Every company has a tech stack. Developers may use a duct-tape cobbled together stack of disparate technologies in a desperate attempt at creating the next unicorn company. Marketing organizations may use a combination of Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Drift, and a ton of others.
This article is about the Micromanagers tech stack. But first, what is a micromanager, and what is a tech stack?
What is a Micromanager?
A micromanager is a manager (note: not a leader) who closely observes their employees, requires frequent updates, reports, and gets extremely bogged down in the details of all projects. They often have a very particular way that they like something done, and if it’s not done to their standards, they’ll either do it themselves or request it be done again. Micromanagement is often a symptom of weak leadership, and most micromanagers don’t realize they’re micromanaging. When accused of micromanaging, many of them actually double down and begin micromanaging more to overcompensate for the criticism they receive. They focus solely on the day to day, and spend the majority of their time reacting to things that have already happened, rather than focusing on planning for the future.
They can often be new managers, but not always, as many have learned the traits of micromanaging from previous managers.
So, is micromanaging good or bad? Depends on who you ask, but most people who report to micromanagers say that they’ve considered quitting a job due to an overbearing, micromanaging boss. Micromanagement is proven to lower employee morale, damage trust between manager and employee, can burnout employees, and is impossible to scale. A micromanager who works 80 hours a week managing 4 employees could work 100 hours a week managing 5. Below are some of the common traits of a micromanager:
Traits of a micromanager
1.Avoids delegation. The number one trait of a micromanager is the avoidance of delegation. Delegating tasks would require giving up control, and micromanagers need to have complete and total control over every aspect of their team, including decision making, project creation, goal setting, reporting, and more.
2. Asks for reports on everything. They want you to report on anything and everything, and to look at the numbers 100 different ways, just to make sure something isn’t missed. They measure everything, regardless of whether it impacts decision making. They use reporting as a crutch to fall back on in case they get blamed for something, like a missed goal. Not only do they report on everything they possibly can, but they often want these reports daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly.
3. Doesn’t allow their direct reports to make decisions on anything (withholds authority). Whether it’s a large or small decision, micromanagers refuse to allow anybody else to make decisions without their input, and they always get the final say in any decision. If a decision is made without them, it can lead to an upset micromanager who may retaliate against or discipline their employee.
4. Doesn’t train or develop their staff. Why would they want to put themselves at a disadvantage? An untrained staff poses no threat of super-ceding the micromanagers status. A micromanager never wants to deplete their value to the organization. The ones who tend to get promoted by micromanagers are the ones who agree with the micromanager all of the time, never pushback, and don’t question the status quo.
5. Not strategic, always bogged down in details. A micromanager will never be strategic or look at the big picture, because they’re too busy focusing on the nitty gritty details to be able to see the larger picture. A micromanager may go from demanding reports on a 3% week over week drop in website traffic, to deciding what to put into gift bags for swag at a conference, to asking for an update on the project that was started yesterday, all in the same hour. If you ask them what it’s all for, they’ll stare at you blankly and then ask for more reports.
6. Always roadblocking progress. Because micromanagers are extremely busy and the only ones allowed to make decisions, projects will frequently be roadblocked, and employees will be blamed for deadlines being missed.
7. Overly critical and have one way and one way only of doing things. They provide overwhelming instructions that typically make sense only to them, and if not done to their exact standard, they’ll be extremely critical and have it be done again, even if the end product would be better if the employee had done it their own way.
8. Gets nervous whenever their reports have conversations with higher ups (or the micromanagers boss). “What is that employee is complaining about me? What are they talking to my boss about, they have no reason to talk to my boss.” These are the kinds of thoughts that go through a micromanagers mind. They believe in strict hierarchy, and any conversations that their direct reports need to have with the higher ups need to go through the micromanager first. What would happen if the higher ups thought poorly of the direct reports? It would reflect negatively on the micromanager, of course.
9. Requires checkins on everything. Pretty self-explanatory. Every project, every report, every goal needs to be checked in on multiple times so that the micromanager is always aware of where their team stands.
10. Schedules way too many meetings. Meetings are a great way to appear like you’re making progress without actually making any progress. Micromanagers love meetings for meetings sake and will frequently set many weekly or monthly recurring meetings just to have them on the calendar. In their mind, there’s nothing that comes up that wasting an hour in a conference room can’t solve. They’ll also loop in way more people into a meeting than is needed, wasting the time and resources of the company.
11. Thinks they are smarter than their employees. Micromanagers are great at finding fault in people, and when they try to seek it out, they’ll always find it. Because they are the manager and were promoted, they believe that only they know the best way to complete a job. They also feel that because they were promoted, they are smarter than their employees. They don’t like or trust employees who are smart, who ask questions or question their judgement and authority.
12. Takes credit for successes, blame direct reports on failures. If a project succeeds and a team hits their goals, a micromanager will be the first one to share the wins with the higher-ups. However, if a project fails or a goal or deadline is missed, it is always the direct reports fault. How could it be the micromanagers fault, since they scheduled and attended all of the meetings, approved the project plan, and delegated all of the tasks to the appropriate people?
13. Often has high employee turnover within their team. Most intelligent, valuable, and capable employees have job prospects at any given time, especially during a good economy. If an employee feels that their career growth is stifled, or is not allowed to make the impact that they hope to make within their area of expertise, they’ll quickly move on to find new opportunities elsewhere.
14. Sets too many priorities (everything is a high priority, some are super high priorities). A micromanager is not willing to prioritize, because it could lead to work being missed, so they set everything as a high priority. They want everything done as quickly as possible and to their specifications.
15. Works extremely long hours, and often 6 or 7 days a week. Because they’re always busy making decisions, approving work, redoing work, making comments and providing feedback on work, sitting in meetings, building and reviewing reports, and hiring new employees, they often have to work way more than a 40 hour workweek.
16. Doesn’t trust their employees. Micromanagers feel that only they are capable of completing a job to the satisfaction of the higher ups and the company, and thus, don’t trust their employees to get the job done themselves. They also feel that employees may go behind their backs (and likely have had this happen in the past).
17. Restricts communication between teams, all interdepartmental communication needs to flow through the micromanager. All communication from across the company and up needs to go through the micromanager. They are extremely protective of their direct reports time, and don’t want any other managers priorities conflicting with their own massive list of high priorities.
18. Never ask for feedback. If feedback is given to a micromanager, it is often ignored. They feel feedback should be a one way street, from the manager to the employee, and never the other way around. If accused of being a micromanager, they’ll plug their ears and yell and blame it on you for not being a good enough employee.
What is a tech stack?
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) aka what Facebook was built on. MEAN (MongoDB, Express.JS, Angular, and Node.JS).
A tech stack is a collection of tools and services that make up an application or organization. For example, a common tech stack for an engineering team may be HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Git/Github, PostgreSQL, AWS, Heroku, and Snowflake. These are all of the tools the team uses to build and maintain an application.
Organizations, such as marketing teams and sales teams, also use tech stacks. These often include a CRM like Salesforce, a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, a website CMS like Wordpress, a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, and much more.
In the past, micromanagers were frequently required to walk around the workplace and look over their employees shoulders. But now in 2020, thanks to the powers of technology, a whole entire selection of micromanaging tools are available for their use.
So, what is the micromanagers tech stack?
The Micromanagers Tech Stack
1. Slack
“Why are they away or offline? WHY ARE THEY SET TO DO NOT DISTURB? I need to slack him right now to find out”.
-Actual thoughts going through a generic micromanagers mind when you’re not green on slack.
Ah slack. The tool designed to increase and enhance workplace productivity that just ended up derailing workplace productivity even further. If a micromanager had to choose just one tool as part of their stack, Slack would be it.
Slack has the following benefits for micromanagers:
- They can always see when you’re online or offline.
- Slack by default stores entire conversation histories forever, including public and private channels and DM’s (direct messages) between users.
- Slack is impossible to ignore and most organizations expect their employees to have it on their smartphones.
- Channels. Micromanagers can setup a series of channels and require their underlings to post in them. Monitor progress on a project? Post updates in the channel please. Just scored a new major client? Post it in the channel to make yourself (but mostly the micromanager) look good in front of everyone. Going to be out of the office or late or leaving for lunch or going to get a haircut or rushing to the vet hospital because your dog is shitting all over your house or going to grab a cup of coffee to connect with an old coworker to inquire about new job opportunities? Post it in a channel so everybody, especially the micromanager, knows where you are and how to find you if they can’t reach you on slack.
Just remember, if you work under a micromanager…
That green dot better STAY GREEN.
2. Google Drive
Google Drive makes it simple to collaborate on everything from Word docs, Spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Best of all, a micromanager can watch you as you make edits to the doc in real time, so they’ll always know when you’re working and when you’re not. Google docs also makes it easy for micromanagers to add comments and revisions, tearing your work to shreds so that you can redo it their way.
Recently, Google released a new feature built for micromanagers, by micromanagers, that allows people to see the view history of the documents they share. Now you can no longer pretend that you read your micromanaging boss’s 23 page weekly update report; you actually have to open it.
They especially love reports to be built in Google Drive. You have a way to automate the report using a system like Google Analytics? Too bad, copy and paste the numbers into Google Sheets anyways, then link the cells to a Google Slide presentation. By doing all reporting manually, this is how you will make progress towards your goals.
3. Monday.com
What’s better than working on projects? Talking about projects, setting project deadlines, and planning how you’re going to work on projects, and that’s where Monday.com shines.
The company even realizes that they’re the perfect platform for micromanagers to micromanage their team performance. They’ve helpfully written a blog post designed to help their potential users (micromanagers-in-denial) come to the conclusion that yes, even they, are micromanagers and thus, the perfect candidate to use their software. Curious if you’re a micromanager? Take Monday.coms micromanager quiz.
Monday.com provides visibility for micromanagers into every task their employees are working on, and if its not in monday.com, it didn’t happen. You missed a deadline in Monday.com? Why? Forgot to update it? Why did you forget?
Not only does Monday.com provide visibility into everything their team is working on, but it also makes it easy to:
- Make reports (#2 on the traits list above)
- Require approval and input directly in the app (#3 on the traits list above)
- Roadblock progress (#6 on the traits list above)
- Submit comments and require work to be done to the satisfaction of the micromanager (#7 on the traits list above)
- Set priorities (#14 on the traits list above)
4. Screen recording software
There’s a wide variety of screen recording software out there for micromanagers to use, and there’s no one best option. Some take screenshots of the employees screens every few minutes. Others will simply record every single action the user is taking.
Bonus: keylogging software. Make sure you capture everything the employee is typing so you can see how much they dislike you.
5. Shared Calendars
Shared calendars may be the best thing to happen to micromanagers since Al Gore invented the internet. Now, micromanagers can not only see what the employee is doing and what meetings they’re holding, they can also see who they’re meeting with and the subject line and descriptions of all meetings.
Holding a web conference? They can see the dial in link too (more on this next).
6. Zoom
As remote work grows (much to the chagrin of your everyday micromanager, who wants to require people to be physically present in an open office at all times), Web conferencing is a great way to have meetings with your employees and ensure they are where they say they are by requiring them to enable their camera. Now, meetings are inescapable (#10 trait above).
7. The weekly progress report
Micromanagers may have visibility into everything an employee is working on, when they’re working on it, and how they’re doing, but the weekly progress report is still a staple in any micromanagers arsenal.
This report, ideally 3 or more pages in length, is submitted by the employee to the micromanager and details every single action the employee did during the week in excruciating detail. If there are any minutes unaccounted for, they better be explained in the weekly progress report. This is one of the oldest tools in the micromanagers stack but still one of the most used.
8. Meetings
Micromanagers LOVE meetings. Nothing ever gets done in meetings, only things are discussed about being done, and this is where managers thrive (since they don’t actually do any work). Best of all, it’s clear who is in the meeting and who isn’t, who contributes and who isn’t, who is late, and on and on. When projects aren’t completed satisfactorily, they can point back to the meetings to show that they’ve done all they could to ensure the success of the project.
The micromanagers favorite meeting is the 1 on 1. They use these as an opportunity to check in with the employee and provide a brand new list of tasks and requirements for the employee to complete before their next 1 on 1. Rarely will the micromanager discuss employee growth, job happiness, career paths, or items that are of importance to the employee. They use this as an opportunity to have another weekly or monthly standing meeting with their direct reports.
9. Salesforce
It’s hard to imagine how sales managers micromanaged their sales teams before the SaaS behemoth Salesforce, but this tool is here to stay. Managers have full visibility into everything including when reps have last contacted a prospect or customer, where opportunities are in the pipeline, how quickly they call a lead after it comes in, and much more. Salesforce has robust reporting features (#2 in the traits above) which provide everything a micromanager could ask for, and more.
10. ActiveTrak
Similar to keylogging and screen recording software mentioned before, ActiveTrak is software which provides robust reporting features to micromanagers on the productivity of their direct reports. It shows you what websites they look at, when and how often they’re idle, and much, much more.
11. Rolling chairs
This goes hand-in-hand with open offices (#12 below), but rolling chairs are a godsend for the average micromanager. Who needs to stand up to spy on your employees when you can simply roll over to their desk, which is probably close to the micromanagers desk, and look over their shoulder without them realizing you’re there? Squeaky wheels? Nothing wd-40 can’t fix, can’t let them hear you coming or they may quickly switch tabs to make it look like they’re working.
12. Open Offices
Last but not least, the open office. Open offices have become so commonplace that it’s a wonder micromanagers how micromanagers were ever able to micromanage without them. Employees working in their own office? Clearly slacking off, and also, very hard to look at their screen without the employee noticing. Cubicles? Those 4 foot walls can hide an employee slacking off, and what is a short micromanager to do? The solution? Get rid of all walls and barriers so that all employees are visible from any angle at all times. Somebody is late? No hiding it in an open office. Somebody is watching Youtube workout videos? The micromanager can see it just as well as you can.
Not only do open offices save employers a ton of money (which they don’t pass on to their employees or customers), but they provide the perfect environment for micromanagers to thrive.
Conclusion
Nobody likes to be micromanaged, but micromanagement is here to stay. One of the easiest ways to spot a micromanager is to listen and wait for a manager to say “I’m not a micromanager”, or, “I don’t like to micromanage, BUT…” If they say either of these things, they are 99% guaranteed to be a micromanager.
Micromanagers have various reasons they micromanage their employees, such as being insecure, lack trust in their employees, fear a loss of control, like to be considered the expert, and being power driven.
Are you a micromanager and do you have a favorite tool or process? Sound off in the comments below and I’ll add it to the list!
