How to escape the soul-crushing cycle of micromanagement

You’re sitting at your desk, writing your 76th email for the morning, when you feel it – your boss lurking over your shoulder as you put the finishing touches on another “just checking to see where this is up to” email.

You slowly close your eyes. It’s time to initiate the emergency box breathing techniques your therapist taught you. Right before you hit send, you get the critique you’ve been waiting and holding your breath for. You forgot to cc your manager again. If you want to be taken seriously in this business, cc’ing senior leadership is a must.

Micromanagement is not a personality trait. It’s a vicious cycle.Credit: Getty

We’ve all experienced these moments. It’s the soul-crushing art of micromanagement. You’re trying to do your job, but your manager weaves their way into the details, destroying your shaky illusion of autonomy.

Here’s the weird thing, though – micromanagement is not just demoralising for the person being managed. It’s equally soul-crushing for the one doing the managing. So, if it makes us all miserable, why does it happen so frequently?

To answer this question, we need to dig into the details.

People often view micromanagement as a personality flaw. A controlling or perfectionist person gets promoted, and viola, you’ve got a micromanager. While it’s true that controlling and perfectionist tendencies are linked to micromanagement, this is a micro view of a bigger problem.

Micromanagement is a soul-crushing art and vicious cycle. If you’re stuck in the middle of it, it’s time to hit reset.

Micromanagement is not a personality trait. It’s a vicious cycle. No manager starts their leadership career hoping to become a micromanager. Most people get caught up in the cycle and don’t know how to escape it.

If you want to free yourself from micromanagement, you need to understand how the cycle works. There are four steps:

Step 1: Expectations are not met. This is when a manager has expectations, spoken or unspoken, that a team member doesn’t meet. One of the main reasons expectations aren’t met is that they aren’t clearly communicated.

Brene Brown refers to this as “stealth expectations”, where someone has expectations of someone, but fails to communicate them. So when an employee doesn’t meet these expectations, the manager begins to question the quality of their work, which leads us to the next step.

Step 2: Trust is damaged. Once the expectation isn’t met, trust starts to diminish. The manager begins to monitor and inspect the work closely.

They become less of a leader and more of a quality control officer. And, the more time someone spends looking for issues, the more issues they find, bringing us to the worst part of the cycle.

Step 3: Confidence drops. The worst part about micromanagement is that it obliterates an employee’s confidence. As a manager critiques the small details, employees begin to question themselves, their decisions, and their work. This leads to fear of failure, lower productivity, and the final stage of the cycle.

Step 4: More mistakes. It’s simple HR math – lack of confidence + controlling leadership = more mistakes. You can see how we get stuck in the vicious cycle. The more errors an employee makes, the more it validates the need for micromanagement. And so the soul-destroying cycle continues.

But, the good news: the cycle can be broken. Here’s how:

Leaders that are stuck in the cycle need to hit reset with their teams. They need to reset the expectations and rebuild trust.

First, managers and team members must get all the unexpressed expectations on the table. Ellie Middleton’s ‘What, Why, When’ approach works really well for setting clear expectations:

1. What do you need your team member to do
2. Why do you need it
3. When does it need to be done

Your goal is to be clear on the outcomes but flexible in how people get there.

Next, managers have to rebuild trust and confidence. One way to make it happen is to agree how you’ll handle problems before you have a problem. If a deadline can’t be met or an important detail gets missed, create a game plan for resolving it.

Managers who acknowledge mistakes will happen but have strategies to resolve them build trust. They also give their employees clarity about how they can escalate issues.

Micromanagement is a soul-crushing art and vicious cycle. If you’re stuck in the middle of it, it’s time to hit reset.

Shelley Johnson is the founder of HR agency Boldside and hosts the podcast my millennial career.

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