The fine line between control and micromanagement
In my last post I talked about the importance of autonomy in building an environment to bring out people’s best thinking and performance. The elephant in the room of this conversation is where a leader's and team member’s need for autonomy come into conflict.
I’ll be the first to say that autonomy at work is not an automatic entitlement. It’s earned through delivery and taking accountability. You demonstrate good performance and accountability in your job, and you get given more responsibility and decision making freedom. The organisation takes a risk by giving you freedom to act, and needs to be confident that the benefits of giving you that freedom outweighs the risks if something goes wrong.
However management control sings a seductive song for some leaders: “Control my team and their work, control my outcomes and success as a leader”. A leader’s need for control can steer them into the realm of micromanagement, which is where there is a perceived mismatch between how much autonomy you are given by your leader, versus how much autonomy you feel you have earned through your track record of previous performance.
In my experience working across 30+ organisations, I’ve found that most folk loathe being micromanaged with a passion. It’s a true motivation killer and there is plenty of research to show that it is linked with dissatisfaction at work and has a negative impact on performance. However, those that do the micromanaging often come up with seemingly valid justifications for it. But overly controlling your team is like driving a car around in first gear. Not very efficient beyond the very short term, and burns out everyone’s engines.
The consequences for the leader who micromanages is that they end up with more work, as they hold onto their team’s responsibilities. Their team remains more dependent and learns more slowly. It means the manager won’t be able to truly fulfil their leadership potential, as they create a ceiling on the performance of their team and remain stuck in the ‘doing’ – which negatively impacts their reputation as a leader.
So is it ever OK to micromanage someone? Given the negative impacts, I’d advise a leader to reserve the ‘high control’ management style to a few limited situations such as:
Where there is significant learning required and significant negative consequences of getting something wrong. You should dial down the control as competence and confidence grows, and the risk decreases.
When you are managing underperformance. This is where you have to dial up the control and oversight to ensure very high clarity of expectations, and high accountability of delivery, to get things back on track.
Unless you are genuinely dealing with these situations, then go for the principle of giving balanced autonomy – ie. as much autonomy as you can, based on capability, competence and confidence – and save 1st gear for when you really need it!
#leadership #micromanagement #autonomy