Micromanagement Dragging You Down?

A struggle for many company leaders is resisting the urge to micromanage.  What enabled you to rise in your organization was your ability to get things done – to take full responsibility of making something happen, based upon your own extraordinary skills in specific functional area.  But now you are a leader.  Yes, you probably CAN fix that problem better than your much less experienced subordinate.  So you fix that one small problem.  And then another.  And another.  Soon, you are back working IN your business all the time, with no time to work ON your business.

So how do you avoid micromanaging?  As with most problems, the first key is understanding what is causing the problem.  Ron Ashkenas believes there are “two mostly unconscious reasons” why leaders remain micromanagers.

The first problem, he says is that “managers worry about being disconnected.” As managers rise up through the ranks, they have less direct contact and feel isolated.  To reduce this anxiety, they resort to seeking mountains of data, and as a result people at multiple levels all feel like the leader is micromanaging by obsessing about details that the lower level person is quite capable of managing.

Ashkenas says the second cause of micromanagement is that “managers stay in familiar territory”.  They can’t get rid of their old ways of doing things.  But as they rise to higher levels, they remain focused on the operational details, rather than shifting focus to become more strategic, and rely on others to focus on those details.  He says that for many managers this is a very difficult transition and they unconsciously spend their time in those areas of comfort.  As a result, the leaders micromanage.

How do you change?  Understand your situation, discuss this challenge with your team, “confront [your] patterns” and find ways to get enough information so that you are able to keep abreast of the details, while not resorting back to trying to manage them all.

Check back later this week for more on becoming a macromanager instead of remaining a micromanager.  Read the full Ashkenas article here.