Micro Management, Tough Times, and Trust

Paul McCord has an excellent post at the Sales and Sales Management Blog on the downward spiral micro management creates. Although the focus of his piece is on sales, what Paul has to say applies to the effect of micro management on productivity throughout the organization. An excerpt:

As morale declines and sales lag even further, senior management gives more and more directives, demanding greater control and more ‘accountability’ on each employee’s part.  When today’s demands don’t create the desired result, they’re added to or changed tomorrow, spiraling in a seemingly never-ending series of demands and threats, each more ominous than the last.

And sales plunge even faster than before.

Once management panics it seems impossible to stop the downhill flow of negative consequences.  The more pressure management feels, the more they try to spread the pressure downward, believing they can demand production via force.

The process inevitably produces nothing other than a bigger hole from which the company must emerge.

If micro managing is such a negative force, why do managers resort to it?  The root cause may be panic, but the belief they need to micro manage their team is based squarely in a distrust of their employees-a belief that their salespeople and managers aren’t working hard enough, that the sales team doesn’t care enough, that their team is intrinsically lazy and is only looking for the low hanging fruit, not willing to get dirty and dig for the hard to find business.

I agree that micro management is much more common when there is a lack of trust in the organization. This tendency is especially obvious when new management is brought in to “solve the problem”. By definition the new manager has no history with the existing employees, so the natural tendency is to assume the problem is attributable to them. This is a difficult perception to turn around until successes start happening and the credibility of the existing employees is established. It may never happen if the manager believes the successes are attributable to his or her micro management.

It’s not just an issue of trust, however; micro management can be a problem during hard times even when there is trust in the organization. Demands for information are one form of micro management.  To solve problems information is needed, so during hard times the demand for information from upper management increases. The only way for middle management to satisfy that demand is greater involvement in the work flow. This is not a trust issue; upper management is trying to do their job and solve the problem, and they need information to do it. Unfortunately, an inherent side effect is the time and resources spent gathering and communicating the information are time and resources diverted from other more productivity activities.

Another cause of micro management is the tendency of managers to return to their comfort zone. During tough times, good managers want to contribute to the solution. If a manager has experience doing the work their employees do, it’s very tempting to satisfy the urge to contribute by taking a more active role in that work. For example, if an employee negotiates a deal and the manager tweaks it to make it a little better for the company, the manager feels like he or she has added value. It’s very difficult for managers to stick to their jobs when the pressure is on.