One of my coworkers got a temporary promotion to supervisor and he was a crappy employee to begin with but no one else was interested in the position. Now he’s micromanaging the rest of us and driving us crazy. How have you dealt with these types?
I’ve been good about just ignoring them and getting things done. A few times I’ve had to do things their way long enough for a few major failures but for the most part I’ve been lucky and far enough down the food chain to get away with not being obedient.
Try a sharp whack on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
Our head cashier raised micro-managing to a new level. She once gave me hell for putting the big bags on the hook thought the tear off hole instead of the hook hole.
Everyone ignores her.
The other classical way is to just exhibit NO initiative whatsoever, and force her to make every little decision, instead of giving her ammo to pick and choose. Eventually she’ll tire of micromanaging to that level, and will back off, at least in theory.
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Leave.
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Abdicate all responsibility. They want to make every damned decision and get angry if you make them? Then stop making decisions. Take every single one of them to this person. IN DETAIL. When they get angry, innocently state that you’ve made them angry by making decisions that they think are theirs to make, so you’re bringing them every decision from now on.
Avoid all sarcasm and pettiness in doing this. I speak from experience on that.
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When people from other areas come to you for action, inform them what you think should be done and then refer them to your manager for final decision.
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Understand that every other manager in the place sees your manager as a jackass who doesn’t trust their own people to do their jobs. Also accept that some of them will believe that you CANNOT be trusted to do your job if your manager doesn’t trust you.
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See also #1.
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Copy your manager on every damned email where you are discussing solutions with people on your team or people outside of your team and ask them for decisions when one needs to be made.
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Don’t trust your manager’s manager to be less of a jackass about it. After all, they’re the one who put this person in power and aren’t dialing them back.
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HR is not your friend.
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If this same manager starts insisting that they get credit for all team efforts and no team members do, fucking RUN out the door. I wish I had. (Mine said our job was to make him look good, that the team name went on all documents and none of us were allowed to put our names on them, not even as the person doing the revision. Fuck that guy hard. He deserved the stroke he had.)
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Did I mention leaving? Always a good idea when someone gets all self important to the point of hating and punishing their own people for doing their damned jobs.
Micro-manage up. Ask for every directive to be confirmed by email, just to “make sure the paperwork is right”. If they won’t, send the emails yourself - but positively and clearlybin furtherance of whatever the objective is: “confirming our conversation, you have asked me to re-jacket the Fenner files, I should have that done by Thursday”. If applied correctly, you will be the master of your own activities fairly soon.
Decaf.
I’ve had two basic types of micromanagers: those who start from insecurity (and who will never be satisfied, because they never feel like they know as much as they should) and those who like hearing the bang, bang, bang of their own scrotum.
For the first type, lots of decaf. They’re the team’s worst bottleneck; just assume it and do not try to make things easier, clearer or more straightforward. Everything must go through their desk, then they fret because they don’t have time for anything because they’ve got so many emails because everything must go through their desk. Copy them in every email and do your best wallflower impression (I’m really bad at those).
For the second type, they’re assholes but so long as you do follow their rules exactly as set, things will be fine. Accept that he’s going to bark at someone several times per day or shift. Look contrite when it happens to be you. They can actually be pretty efficient, they’re just enamored of that bang, bang, bang…
You turn the screw until the object to be measured is gently pinched between the spindle and the anvil. Then you read the number on the barrel that is aligned with the datum line, and add that to …
Oh, “micromanager”. Never mind.
Human Resources exists not to help employees or support line management but to protect the company and upper management from liability. To that end, they will eliiminate the employee who is creating the biggest ruckus or who is easiest to fire, regardless of whether they are the root cause of conflict. Going to HR with a complaint should be the last resort course of action, and should be done with a large stack of evidence to support your complaint because just being in the right does not guarantee fair treatment.
Stranger
Thanks for the responses, the informative and the entertaining.
My first micromanager was the subject of frequent jokes because she also had a very short attention span. Everyone ended up checking with co-workers to make sure nobody else hadn’t already been assigned to a particular task.
My second micromanager also lacked an attention span, so people just generally ignored his more annoying advice unless he came back six or seven times.
No, no, no, no, no. That’s not how you deal with a micromanager. Here’s how you deal with a micromanager.
First off, never contradict or disobey. That’s very important. Doing so is counterproductive. And I don’t just mean overt verbal refusals or expressions of disagreement. Facial expressions and body language also convey an attitude that isn’t the one that is optimal if you’re resisting on this level, so it is very important to not do that.
What you want to do is engage in malicious consent (as discussed in this SDMB thread from last month). Specifically, you want to tailor your malicious consent so that you’re effectively pitting your micromanaging colleage against their own imposed judgments, including the implicit one that you should defer to them at every point instead of making your own determinations. You want to obey the “letter of the law handed down”. Now, it may be tempting to make a deliberate mockery of their instructions, but you should resist that urge and let their actual intended instructions’ foolishness do the job all by itself.
In fact, why don’t you describe some scenarios here and explain how you have, or how you think you might, handle them, and I can tell you which portions of your approach could be refined somewhat so as to have the ideal results.
Maybe I’m more thick-skinned than other people, but I usually listen to what they have to say and just sift out the wheat from the chaff. It’s pretty rare that there’s absolutely NO value at all in their suggestions or directions. “Remember to do this, this, this…and this in your project.” I usually find the person is right in at least 10% of what they say. It might be blindingly obvious that I should do X or Y, but that’s part of working for people. I do keep notes and records, though, to make sure that they can’t backtrack or deny what they told me.
The people I can’t stand are the ones who don’t provide any input at all and then (after much work on my part) say, “That’s not what we need at all.” They’re the no-managers.
In my experience, micromanagers spend their time telling people how things should be done, but they rarely follow up. The people who best deal with micromanagers do not discuss or argue; they simply listen politely and then do things their own way. As long as the solution works, the micromanager rarely notices. If the mm does notice, the employee claims that they misunderstood.
You have to fight fire with fire. Start emailing and calling him constantly, asking for advice about everything including/especially the most obscure minutia, at all hours of the day and night.
Might I suggest that the next time something like this happens you step up and take the job instead of letting some jackass ruin everything for you?
I would also add to watch yourself. I’ve had two micromanagers in my career that wanted me to run everything by them or criticized the choices I made or how I worded an email.
It got to be that I lost my touch in making decisions for myself, that I began to doubt my own judgement, that I feared every decision I made was the wrong one. It’s only now, after my lay-off and beginning contract work with a very hands off boss, that I am starting to realize that I can make decisions on my own again. If it’s not exactly right, it’s fine. It will all work out.
So keep an eye on yourself too, and if you start to doubt yourself, dust off the resume and find something else.
Exactly. A lot of new managers micromanage because they either did or think they did the old job better than anyone else, and so think everyone else needs their advice. For most it will last only until they get pulled into so many meetings and do enough real management stuff to not have time to micromanage any more.
So the best thing to do is to agree with whatever they say and then do it your own way, so long as the results are good.
Any sort of resistance is going to be interpreted as someone being jealous that she got promoted and they didn’t, and won’t go well.
Now if they evolve into a permanent micromanager, then you may need stronger measures.