I’ve tried to find an online article or blog on this subject and keep coming up empty. All everyone wants to write about is advice on dealing with a micromanaging boss.
One of my reports is a team lead (let’s call her Jane) who exhibits classic symptoms of micromanagement disease. She isn’t anyone’s supervisor, but that hasn’t stopped her from creating all kinds of rules and procedures for her teammates to follow before they are able to, say, send out a widely disseminated email or finalize a report. When she reviews written communications authored by her teammates, she is heavy-handed with her revisions, and she treats these revisions as mandatory not optional even when they concern cosmetic details (which comprises the huge majority of her corrections). She is reluctant to let her teammates take ownership over certain things, and she is constantly checking up on them because she feels they are slow.
Things reached a tipping point earlier this week when one of her teammates pushed back on one of her “directives” and cc’ed me on the show down. That provoked Jane to call me for advice on how to handle things. I think she thought I’d immediately take her side, but instead I tried to get her to understand why this conflict might be occurring (without blaming anyone). My advice for her was to back off a little to allow her folks to have some breathing room and autonomy. She clearly thinks they don’t write well according to her standards, and she explained this accounts for her scrutiny.
Anyway, she took my instruction and allowed the teammate to proceed unchecked on this one thing. But I’m under no delusions that this problem is cured.
Have anyone here dealt with this? I know I’m going to have to be frank with her and call a duck a duck, but she’s so steeped in denial and rationalization that I know she’s not going to change her behavior unless there are consequences. I don’t want to turn Jane’s people into whiny snitches either, but how does one assess her behavior without doing that? And what are some reasonable consequences one could enforce in this situation? I don’t want this to be a case of me micromanaging a micromanager. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
There are a couple of things you can do. First, give immediate feedback whenever she does something which you have a problem with. It could be just a word, it does not have to be a major confrontation. I’m sure you know you should be doing this with everyone - and give positive feedback also, of course.
Second, if she has unilaterally created some kind of process which you think might have merit (though needs big changes) you should have a meeting, which you run, which allows her to present it and get feedback and changes from everyone else. When you come up with something, you should own it as the manager, not her.
In some cases an employee is acknowledged by the team as the leader - that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Is she truly the only person who knows how to write? If she is really that good, they would be coming to her.
She also seems to have too much time on her hands. Can you give her something challenging?
Part of the problem is what you’ve correctly sensed: she was appointed as team lead by the previous director, but I don’t think her teammates see her as the leader the way she envisions they should. Her writing skills are a strength of hers, but writing well is not as important as other things in our line of work. So her team is bristling at what they perceive as a misplaced focused (and they are not poor writers, just not novelists). They may recognize that she writes well, but they don’t see her as their leader just because of that.
Another part of the problem is I can’t see how she interacts with her team on a day-to-day basis because I’m located at headquarters and they are scattered across three sites long distance to me. So there is a lot that I’m not privy to. Which is why I’m wondering how a supervisor monitors a micromanager without relying on staff complaints.
I’m kind of fuzzy on how she can be the leader without being anyone’s supervisor.
If I was on her team, I’d benefit from knowing that I don’t have to make changes that she’s asked for that are merely cosmetic and that will slow things down. Everyone would benefit from clarification on how perfect or how standardized different types of writing do or don’t need to be.
Are there team leader things that the rest of the team could use more? If so, determining and making her aware of what you consider her priorities to be might be useful.
Instead of “micromanaging” I’d probably describe it more as her being a control freak that coerces her co-workers to do things her way. I’ve seen people like that at almost every job I’ve had.
In many workplaces, there is a position between the peons and the supe. The appointed lead tends to handle a lot of the routine coordination and day to day issues. Discipline and more major sfuff gets taken care of up the food chain.
I have a coworker who was once threatening to slow down production by nitpicking other coworkers’ work. And the worse thing? She was embarrassingly wrong with her nitpickery.
Since it was my job to keep production on track and I saw her driving us off the road, I forcefully told her straight-up to stop doing that shit. Being in headquarters, we’re despised enough as is. We don’t need another reason for regional staff to think we are incompetent busybodies with nothing better to do with our time. And she had plenty mistakes of her own to fix.
She told me that she thought it was her job to find other people’s mistakes, no matter how small. I got her to see that her job was only to find mistakes that affected her ability to do her job and fell within the responsibilities documented in her work plan. Nothing more that, or else she was going to cause people to riot. After we had this discussion, we were good.
Another thing I told her was that it wasn’t fair to do that to people. No one was micromanaging her to the same extent that she was other people. I asked her how she would feel if someone was triple-checking her work behind her back, especially if the “checker” wasn’t as experienced or trained as she was. I don’t know if this helped her to see why she was in the wrong. But like I said, she did improve (though she did cry because I got somewhat heated with her. For which I’m still not sorry. You mess with my timeline and you WILL see my nostrils flare a little).
(Bolding Mine) Then get rid of her; these people are extremely toxic and they won’t change. They convince themselves that they know how to run things better than anybody, including you, and that they are indispensable to the organization. I’ve been an employer for 28 years and every time I’ve gotten rid of one of these clowns, it has been a relief to all involved.
It’s best to sit them down and talk out how you see their job vs. how they see it. Let them talk and respond with: “I’m not sure that there’s a position here for what you’re describing; what I really need is XYZ. Can you do that, without the confrontation? Okay, then we’re good.” Give it about a week until they go back to their old ways. Call them back in and remind them that there isn’t a job position that fits their mindset; there’s only the one that you need done. Are they interested in doing THAT job? No? I wish you all the luck in the world.
I really appreciate your thoughts on this subject.
I think she has OCD. She sees problems that no else does or cares about, and then can’t let these problems go. I’ve talked to her about being able to triage issues so that her response to them are proportionate to their big picture importance, and even though she makes the right sounds as I’m expressing this to her, I get the sinking feeling that my concept of big picture differs radically from hers.
For example, after our convo this week (after I told her to back off a little), I told her to cc me on her response to a teammate who sent her a report to proof. I read the same report and concluded that the content was fine, it mainly just need to be re-organized in tables so that key facts could be quickly assimilated by managers and executives as well as folks on the ground. This is what I communicated to the teammate, and cc’ed Jane so that she could where my level of critique starts. The teammate agreed to this and said she would make it so.
Jane’s feedback to the teammate? Well, the whole report was marked up with track changes. Red galore. So much red that the teammate probably felt obligated to accept all changes because it would take too much time to go through them one-by-one. And sadly, Jane’s changes were directed towards syntax and other superficial details. Sentences that end with prepositions are the things she is concentrating on, when really she should be focusing on ways to structure these reports to improve information uptake by busy professionals.
I will call her today and explain to her job is not to correct the grammar, spelling, and word choice of her colleagues. A report with perfect sentence structure is meaningless if no one feels like reading it, because it hits people’s eyes like a wall of text. Her job is to ensure the process her team follows is efficient and effective in advancing our mission. She can’t do this if she’s focused on minor details, and I will tell her that if she can’t or won’t shift her attention to bigger issues and faciliate group decision-making rather than issuing mandates unilaterally, then I will have to increase my control of her team.
It almost sounds like the employee is trying to cover for real or perceived inadequacies in her work ability. At least, that’s my best guess for why she’s doing a proofreader’s job rather than whatever her actual job is. Is there some kind of technical/competency task she could be unilaterally given that might take up her “free” time at work and/or show if she knows what she’s (supposed to be) doing?
By saying the “previous” director made her the (informal?) lead, it sounds like nobody’s informed Jane that things have changed since you took over. So give her a chance to reform. I would say, promote someone else to the team lead position (or hire fresh, if it’s in the budget). Email the whole team this information. Contact Jane privately and let her know she is no longer responsible for checking/allowed to check on her colleagues’ work. She has proven unable to handle the responsibility.
I’ve had a couple of employees who acted like that. One way to deal with it is to assign them special projects that they do mostly on their own. I had one guy who would latch on such a project and not let go until it was done. However I had another guy who was just a jerk trying to make himself look better. I had him transferred to another minor project that only had 3 people in it and he was lowest on the totem pole.
You might try working with her. Let her know how her actions bother others. She might be thinking this is the way to get promoted into management.
Speaking of management, unless she changes you want to let your bosses know that she shouldn’t be promoted into a supervisory position. That could be very bad for your company.
You seem ready to squash her down (that’s just my take at this moment). Maybe she just needs to be redirected. Upthread, you mentioned ‘that proper writing was not needed so much as other skills’ (or, words to that effect). Apparently, she can take direction, so, just throw this in as well, sort of a ‘you’re doing a good job, it’s just not the job that we need’ kind of thing.
You can probably say this a bit more diplomatically, but I just want to cut to the chase here.
“Are you familiar with the term ‘micromanager’?”
“Yes”
“because that’s what you’re doing to the rest of the team”
(excuses, discussion, etc)
“And that really isn’t your job, or part of your performance objectives. It is also messing with morale and other people’s abilities to do their jobs.”
(her explanation of how other people aren’t up to her standards)
“Well that’s a good point. Writing is one of your strengths and you are really good at it. Others not so much. But in order to become better writers, they need to be given room to grow and learn their own way or writing rather than having you hanging over every word. That kind of thing only makes it unpleasant for them and stiffles their creativity. I need you to back off and let them fly or fall on their own.”
(more excuses why she needs to do this)
“Look, do you want to do ALL of the writing on the team? No? Then you need to stop trying to write their papers for them or telling them how to write them. In fact, I’m going to make that one of your performance objectives - for you to back off and allow the rest of the team to grow on their own and to provide positive feedback rather than all of the negative engagement that we’ve been seeing. Ok?”
If pressed;
“(name), I’ve made my decision. I need you to step back, stop micromanaging their work and learn how to positively engage them in allowing them to do it.”
This. I have a co-worker who is very similar to Jane. Privately, she has confessed to me that she is afraid she’ll be fired because imperfections in “her” work product will reflect badly not only on the organization but also, her biggest concern, on her. (It’s ironic, because it is actually the team’s work product and her name is NOT on the published version.) She has a similar focus to Jane’s, too, in that she has tunnel vision on tiny, often unimportant details and will badger her team members about them. It has become such an issue that others are now declining to work with her.
I do not supervise this person but I have told her, when she has expressed her fears, that she’d benefit by focusing on the job she was hired to do and do only that. I think the OP has received good advice to that end: explain to Jane specifically what her job is and, more importantly, what it isn’t. Jane needs to know that she is causing dissention in the ranks and that that will not be tolerated. If she can do the job she was hired for, now clarified, great. If not, other arrangements will have to be made. You may have to have this conversation, or a variant thereof, a couple of times. Good on you that you’re giving her a chance, but you are going to have to be willing, at some point, to pull the trigger if she can’t rein in her insecurities. I wish someone would do that in our office, but no one will, more’s the pity.
Good luck. Remember, this is why they paid you those big dollars to be a manager.
This sounds eerily like the coworker who drives me nuts. I don’t think she’s insecure. I know she is. She has told me from her own mouth that she feels inferior to everyone because of her relatively lower level of educational attainment. She feels bitter because she doesn’t get “credit” anywhere in the report. I think she feels small and unappreciated, and the way she compensates is to take on the role of self-appointed editor. Kind of like, if she can’t be an engineer, at least she can put one in their place. It’s sad but not in a way that makes me feel sorry for her.
But I don’t know if this describes Jane’s situation.
It is likely. I don’t know her well enough to diagnose all of her issues and I don’t like making assumptions either, but she works with a bunch of doctorates when her highest degree is a masters. Could she feel she has something extra to prove? Certainly. You would think it is enough that she is paid at a higher grade than her teammates, but nope. Insecurity + poorly set boundaries + OCD-like attention to detail = micromanaging team lead.
Since I can’t do anything about her insecurity or detail-orientation, I will need to outline to her what her job responsibilities are and aren’t. Until now, it’s been left up to her (and the other team leads) to figure out what their role is and that “what” only exists in each of their minds, not written down anywhere (including their performance standards). This brilliant management strategy was brought to us courtesy of our previous boss, who seemed to think that by “empowering” her staff to make these kind of decisions, everyone would organically do what was best.
This is an interesting insight. I wonder if Jane, like your co-worker, also feels slighted and unappreciated because she isn’t getting the credit she thinks she deserves. Jane’s actions – lots of corrections, lots of red ink – do sound a bit like bitter one-up-manship.
But, I had another thought about Jane, after re-reading the OP. It sounds like part of the problem is that Jane is focusing on the information alone, rather than on the accuracy of the information and the visual presentation. Do I have that right? If so, it is quite possible that Jane is one of those people, and there are lots of them, who just don’t have any visual artistic sense. I’m not sure I can express this very well because when I think about artistic stuff my left brain – the verbal half – slows way down. I’ll try: I am an artist. Was born that way. I just know how to arrange information on a page in a visually pleasing, visually accessible way. People are endlessly mazed when I do it. They usually say, “I just don’t think like that!” Perhaps Jane is simply doing what she knows she’s best at and doesn’t even see the other part of the equation. In which case, you’ll need to put someone else in charge of the layout of the information once Jane is satisfied with the content.
