Micromanagement and Delegation

Micro-Management and Delegation Recently I had a long discussion with a friend of mine about Managers and managing. She is a former HR Manager for several major companies and was bemoaning the fact that training for managers has been cut back so significantly in recent years and that managers no longer receive the type of help, guidance and assistance that they received just a few short years ago. My background has been in retail and telecom. Hers was neither. Yet the same problems and issues seem to rise in every industry. Of course, this is exactly the reason that I got into coaching. Coaching allows those managers who want to improve a very personalized venue to do just that.

We went on to agree that the common pattern these days seemed to be for the department star performer to be promoted from contributor, to team leader, to manager in seemingly record time. We agreed that new managers have difficulty moving from the contributor to the manager role because no one is willing to spend the time and energy to coach them through the various hurdles that new managers and leaders face. We agreed that this lack of training never seemed to lower the expectations of the manager, just the performance.

Then we disagreed, strongly. What caused the disagreement? The

concept was micro-management. My friend explained to me that she has "coached" many employees recently and that many of them complained about one particular manager who was micro-managing them. She told me that she helps the employees understand and come to grips with "their problem". "You're not going to be able to change that manager, she explained to me, "so you've got to change the employees". She explains to them that if they are being micro-managed, there's probably a reason for it. They are probably doing something wrong. If they just identify that problem and improve, their manager will stop the micro-management. "The employees need to improve themselves. It's as simple as that."

I wish my life was as simple as that.

She acknowledges that with that many employees complaining that

it's likely the manager is the problem. But changing the manager is too much trouble, she says, so let's tell the employees it's their fault.

While it is true that it is sometimes necessary to micro-manage

people, her explanation makes little sense to me. You might micro-manage an employee if their performance is lacking. Or because the project they are working on is very high visibility and any chance of error must be minimized. But when a number of employees are complaining about the same manager micro-managing them it implies one of two things.

Either this manager:

1. Has a lot of problem employees and needs to start weeding them out, or

2. This manager does not know how to let go and properly

delegate to their staff.

Excessive micro-management is not the sign of a healthy manager.

When someone is constantly micro-managing their staff it's generally their problem, not the employees.

If you are micro-managing your staff, refusing to delegate routine, and not so routine tasks to them for completion, then you are setting yourself up for trouble. Have you ever heard yourself say, "I would delegate this to someone else, but it's just as easy to do it myself"? Or maybe you say, "This task is too complicated to delegate. I have to make sure it's done right."

If so, I hope you like your job. Because you aren't going anyplace higher. Delegation can be difficult to learn because it looks like a huge risk and a huge leap of faith. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are techniques that you can learn that will help you delegate and get you out of the detail. And you have to get out of the detail if you really want to be an executive.

One Bad Apple   The Ivory Tower Syndrome   One Bad Apple   

The Ivory Tower Syndrome

"His cardinal mistake is that he isolates himself, and allows nobody to see him; and by which he does not know what is going on in the very matter he is dealing with. - Abraham Lincoln on his reason for relieving Gen. John C Fremont of his Missouri command. (September 1861)

How many times have you been given direction from your boss or the "head office" where you find yourself just shaking your head, wondering how the executive team could possibly have made such an uninformed decision? Maybe they have implemented a new cost control program that eats at the heart of your implementation process, putting you into a position where you can't possibly meet your delivery commitments. Or they roll out a new sales promotion that is not supported by your systems and almost assuredly will result in unhappy customers.

In my younger years I worked as an accountant at the head office of a shoe retail chain. We were suffering some significant losses in some stores and implemented some new control systems. Later I was shopping in one of our stores where the sales clerks did not know me. They were bemoaning the latest directive from "The Ivory Tower" and how silly it was and how difficult it made their job.

"These guys just don't get it", they were saying. "They've totally lost touch with what goes on in the real world." I was young, and very confident that we in the head office had a bigger, more complete view of the situation than these sales clerks did. I was confident that they were the ones who had lost touch. They just didn't see the big picture. Sound familiar?

I know that I heard a similar refrain at least 100 times in my career. The people in the field were convinced that the people in "The Ivory Tower" were out of touch. The executives in the home office were convinced that they had taken the proper steps based on "the big picture".

Who was right? It's hard to tell. There is no pat answer. Surely not every decision the executives make is correct, nor is every decision they make wrong. But as Lincoln intimated when he replaced General Freemont, it's not a good thing to lose touch with what is happening on the front lines.

Leaders that isolate themselves too much from the day-to-day activity of their business take the risk of losing touch with their employees, their customers, and even the companies' mission. In fact, there is an old joke about how decisions are made with input from the front lines that gets so badly distorted by the time it reaches the executives that it bears no semblance to the original message. Some people would tell you that this represents a communications problem. And to an extent, it does. But it also represents an executive team that is out of touch because it relies entirely on the chain of command to get information about important issues instead of being directly plugged into the day-to-day activities.

But here is an important thought that every reader needs to keep in mind. My experience is that the first line managers are just as likely to be out of touch with the day-to-day activities as the executive team is. If you are failing to walk the floor to talk with your employees; If you are failing to open the lines of communications on what happens on a daily basis; If you are so absorbed in meetings that you don't spend direct time with your first line staff then you too take the risk of not truly understanding your business. And that is much more risky then what happens in "The Ivory Tower".

One Bad Apple   The Ivory Tower Syndrome   One Bad Apple