Avoid Being Micromanaged — What can YOU do!
Nobody likes being questioned every other day about how things are going and when they are finishing things that are in progress. And when I say Nobody, I mean, nobody! Neither employee nor their manager (from upper management). Let’s talk about what Micromanaging is, before we dive into how one can avoid it in the remainder of this post, so that we establish a common definition of Micromanagement.
Micromanagement, from my perspective, means someone constantly looking over your shoulder, especially when they need something to be delivered in a finite time. While employees are micro-managed most commonly by their manager, unfortunately it is not limited to just them. Your peers or partners who depend on your work in any way, may also start micromanaging your work by constantly asking you about the progress and the delivery dates, without really caring about your challenges and hurdles. Sometimes, even asking you to do your things in their preferred ways, i.e. dictating the how, falls under micro-managing. For example, when given a task to prepare a report for a project, being dictated on the exact format of the report leaving no space for your creativity can also feel like being micro-managed. Employees who are micromanaged have very little autonomy over how they do things or voice in decision-making.
So, what can you do! To avoid being micro-managed and reclaim your independence, creativity and freedom of execution. Just like always, you can’t change others, but you can change you. Building on the concept of the Circle of Influence as explained by Stephen R. Covey in his famous book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”; you can’t change other’s way of working with you, but you can change how you execute and deliver as that’s something you have influence over.
I’ll touch upon 4 things you can inculcate in how you do any work, to avoid being micro-managed. It’ll give you tangible and positive results, no matter what industry you work in or how micro-managing your peers/boss are.
Proactive Communication
Often times when working on a complex problem/project, we need focus and uninterrupted time, to be able to solve the complexity. We sometimes get buried deep into the layers of complexities as we continue to solve one layer at a time. Our mind just gets so consumed by the problem at hand, that we go into isolation to achieve deep focus, and forget about communicating the little wins we have along the way (the layers we resolved). And of course, in the moment, communicating progress doesn’t seem as important as solving the problem fully. And I agree, it just sounds silly to declare smaller wins, when you know the whole problem is yet unsolved. This paradigm applies to something as simple as preparing a multi-page project report, where you want to get the full thing right before you share it out, and you’ve only gotten through half of it. Been there?
Now think of someone who’s patiently waiting at the door, curious about how close are you to solving the problem. While you are rightfully busy working on the problem, all the observer sees is pin-drop silence; with no clue about whether you are getting closer to the end or you are stuck or you are on a completely wrong track. And that’s when you hear them say, “Hey Joe! How are things going?!” and what you may hear is “Hey, when you are going to get it done!?”. May be, you’ve gone so deep into the problem at hands, that you didn’t realize that weeks have gone by without you sharing anything with the person waiting at the door.
Solution: Proactively communicate.
Don’t give the waiting person an opportunity to ask you that dreaded question. Sharing those smaller wins can help the person waiting outside, see how things are going and if you need help or redirection. Allow them the opportunity to see through your challenges and small wins. It helps a ton! If you are moving in the right direction, communicating the progress helps you gain trust of the stakeholders, that you are going to get the job done, all you need is just a little bit more deep focus. Bonus points, if you tell them, how soon (in days/weeks) should they expect to hear the final outcome and if not, the next update.
Early-in-career employees often make this mistake, and it doesn’t have serious consequences until they are trying to make the jump to Senior band in their career profiles. At Senior band, proactive communication is crucial for success.
Managing Risk
The problems you work on may have some dependencies too. Often you are solving a problem in a group, where everyone is working on one smaller piece of the larger problem. And the solution to the larger problem depends on the solution of each individual piece your group is working on. All solutions need to be integrated to build the final solution. Sometimes people in your problem-workgroup report to the same manager and other times not. In the latter case, employees/engineers form v-teams (virtual teams) to get together to solve a complex and distributed problem. This is often referred to as cross-team collaboration.
When your project’s success depends on others doing their part, you have to be extra careful. Because each integration point is a dependency, and each dependency poses a risk to the overall success of the project. Distributed projects have higher risk probability and hence someone is needed to manage the risk, so often managers or leaders make one person as the dedicated “Project Lead” to ensure they are going to be the point of contact for the project and will overlook/align all the pieces to make sure everything is landing as expected. And hence, if you are in that role, you have a critical responsibility of Managing Risk.
What does that mean? — Identify risk and proactively mitigate risk
Every person on the v-team/workgroup can show leadership, without having a specific title of “Project Lead”. Meaning, everyone can help identify risk as early as possible and proactively suggest ways to mitigate risk. For example: If one of the members of v-team has an unplanned time-off of 2 weeks, you recognize that as a risk to the delivery dates, and proactively trying to load balance their work with other member of the teams before they go on vacation; is the simplest example of identifying risk and proactively mitigating it.
Another example: If one part of the problem has hit an unexpected dead-end, you proactively working on finding an alternate solution or finding someone to find that alternate solution, to keep the project on track, is good way of identifying risk and proactively mitigating it.
The end goal is that you don’t want to be giving surprises on the last day, when stakeholders are eagerly waiting to see the outcome. If you remember a time when you had to give a surprise in the last day/week, try to recall if you faced questions like “When did you find out about the risk!?” or “What did you do about that?” or “Why didn’t you tell us then?” or all three!
This also applies to situations of working solo. If you hit a dead-end on one of the layers of the problem, how do you proactively communicate that to the stakeholder and how you find alternates, is going to make a huge difference, in how people perceive you. You have to manage risks all the time.
Seeking Support
Now whether you are working alone or in a v-team setup, there will be times when you can’t mitigate risks alone. There are challenges that you may encounter, which are beyond your circle of influence or simply put, above your paygrade (or role). To build on the example I gave in the previous section: If one of the member of the v-team took a 4 week time-off in an unplanned manner, and you can’t possibly load balance the work with the remaining members, you have to proactively communicate the identified risk, and seek support from your manager or leaders. If you shy away from seeking support or asking for help, because you think it’s going to look bad on you; you are not only setting yourself up for failure, but also the v-team you are leading.
Good manager and leaders always provide support when asked for. But if you don’t even communicate, they have no way of knowing that you were struggling to keep the project on track. If you feel your manager is not supportive, seek support in a formal request (email) so that there’s documentation of you asking for support when a risk was identified. This kind of paper-trail safe-guards you in case the project misses the timelines and impacts the business negatively.
Another example where you could need support is: Imagine one of the dependency of your project is under a different organization (cross-organization projects), who has different priorities and goals. In the beginning they agreed to provide the framework/API or a part of the solution to your v-team; but mid-way they had a change of priorities and are no longer funding the solution you depend on. You don’t have authority in these cases to influence the other organization or the employee who were working with you (because well, they are just following their boss’s orders). Here also, the best technique is to seek support from your leadership, by clearly articulating the risk to the project due to changes in the priorities of the partner org. Good leaderships will try to provide support by re-aligning priorities at their level or worst case the project will be halted. But in any case, you will not be held responsible for the failure or the slippage.
Delivery & Trust
Lastly, if you do all the above skillfully, you’ll be able to deliver your project on time (even against the revised deadlines acocunting for slippages due to risks you highlighted timely). And the more your deliver, the more trust you earn.
You can’t demand trust, you have to earn it!
Often employees become victim of micro-management because their manager don’t trust them. Don’t trust their competence or commitment! Competence simply is the skills you are supposed to have to be able to tackle the challenges of the project. And commitment is your motivation and confidence to deliver against the set goals. If you don’t have any of those, you are destined to fail. But let’s say you do have both but still you are not trusted by your manager. Then you need to look back and reflect on your past projects and look for patterns.
Did you always deliver what you were given on time? Or did you often miss timelines or delivered things too late? If you spot a pattern of late deliveries or slippages, you can use the techniques shared above to ensure you deliver on time. As your manager starts seeing a pattern of reasonably timed deliveries, they’ll start trusting you more, will give you bigger opportunities and challenges to own and not question you every day or even every week on the progress.
Micromanagement stems from lack of trust. See what you can do better, to rebuild the trust.
That’s all for this one! Hope this helps you reflect on your current situation or past experiences and most importantly, take better steps in the future.
There’s one related topic here: Accountability and Ownership. Will write about that separately.
