More Structure for Less Micromanagement

Written by Dr. Holly Ward, PhD

Raise your hand if you’ve been micromanaged ✋ (or if you’ve done the micromanaging 🫣).

We’ve all probably experienced it, either on the giving or the receiving end. A manager feels the need to control aspects of their employee’s work to an extreme degree—certainly more than is necessary or healthy for a typical working relationship. It happens for a lot of reasons, but at the center of it is fear and a need to control, and it is damaging for all parties involved. Micromanagement can reduce employee confidence, extinguish autonomy, and hinder creativity. It can also add a lot of stress to the micromanagers as they uphold unrealistic work demands.

This blog title may then seem a bit counterintuitive: impose more structure and therefore do less micromanaging? But the type of structure imposed is important here: when the structure is based on proven principles and has independence as the goal, it can provide a foundation for the manager-employee relationship built on trust. And that trust can allow both parties to do their work confidently and without micromanagement.

But first, what do we actually know about the effects of micromanagement?

Micromanagement hurts morale. It’s a fact.

Recent studies report that 85% of employees say their morale is negatively impacted by micromanagement, and in another study of tech workers, micromanagement was listed as the worst possible leadership trait. 55% of employees report that micromanagement hurts their productivity. Being a micromanager is a hard way to keep a good team, and it’s one of the top three reasons employees resign. In fact, 69% of employees considered changing jobs due to a micromanaging boss, and 36% actually did.

The fear that drives micromanagement can stem from a lot of different places: fear that the employee will not do the work to the manager’s expectation; fear that the manager will not adequately support the employee; or fear that the work itself will not succeed. Without a structure in place to manage well, managers resort to micromanaging in an attempt to assuage their fears.

There is a level of trust needed between the manager and the employee, and it takes time and a plan for how to develop that trust.

A structure that begins with Modeling and Guided Practice can help an employee build the skills they need to work independently with a clear understanding of their manager’s expectations, while the manager can feel confident that the employee understands their duties and that they can trust the employee to perform them adequately.

A strategy to equip managers to train and support employees follows these three stages:

1. Modeling
   In the first phase, the manager models the competency along with the expectations of the work. This involves modeling the actions along with the thoughts behind them by talking out loud throughout. The employee watches and is encouraged to ask questions following the modeling. The key here is for the manager to model explicitly the skill of the task with the narrative of what they are thinking in their mind during the task. A clear picture is created that allows both parties to see what is expected and learn the procedure. This process helps managers avoid telling someone to do something and assuming they know how to complete it to their expectations because the expectations have to be explicitly stated in the Modeling phase.

2. Guided Practice
   This phase is critical and often overlooked. In this phase, the employee completes the task while providing a narrative to explain the process out loud, using language like “first, next, then.” Note: this is not the manager telling the employee what steps to follow, but the employee doing the task while verbalizing the steps. The manager may ask questions to ensure the employee can describe the steps accurately. This allows a chance for both the manager and the employee to identify any gaps or confusion in how to complete the task; if there are any, the manager returns to the Modeling phase to demonstrate and describe the process again.
   This phase also allows the manager to build trust and confidence in the employee by seeing their abilities, thus decreasing the need to micromanage once this phase is complete. It can take some time to move beyond the Guided Practice phase, but it is important to take the time to work side by side and ensure the employee develops their skills to the expectation of the manager. At that point, the manager can fully release the task to the employee. No need to keep checking or micromanaging because the process of Modeling and Guided Practice ensures that a competency has been met.

3. Independence
   After Modeling and Guided Practice, the employee can conduct the task on their own with complete confidence from their manager. While it can feel time-consuming to go through the first two phases, they do go quickly in the grand scheme and offer a very effective way to develop trust and learn lessons about the process. When both parties can have confidence in the results, the process will have been worth it.

Leading is teaching.

The Modeling-Guided Practice strategy ties in well with the idea that a manager is taking on the role of a teacher for their employees. It is rewarding not only from a productivity standpoint, but it allows managers and employees to learn about each other as trust is established. The process can be repeated or go through multiple iterations as expectations shift or increase. By holding steadfast to this solid structure, managers and employees have a constant touchstone to return to whenever new skills or competencies need to be developed. And that structure frees them both from the shackles of micromanagement.