Every single aspect of life requires balance. Spend too much time at work, and your personal relationships will suffer. Spend too little time at work, and you will be without a home or a car and up to your ears in credit card debt. It’s all about maintaining proper balance.

One of the hardest things to do is to lead other people. I’ve often said that for high performers it’s pretty easy for them to dominate in their work roles. For a REAL challenge, just start overseeing others. Whether it’s 2 people or 2,000, each follower brings their own unique set of challenges to the table that the person in charge must navigate. Leaders are often underappreciated and over scrutinized. But the reward and the impact that comes from effectively leading others toward a goal worth pursuing is worth its weight in gold in the end!

Over the past few years, I have noticed a leadership phenomenon that involves a loss of proper balance and leads to reduced impact as organizations increasingly struggle to execute their missions. This phenomenon has to do with micromanagement.

Out with the old

Rewind the clock back 50 or so years, and what you would experience in most organizations was command-and-control management. Leaders acted like kings and queens with high levels of authority and innumerable policies that direct reports had to abide by. Often, leaders treated other human beings like something much less than an equal. A staple of command-and-control leadership was micromanagement. Those in charge would ride their people constantly while berating them and suffocating the life out of them. Leaders would act as if employees had no brains and were incapable of making decisions for themselves. Instead of casting a vision for desired outcomes and allowing others to find the best possible path to achieve them, command-and-control managers would do the exact opposite.

To be clear, the command-and-control leadership style is unhealthy and ineffective. Treating others in a degrading way is never alright, no matter the context. And leading this way is simply not helpful or needed. Humans do their best work when thinking creatively and working with confidence. Place fear on a person, and they will inevitably crumble while producing subpar outcomes at every turn. If you have ever worked under a C&C leader, like I have, you know exactly how devastating it can be professionally, emotionally, physically, and relationally. To this day, over 10 years later, I still suffer from physical issues brought on in the 2010s because of working too closely for too long under a micromanager.

Due to the numerous glaring problems, command-and-control leadership was a dinosaur that needed to be gone. Now in recent years, an understandable war has been waged against it in an effort to bring it to full extinction. While it still exists here, there and everywhere, there are undoubtedly less C&C managers now than say 50 years ago. Employees are aware that they deserve better and are quick to run away from bad leaders. Micromanagers increasingly end up existing in smaller and smaller pockets of mediocre organizations with a small number of apathetic employees dragging along behind them. While this dinosaur will never be fully wiped out, the ship is headed in the right direction slowly but surely.  

While command-and-control leading should rightly be a thing of the past, during the past few years I have noticed an increasing trend that moves not only back to the point of healthy balance but then keeps going too far in the opposite direction. Along these lines I ask the question: “Are you too LITTLE of a micromanager?”. I am of course not encouraging you to micromanage employees every day :). Instead, I would advocate for you to MANAGE your people!

Micromanage vs. Manage

There seems to be an increasing amount of confusion amongst leaders regarding the difference between micromanagement and management. More and more I hear leaders say that they don’t want to micromanage their people, but the examples they give center around simply managing their people. So, what are some key differences?

Micromanaging leaders:

• Require others to always follow processes given to them by the leader
• Maintain high control on the front end
• Hold others accountable for lack of outcomes from the leader’s process
• Interject themselves into the details of every step of every process
• Constantly exist in the workspace of their people
• Evoke fear in employees
• Avoid delegating real responsibility
• Fix any mistakes that are made
• Avoid training employees effectively on the front end
• Set unrealistic expectations, deadlines
• Display frustration if they are left out of any decisions or discussions
• Believe that something will only be done correctly if they do it themselves
• Constantly change the standards and confuse everyone
• Start by making statements
• Do not trust their people
• Slow everything down and breed inefficiency
• Inhibit the organization’s ability to achieve key outcomes

Managing leaders:

• Allow others to follow any process that they feel is best and hold them accountable to the results 
• Display low control on the front end
• Hold others accountable for lack of outcomes from the employee’s process
• Check in with employees on a big picture level to gauge progress and how they are feeling
• Allow their people space to breathe and work 
• Grow confidence in employees
• Delegate real responsibility 
• Teach employees how to fix their own mistakes
• Train employees effectively on the front end
• Set realistic, fair expectations and timelines for work to be completed
• Allow others to take ownership of their area in the workplace
• Know that others are more skilled than they themselves are in certain areas and allow people to put their talents to full use
• Maintain clear standards and provide everyone with clarity
• Start by asking questions
• Display trust in the capabilities of their people
• Keep everything efficient
• Consistently achieve key outcomes for the organization 

Holding an employee accountable to key outcomes is not micromanagement. Checking in with an employee to gauge progress towards an agreed upon result is not micromanagement. Requiring an employee to do their job is not micromanagement. These things are MANAGEMENT. Be careful not to confuse the two! In an effort to avoid micromanaging, have you taken it a step too far and to some degree stopped managing?

When low control fails

One final thought. Leading employees with low control on the front end and then high accountability on the back end only works with employees who are competent and good stewards. Some employees lack the ability to do their job without constant hand holding. Others have all the ability in the world but choose to underperform in spite of healthy work culture and consistent accountability from the leader. In both cases, only two real options exist:

1. Raise the level of control to Medium or High on the front end. Articulate to the employee that they continue to show themselves incapable of creating their own processes and through these achieving the required outcomes. Due to this, you as the leader are stepping in to dictate what steps must be taken in terms of process and then requiring the person to follow those. The problem here is that A) you are now having to do part of this person’s job while neglecting your own job, and B) the person will most likely lack even more motivation and their performance will not improve.
2. As I have shared before, those who are not performing up to the agreed upon standard in their job should be terminated (after conversations have been had) or asked to move on and given 4-8 weeks to find their next job. This is the only alternative to raising the level of control from the leader.

Avoid micromanaging so that your people can thrive and enjoy their jobs while making the organization better. But never avoid managing! Why? So that your people can thrive and enjoy their jobs while making the organization better!