A Close-Up Look at Micro-Management
When I was a management consultant, clients sometimes complained about “micro-management” in their organizations. I had to look it up, because I thought it just meant someone was paying too much attention to details. I learned that it’s much worse than that, but now I have been educated in real life, because I have now been micro-managed.
I am working, post-retirement, as a volunteer in a small organization. I support three Committees, each of which has a Chairman, so I take my job to be assisting those Chairmen in setting and attaining goals as well as supporting the Committee members in working as a team and being productive and effective. All was going smoothly until one Chairman resigned and was replaced by Captain Micro.
The Captain watched every action I took, heard every idea I offered and saw every communication I delivered to Members. He then criticized each of those things, saying this email to members was “too complicated”, and that idea was “inappropriate”. His instructions to me were specific but piecemeal, and I wasn’t always able to assemble them into a meaningful whole. I confess to having lost my sense of humor at one point, telling him that his latest instruction was “another piece of our communication problem”, which was the first time I had let him know how I saw the situation.
Another annoyance was that he wanted me to check with him about every little thing before I took any action, as if I couldn’t see for myself what would work. He gave me miniature assignments – send out this email to the members, forward him a copy of Aaron’s article from last week, etc. And he often messed up my schedule by giving me several different due-dates and times for each request. Multiple emails and phone calls showered down in the first week of working with him, which became annoying. I suspect he could hear the impatience in my voice by that Friday afternoon.
Week Two didn’t gain any momentum. Fewer calls and emails, but he was still stalling on taking any substantive action for the Committee and was not allowing me to make any decisions (or he corrected the ones I had already made). What had been an unfolding project for the Committee was now a mute folder lying on my desk waiting for attention, and I couldn’t get him to move ahead. He didn’t seem to know or care what I had done for the prior Chairman nor to have any sense of urgency about moving the members’ teamwork forward to meet the goal everyone had aligned on before his arrival.
It’s over now. Captain Micro won’t work with me – he’s going to do it all himself. Perhaps I’m too headstrong, pushing to finish the Committee’s current project so we could move on to future aspirations. It appears he has decided to take over the facilitation tasks I had been doing – sending out what he chooses to the members, and perhaps also taking notes on their monthly calls and creating an agenda for the next call (though he may not think such tasks are necessary).
Now I’m supporting only two Committees. I initially feared that Captain Micro’s lack of support would undermine the group’s sense of purpose and cohesion, but several members have now been in touch with me, looking for more productive pathways to get what they wanted to accomplish. Captain Micro will go his own way with his new Committee – and I wish them all the best. I’ll continue my accountability for supporting the two remaining Committees as best I can, and be grateful for the trust and respect of their leaders.
