiagnosed until the damage is done.  Managers need to be evaluated from below as well as from above and by peers.  Teams need regular health and psychological safety check-ups so you can catch problems before they get bad.

Focussing on team health will help you be the place where everyone wants to work.

More from John  (or follow his RSS Feed )

Psychological Safety Gaps - How leaders are getting it wrong

How do I know if my team is Psychologically Safe? - This scorecard might be for you

Toxic Legacy - Why losing your toxic employees is only the first step

Why don't people participate in meetings?    or, Why can't I get a word in edgewise?

Holding a Mirror to Corporate Values - Figuring out what the actual core values of your company are

Whose Opinion Matters? - How culture can make or break your decision making

The Authentic Team - The problem with bringing your whole self to work