Micro-managers - why do they do it?

In a previous post, I discussed how micro-managers are overpaid. Here I want to talk more about why they micro-manage at all.

Part of it is fear and mistrust: they are afraid of something going wrong and not knowing about it and they don't trust their employees to do a good job. But there can be more to it than that.

As people move up the hierarchy, they are increasingly faced with predicaments and poorly defined problems. In both cases, these are things which have no easy answers unlike the problems that they may have faced in a lower level position. The problems may be messy, it may be unclear what precisely the problem is, there may be constraints that make them hard to solve and even the feasible options may be unclear. The situation they are dealing with may be ambiguous and there may be competing versions of what is going on, and not all of the required information to clarify things may be available.

This is one of the reasons that such problems (which are sometimes referred to as wicked problems) remain unresolved for months or years. It isn't that the management has a lack of will, but rather that they don't know where to begin in trying to solve them.

So how does this relate to micro-managers? Well, if a person is faced with something they find difficult or impossible to do then they may avoid the situation by turning to what they can do. And for a lot of managers, it is to solve the problems of their employees. This makes them feel that they are achieving something and it takes the spotlight away from them and onto the people they are micro-managing.

So micro-managing can be a response to a manager's anxiety about their competence to resolve the problems of their own job. (If they can, micro-managers might also delegate solving the problem to someone lower down the tree as well, claiming that that they don't have time, or that it would be a good 'development opportunity', when in reality it's just that they don't have a clue how to solve it themselves - this becomes obvious when the person they have delegated it to asks for some guidance.)

One other possible reason why people micro-manage is simply that they don't have enough work to do at their own level. As the old saying goes, the devil makes work for idle hands to do, and in this case the devil's work is interfering with how their employees do their jobs. However, this lack of work may well be an illusion based on a poor understanding of their role. A new manager may be left to sink or swim and it may never be made clear what is expected of them in their new role. So they may not realise that they are now expected to look at the bigger picture and plan for the long term. As a result, the real work for which they are being paid may fall into a black hole, while they honestly believe they don't have anything to do.

So apart from fear and distrust, micro-managers may be motivated by the desire to avoid problems they can't solve at their own level and solve the problems that they know how to solve at the lower level. Or they may be motivated by not having enough to do. Either way, they are still being over-paid, since it is precisely the difficult problems that they are paid the big bucks for tackling and the big picture they are being paid to paint.