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.

How Control-Freak Managers (CFMs) lose control

The manager who needs to be in control of everything (the control freak manager or CFM) is driven by a fear of things going wrong and possibly a fear of being blamed for things going wrong. The mindset is "If I don't know what is going on then something bad must be happening, so I MUST know".

They are also driven by a lack of trust. "My staff can't cope with problems or won't tell me if there are problems so I MUST know everything that is going on. And to make sure nothing bad happens, I must get all approvals channelled though me."

So a bottleneck is produced that reduces productivity.

This leaves workers with two choices:

• they can co-operate with the control freak manager and as a result become increasingly dependent and disempowered. They seek approvals for everything even things for which they could use their own judgement. And they are at a loss when the CFM isn't around. And productivity suffers.
• Or they can rebel. They can deliberately conceal what they are doing from the CFM since it's the only way they can get work done without the interference of the CFM.

And it is this second choice that creates an irony: the more the CFM tries to control things, the more the workers keep them in the dark so that they can get their jobs done. And the more CFM's are kept in the dark, the more control they try to exert because the more afraid they are that things are happening that they don't want to happen and that things are getting out of their control. And so a reinforcing loop develops.

A further irony is that the manager who trusts his or her staff may be no more aware of what they are doing. But because they trust staff to exercise their judgement and do their jobs, their staff rise to the occasion, and as a result, such a manager has no reason to be afraid. And the workers because they are trusted to use their judgement become better able to do their jobs and less likely to conceal emerging problems from their manager.

And so the ultimate paradox emerges: that fear and lack of trust generate the conditions which justify that fear and distrust - a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fear, Control and Meaningful Work

To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.

~ Abraham Maslow

If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do

~Frederick Herzberg

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity. In Existentialism, Albert Camus used this myth as a metaphor for the futility of life, but it could equally be used as a metaphor for the futility of work that has been stripped of meaning.


How do managers strip meaning from work? 

One way is to eliminate opportunities for workers to use their minds, by developing complex sets of rules that eliminate discretion. Part of the problem with rule-obsessed management is that it becomes increasingly difficult for workers to make decisions.

• The more rules there are the harder it may be for the worker to determine whether there is a rule that applies and then to find that rule.
• If workers are unable to find a rule and end up using their own discretion, they will still be left with doubt and uncertainty about whether they have complied with what was required, and with fear of reprisal if they haven't.
• With workers getting fewer opportunities to actually use their judgement, even simple decisions may become problematic.
• Workers end up applying the rules mechanically without using their common sense or judgement to determine whether a rule should be bent, broken or tweaked for a particular set of circumstances.
• Maintaining a complex set of rules becomes a task in itself requiring resources that could otherwise be devoted to getting the work done. It also becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether the rules are consistent.

In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein tells the story of a senior air traffic controller faced with a hijacking situation and also faced with a 15cm (6") thick manual of procedures to follow. Time was critical so he jettisoned the manual and instead drew on contacts in the security services and started to improvise. As the senior air traffic controller told Klein:

I was reprimanded for not following the procedure and commended for handling it with no civilian casualties. Then I was asked to re-write the procedure. It is still too thick.

Incidentally, rule-obsessed management isn't about getting the job done effectively. The person who makes the rules probably believes that they could do the job without the rules, they just don't trust anyone else to do so. So on the one hand there is arrogance ("I am smarter, have better judgement...than any of the people working under me") and on the other hand there is a desire to centralise power due to lack of trust ("I must control things through rules because I can't trust the workers to do the right thing"). And both of these attitudes send a demotivating message to workers, as well as resulting in delays, logjams and bottlenecks as workers end up seeking guidance on even the simplest decisions. Or conversely, it may lead to malicious compliance where the workers apply the rules to the letter regardless of the consequences.


A second and related way is to eliminate the exercise of skill in the job. For example, a manager may not trust the workers to write effective letters to clients, so they may put in place hundreds of different letters for staff to use with only limited discretion to vary them. Again, it is about centralised control and lack of trust. And paradoxically it achieves the opposite of the intended result. Since workers get less practice in wording their own letters, they lose confidence in their abilities and so they end up choosing the wording that fits the best even if it doesn't fit that well and are afraid of modifying it. And the client who writes in more than once may receive identically the same response implying that the issues they ave raised have not been given any genuine consideration.


I think you can see a pattern here:

• management fear leads to
• mistrust leading to
• centralised controls leading to
• skill reduction leading to
• mechanical performance due to fear of deviating from the centralised controls leading to
• poorer customer service.

The lesson here is that:

• You don't build a skilled workforce by eliminating opportunities for the exercise of skills.
• You don't build a motivated workforce by removing the more satisfying parts of the work.
• You don't build trust and confidence by increasing fear