The Micro-Manager

You will encounter a few great bosses, a few terrible bosses, and many mediocre bosses in your career. Virtually anyone can succeed with a great boss. Actively manage your work-life and you can succeed with (or despite) the not-so-great ones.

Active management of your own work-life requires first that you strive to understand your boss’ needs and style. After the initial getting-to-know each other stage, ask her or him how they like to operate. Does she prefer to get frequent updates or be notified only when work is complete or problems arise? Which decisions are delegated and which are reserved? Does she encourage or discourage asking for advice from those inside her group? Outside her group? And so on. Most managers are self-aware enough that they can give you valuable guidance.

Listen to co-workers’ opinions on what the boss is like but follow Marvin Gaye’s advice to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Your co-workers may be mistaken or misleading when they tell you what the boss likes and hates, so take their word as a data point, not as truth.

Once you figure out the boss’s style and preferences, you have two choices – adapt your style to match or find another job. One caveat: if you often find it necessary to move on, the problem may be with you, not the bosses.

The micro-manager is a common style. He wants to tell you, in detail, what to do and how to do it. Then he looks over your shoulder and double checks everything you do. That’s appropriate when we’re inexperienced or he doesn’t know us very well, but most engineers chafe if the boss keeps doing it. The true micro-manager can’t help it. He does it because he likes to do it or because he’s insecure, not because it’s necessary.

I had an otherwise great supervisor who insisted on checking every single detail of my work. If I produced a graph, he wanted to see the tabular data so he could check every point and add up every column of numbers. It took him weeks to review the simplest client report, so as a program manager I had to force subordinate engineers to complete their reports in much less than the scheduled time or risk missing a client deadline. My co-workers adapted by resigning themselves to his microscopic reviews, with one of them saying, “I don’t need to edit my own reports, the boss does that for me.” For a while I adopted that same attitude but it was exasperating.

Finally, I told my micro-managing boss that his mania for editing reports was bothering me and asked how I could get him to only spot check. His reply was clear, “When I stop finding errors in your reports, I’ll stop checking them.” We were in a reinforcing cycle: I made only cursory reviews of reports done by my team because I knew he would carefully scrutinize them. He carefully reviewed because I wasn’t doing a thorough job of it.

So I scrubbed my next few reports squeaky clean. The boss did his usual detailed review and they came back with only word-choice changes. When I showed him how he was making only minor edits, he looked very pained but said, “You’re right. From now on your stuff goes out with only a brief review. But embarrass me and I’ll go right back to details.”

It actually worked. He was sharp enough to realize his own foibles and change his practice without getting defensive. Many bosses can’t change. Next time we’ll talk about one of those.