When senior executive Reeta appointed Kim to a middle management role in her team, she was looking forward to some relief from her intense workload. Instead, problems seemed to be bubbling up everywhere. Several deadlines were missed, the quality of work coming through had gone down, and the usually cheerful office atmosphere suddenly seemed charged with tension. The issue became clear when Ella, one of the star performers in Kim’s team, tentatively knocked on Reeta’s door to ask for a reference to help her look for new roles. At first Ella was hesitant to explain why, but Reeta’s careful questioning drew her out.

“I used to love working here,” Ella explained, “but lately it’s been hard just to do my job. We have meetings about our meetings, so that Kim can tell me what he wants me to say beforehand and tell me what I said wrong afterward. My reports are being sent back with tracked changes all over them, and I think the changes are actually making them worse.”

Reeta realised that Kim likely had a classic case of micromanagement.

What is micromanagement?

You have probably had at least one micromanager during your career. Micromanagement can be spotted in various common leader behaviours, such as these:

Overly detailed instructions for simple tasks

Maybe your micromanager sits by you and tells you word by word what to put in your email to a colleague in the same organisation. Or looks over your shoulder as you update the sales spreadsheet for the umpteenth time, even though it’s the same one you’ve been using for years.

Meeting madness

This might look like pre-meetings before meetings, so that like Kim in the story above, they can tell you what they want you to say. During the meeting, they may interrupt you frequently in front of others. Afterwards, there may be tedious post-mortems where they tell you everything you said wrong, and how to handle it differently next time.

Excessive scrutiny

A micromanager will often feel the need to ‘add value’ by significantly changing written work. Reports and briefings sent to them for approval can come back in a sea of red ink. Or simple checklist approvals may be subjected to a degree of oversight usually reserved for a tax audit.

Constant check-ins

Your manager delegated a task or a project to you, and you agreed on a deadline. But now they’re checking in with you every couple of days to ask how it is going.

Challenging decisions

A chronic micromanager may blow up over decisions being made without their input, even routine matters. They may come back to revisit previously agreed decisions, even if they had oversight of the decision-making process.

What are the consequences?

Micromanagement is one of the worst sins of leadership. It tanks morale and team spirit, while reducing quality and productivity of work output.

Team members try to find workarounds, such as pre-empting anticipated changes to their reports, asking for forgiveness instead of permission by acting without authority, or becoming secretive about their work. These approaches rarely work and may even cause the micromanager to up the ante.

Constantly stymied and unappreciated, the best employees soon leave for better prospects. This can turn into a revolving door, as their teammates struggle harder without their support. Worse, word begins to spread about the micromanager’s operating style, so it becomes difficult to attract new applicants.

What are the signs that micromanagement is happening in your team?

You will probably know right away if your boss is a micromanager, but what if it is one of your direct reports? It is a fact of life that executives are often the last to know what’s going on with their team. If you have a strong and trusting relationship with your frontline workers, they may come and tell you what’s been happening, or it may become apparent when they ask for a referee report to seek a new role. Often, though, frontline workers are not confident to raise issues like these with a senior executive.

Red flags that something might be amiss may include slow delivery of work, missed deadlines or substandard work output, perhaps followed by the middle manager blaming the lack of capabilities of their direct reports. This is particularly noticeable if the team has previously been high performing. It may be harder to spot if the team is newly established, or if there’s been a sudden surge in responsibilities or demand for the division.

You may hear reports from peers about the micromanager’s refusal to collaborate or share resources.

The micromanager themselves may tip you off. Problematic behaviours could include asking for far more guidance than you would normally expect over routine decisions or coming back to you with the same issue over and over when you previously considered it to be resolved.

What causes micromanagement?

Micromanagers are not bad people. Their controlling ways are often driven by their eagerness to please, their perfectionistic standards, and their fear of failure. They may suffer from impostor syndrome, questioning their own ability to fulfil their role. This is especially common among new leaders.

Many workplaces have a climate that lacks psychological safety, so mistakes have severe consequences including punishment or public ridicule. Under these circumstances, of course leaders are going to fear failure.

Micromanagement can also be self-reinforcing. A micromanager may conclude that it was their controlling behaviours that drove their previous success, so they continue the same approach. On the other hand, if something slips, they conclude that they must double down next time, and try even harder to ensure that everything will be perfect. Perversely, micromanagement itself leads to underperformance.

How do you fix it?

In many cases, as a leader grows in confidence, micromanaging resolves itself. However, some leaders are unable to let go, and can cause untold harm to their team’s performance.

It can be very challenging to address micromanaging behaviour. Even successful approaches may take a great deal of time, and in the interim, you can lose a lot of good people who can’t stand the organisational climate.

Some approaches for executives seeking to rehabilitate a chronic micromanager might include:

Check the facts

As always, it’s important to clearly understand the problem you are trying to solve. Before diagnosing micromanagement, check what’s actually going on. Look for broad patterns of behaviour, not a one-off report. Examine where the information is coming from. If it’s a single individual with an axe to grind, maybe something’s been misinterpreted. If it’s coming in from all directions, there is likely to be a real underlying issue.

Name the issue

Have the difficult conversation that we all hate having. Clear and actionable performance feedback is a gift that every leader owes to their direct reports. Raise the issue calmly and clearly and offer your support to resolve it. Describe the behaviour you’re seeing, the impacts if it remains unaddressed, and what you’d like to see instead. Be kind. Let your micromanager know that you trust them, you have confidence in them to develop the required skill sets, and that it is very important to you that they do so. Struggle to have a difficult conversation? Read more here.

Take the pressure down

Micromanagement can often erupt under pressure. Broadly speaking, are the work demands of this division achievable and in line with strategic goals? What could be dropped from the program? How might deadlines be adjusted to be more realistic?

Help the micromanager to recognise their strengths and capabilities, and work with them to clearly set priorities and delineate delegations for decision-making and completing activities.

Encourage direct reports to ‘over-communicate’ to increase their manager’s confidence they are being kept informed.

Lead from the front

Model appropriate leadership behaviour by walking the talk. Demonstrate your values through delegation, trust, acknowledgement, praise, and appropriate handling of mistakes and errors. Own up to your own mistakes and be compassionate about the errors of others. When addressing what’s gone wrong, keep your focus on solutions and learnings, not allocating blame. This will help create a climate of psychological safety.

Executive coaching

An executive coach can be a tremendous asset to a developing manager. Having an external source of support can help the manager to talk through issues they may be facing and come up with practical solutions. There are a couple of caveats. First, be careful with 360-degree feedback. A manager with flagging confidence may find the negative feedback overwhelming, which could cause them to either amp up the behaviour or shut down altogether. Second, don’t leave performance management to the coach. That’s your job as an executive. In fact, it can be one of the more rewarding parts of your work, even if you find it challenging.

Support the team

While you develop your micromanager, help their team to feel supported and recognised. Find ways to acknowledge and praise their work or offer opportunities to work on cross-agency projects or subcommittees where their expertise will be valued.

It may be helpful to run a work styles inventory session with the team, such as DiSC, Myers-Briggs, or Enneagram. While their evidence base is limited, they can be helpful to demonstrate how we all approach work tasks differently. They can also create useful common language around what’s going on.

Know when to fold ’em

In an ideal world, we could give every new leader all the time and support in the world to grow into their new leadership responsibilities. In reality, we have deadlines, competing demands, and many people to think of in an organisation. As an executive, it’s important to set some expectations around what behaviour needs to change, by when, and how you will measure success. You also need a Plan B in case the micromanager cannot change their approach after you’ve tried everything. Some people find that leadership roles are not a good fit for them, and that their strengths are more suited to a technical role where they can exercise more control. Sadly, there’s no paint-by-numbers guideline for this – it’s all part of the art and science of leadership that executives must perform.

Safety is paramount

Micromanagement is one of the most pernicious and prevalent leadership challenges. It risks undermining whole teams or organisations.

The underlying cause of micromanagement is fear of failure, so it stands to reason that the solutions lie in providing safety and support. Guiding a micromanager to a more participative leadership style is not quick or easy, but a committed executive can do so. It may be one of the most rewarding and instructive leadership experiences they go through.