Micromanagement.
Leaders tell me all the time that they’re not doing it, but if I talk to their teams, I often hear something different.
And here’s the thing, the other person decides if you’re micromanaging.
It’s wonderful to think if you’re not. But the reality is, if the other person, the person you’re leading or managing thinks you are, then you are.
Because micromanagement is relative, right? What feels like micromanagement when we’re brand new in a job is quite different than what it might feel like when we’ve been doing a job for a long time. Because what we even need as the employee is quite different.
You could be working with two different people, leading them in exactly the same way. One of them thinks you’re doing great. The other thinks you’re micromanaging because micromanagement is relative.
Micromanagement is also personal. We have different experiences in our past, different sort of buttons that can get pushed by our boss. And so we have to be clear about what does it look like to the other person.
If we want to avoid this problem right now, this doesn’t mean that we might not need to provide guidance.
Does it mean we don’t need to provide coaching? Does it mean that sometimes people are messing up and we need to give them more input?
It doesn’t mean any of that stuff because all of that might even be welcome. But micromanagement is something else.
So how do we overcome it? Well, there’s lots of things we can do to overcome micromanagement.
The main thing I want you to remember from this short video is this, that even if you don’t think you’re micromanaging, you might be because the other person decides.
Tweet it out: You may think you aren’t micromanaging, but others decide whether you are or not. @KevinEikenberry