I’ve written previously about how to identify if you’re a micromanager, but what do you do if you’re the one being micromanaged?
Being micromanaged is not a fun experience. It’s even worse when you’re a manager who runs your own team and you’re being micromanaged. This is because the effect of you being micromanaged can spread to your team as well. This could be direct and obvious – such as your own manager doing tasks that your team should be doing. Or it could be more subtle, such as your manager telling you exactly how you should be running your team.
Therefore, knowing how to deal with this could really unlock your potential as a manager, not to mention simply making you happier and more engaged with your role.
Why does someone micromanage?
We won’t go too deep into this, because to be completely honest, you’re probably going to struggle to completely “fix” someone who is a micromanager. The best that you can do is to understand their behaviour and to mitigate it as much as possible – so that at the very least, it doesn’t lead to big problems for you in your role.
In order to understand and mitigate micromanagement, we do need to have a basic understanding of why someone is a micromanager at all. It also helps to understand the root problem because it can help us have a healthier mindset and approach towards the manager.
The root cause of most micromanagement comes down to one thing: insecurities.
Whilst we’ll never get to the root cause of insecurities themselves – this is what professional therapists do! But we can follow where their insecurities may lead and how they manifest themselves in their day-to-day work.
Reading these won’t fix the micromanagement for you, but it may just help you see it from another, more empathetic perspective.
They are under pressure to perform
Many managers don’t handle pressure well. They handle the pressure by doing one of two things:
- They “pass it down” to their team i.e. they will simply take the pressure that’s being put on them and give it to their team.
- They keep hold of that pressure and try to relieve it by getting more hands on with projects and tasks than they should be. The belief being that they are the only ones that can relieve the pressure on themselves.
It’s usually the latter which leads to micromanagement. So it may be the case that they’re not micromanaging because of “you” and your team as such, they are micromanaging because of the situation they are finding themselves in.
They have been burnt before
It’s perfectly possible that they’ve not always been a micromanager.
At some point, they may have delegated tasks openly and trusted their team to get the job done with minimal oversight.
Then it went wrong and it burnt them badly.
Now, they don’t delegate anywhere nearly as much and do the opposite.
It’s not your fault. The mess up previously may not have been their fault. But it’s driving behaviour now either way.
They feel insecure in their own role
Some managers will keep hold of tasks because if they give them all away, it may look like they have nothing to do themselves.
In reality, this is almost certainly not true. But you can see why, if a manager feels like this, they may want to keep hold of projects and tasks. Essentially, they are fearful of being asked “well what are you doing then” if their team is capable of doing everything.
Of course, there are other reasons for insecurities that may cause micromanagement behaviours, but they go a bit more towards the personality of the manager which are far less actionable for us to understand.
If I mention things like a need to feel in control of everything, or a need to feel in charge and keep hold of authority, you’ll understand why these are far trickier for us to “do” anything with.
How to approach dealing with your manager if they’re a micromanager
With that in mind, let’s move onto how to approach dealing with your manager if they’re a micromanager.
Start with empathy rather than anger or frustration
When you’re being micromanaged, it’s very, very easy to hold resentment, frustration or even anger towards the person. As we’ve explored above, there are probably reasons for the micromanagement that don’t excuse the person or give them a free pass, but they do show that it’s probably not personal and not them being a horrible, bad person.
When you’re starting to think about how to approach this problem and talking to your manager, try to keep this in mind. Putting together and actioning a plan is far easier if you’re not doing it from a perspective of anger or frustration.
Not to mention, the process is very unlikely to go well if you start here because these feelings will almost certainly carry over into the conversations themselves.
Keep focusing on your work and keeping standards high
If you’re being micromanaged, you’re probably also feeling a bit disengaged and unmotivated. Especially if you’ve been experiencing this for a little while.
As a result, you may find that you struggle with keeping your own levels of effort and standards really high. It’s understandable when you’re not feeling great and it happens to the best of us.
The thing is, if you want to improve a problem like a manager who micromanages, you can’t let your own performance and standards drop.
If you do, then you’re enforcing why your manager is keeping hold of work themselves – because you’re not capable.
So keep focused on your job and do not give your manager a reason to doubt your abilities and skills before you’ve even had a chance to address the problem.
Get really clear with their expectations of you and your team
It’s also hard to approach a conversation with them about their micromanagement if you haven’t previously agreed on what your role (and those in your team) entails.
If you don’t have a clear view of your role and responsibilities, or if these are documented and written down somewhere, you need to start here.
Ask them what your role involves and what you need to deliver in order to succeed. Then do the same for your team members.
Once you have this, it’s far easier to have a conversation with them to point out where you’re not able to deliver on these expectations because they are taking things off you.
List all of the things that you want your team to be capable of doing on their own
A big part of your role as a manager is to get the best out of your team. You can only do this by giving them trust, autonomy and responsibility.
However, these are a little abstract and hard to explain to your manager, especially if someone who struggles with these things.
Instead, make a big list of all of the things that you’d like your team to be capable of doing with little or no supervision.
For example, if you run an SEO team, you may say things such as:
- Completing technical audits for small to mid-size websites.
- Leading client meetings on their own.
- Responding to clients to update them on Google updates.
You don’t necessarily need to list everything in one go, but it should be reasonably detailed to start off with and you need to share it with your boss.
The idea here is to get them on board with day-to-day tasks that your team should be owning and doing themselves. Of course, some (or maybe a lot) of these will cross over with the types of things that they are doing instead of your team – that’s the point.
This helps you start to draw boundaries on what your team should be doing so that when you do speak to them and propose different ways of working, you have already agreed.
Ask them to help with hands-on training for what you’ve listed
Next, you need to involve your boss with the transition towards your team taking hold of these day-to-day tasks.
One very effective way to do this is to involve them in training your team. If they believe that they are the best at carrying out these tasks already, then you can play into this a bit by asking them to help teach others how to do it “their” way.
The beauty of this tactic is that you can tell your boss what the end goal is – for your team to carry out these tasks on their own – without their (or your) heavy oversight. So you’re sowing the seeds for them stepping back from these types of tasks.
Propose alternative ways of working that work for both of you
Finally, you can have a constructive conversation with them which focuses on a few things that we’ve discussed:
- How you’re delivering great work and keeping standards high.
- What they expect of you and your team in your roles.
- The work that you both want your team to be capable of doing.
- How they’ve helped pass across their wisdom and experience to your team.
Then keep this context in mind when you propose ways of working that suit both of you.
This can be something along the lines of:
“I’d love to take all of this work we’ve done together recently and give the team some space to show us what they’ve learned. So on this project for client X, I’d like to take part of your training and give them ownership of delivering on it. Of course, I’ll be accountable for the outcome and will stay close to them so ensure we keep standards high.
How can I best keep you in then loop and update you on how this goes? Perhaps I can update you halfway through the project and then again at the end?”
Of course, you can choose your own wording but hopefully you see what we’re trying to do here.
Basically, we’re using all of the work we’ve already done to set the context for a conversation that moves things forward and loosens their grip on your team – without you having to approach a conversation by saying “you’re a micromanager and you need to stop.”
To wrap up, it’s not an easy problem to overcome. As we’ve said, it’s not really something that you can just “fix”. Especially when the root cause may go deep into someone’s personality! But you can seek to understand it more and mitigate the problem as much as you can. At least to the point where you and your team aren’t being held back by your own manager.
