Here is what an associate in a major entertainment company had to say: "My manager has difficulty delegating and developing trust in the people who are working for him. In anything that really matters, he is totally involved with it and has his hands all over it. The weird thing is that he tends to focus in on spelling mistakes and typos instead of being a more visionary type guy. That makes you kind of wonder about his ultimate value to the company. If I know that my manager is going to go over every detail, rewrite every word on the page, that provides me with a huge disincentive to... really do the best job that I can do. Why? Because I know that it really doesn't matter, because the manager is going to make the thing his own and totally rewrite it, no matter how good of a job I do. So, why should I put in the effort at all. The manager might as well do the whole thing on his own."
Get your hands off my work!
That is the cry of many young people in the workplace today. Their supervisors are stricken with the dreaded management disease: micro-management.
It is a buzz-word for business consultants and almost everyone agrees that it is a style to be avoided. For Xers, fierce individualists of the most entrepreneurial generation in history, it is anathema.
Micro-managers cramp Xers' creative style, trying to control Xers' every
movement, to squelch our creative impulses, and deny us any responsibility for tangible end-products -- for the value we are asked to contribute. When Xers reach for greater independence and creative freedom in our work, we are not expressing arrogance or insolence. Xers' desire for more creative responsibility in our work is an expression of our self-nurtured independence. We are most productive when we are allowed to be innovative in how we accomplish our managers' goals.
Xers have told me about managers who involve themselves in the most mundane tasks, insist on round after round of changes, take hours to finalize a routine letter, months to put out a substantive document, look over shoulders, nit-pick details, second-guess results and halt final products with one last suggestion, and maybe one more, and maybe "this is the last change, I promise."
When micro-managers spend so much time intertwined with Xers, no one has time to do any work. Managers are unable to devote sufficient time to senior level responsibilities when they focus on the tasks that belong in the hands of Xers, while Xers are hard pressed to deliver results with managers attached at our hips. Micro-management takes the hard work of two or more potentially effective people and reduces it to the productivity-level of one ineffective person.
What makes micro-managing the least effective, least efficient and most time
consuming management approach? Well, micro-managing isn't really managing at all. Managing people is about defining tasks and appropriate spheres of responsibility so as to facilitate their maximal productivity. The problem micro-managers have is mapping out the appropriate boundaries between their own work-goals and the work-goals of the people they manage.
What can Xers do to untangle themselves from micro-managers? Be firm, but gentle. When your manager is assigning you tasks or projects, insist on the up-front time to go over the production process with your manager. Insist that your manager make explicit distinctions between the end-products that are your responsibility and the end-products that belong to her. Insist on explicit deadlines for each of your end-product. Ask questions if you have them, request information resources if you need them, and ask for a review meeting at a specified time if you think you may need one.
No matter how minuscule, the end-product for which you can obtain 100% responsibility is your proving ground -- your chance to build trust and your chance to teach good management to your manager by example.
