What is Micromanagement?

Employee satisfaction is a team’s overall contentment with their roles, tasks, responsibilities, and future within the organisation. Satisfied employees are more engaged and motivated, leading to higher productivity levels, higher retention levels, reduced costs and greater profitability. In the UK the leading causes of employee unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their roles and with their employers are low pay, lack of recognition and micromanagement.

The Drewberry Employee Benefits and Workplace Satisfaction Survey 2024 found that 49% of workers said low salary was the main reason for their unhappiness, followed by micromanagement 48%, and lack of recognition 47%, with 67% of employees ready to move jobs within the year.

Employees want to work for managers who treat them with dignity and respect, and who value their contributions. Managers who intervene too often or too extensively in their team members’ work activities can have psychological effects on teams that are constantly controlled, making employees feel undervalued, disempowered, demoralised and dissatisfied.

In this article we examine micromanagement and will look at some of the reasons why managers micromanage. We will also highlight the effects of micromanagement and share some strategies and tips that can help to manage a micromanager.

Explanation of Micromanaging

Micromanagement is a negative style of management or leadership when a manager exercises excessive control, detailed oversight and unnecessary scrutiny over another’s work and this does not necessarily need to be someone who is a direct line report. Someone who micromanages feels the need to control the actions, tasks and decisions of others to make sure an activity or task is completed correctly to their specification or to their deadline. They often want to be involved in every decision, they can avoid delegating work, or they may spend a lot of time focusing on small details.

Micromanagement is the very opposite of empowerment, which is a management style that prioritises giving team members increased autonomy in their roles. Micromanagement is a form of disempowerment, the constant scrutiny and criticism can make team members incapable of believing in themselves or thinking on their own. When team members are micromanaged, they do not have the authority to create, innovate and make decisions on their own work, and this can lead to demoralisation, decreased productivity and high employee turnover. A study found that:

• 85% of employees believed micromanagement decreased their morale
• 79% of employees had experienced micromanagement
• 71% of employees considered it detrimental to creativity and interfered with their job performance
• 69% of employees considered changing jobs due to micromanagement
• 36% of employees actually changed jobs

Micromanagers have a tendency to focus on any mistakes made, and any weaknesses that their team members may have, rather than highlighting their achievements and efforts, leaving team members to believe that they are not competent and that their skills are not valued.

Micromanagement has a number of similarities to bullying, as it is a form of manipulation to control others, often due to an imbalance of power. Micromanagers believe that over-controlling is an effective way to produce a desired result.

Why do people micromanage?

There are various reasons why a person displays micromanaging behaviours, these reasons maybe both conscious and/or subconscious. Often one of the main causes of micromanagement is that the person is lacking leadership and management skills. The manager may have taken on the role, but may not have undertaken any appropriate management or leadership training, and so might resort to micromanaging because they don’t know how to effectively delegate and guide and support their teams. Some managers may only have experienced being micromanaged themselves and just like any behaviour, they have learnt to manage by micromanaging, emulating the behaviours of their own managers. Other reasons why people micromanage can include:

• Lack of confidence in their own ability to lead a team. A new or inexperienced manager may worry that they are not quite up to the role and try to overcompensate for their lack of confidence by trying to keep tabs on everything that the team members are doing. This insecurity causes them to micromanage their line reports.
• Having a distorted idea of the role of a manager. Some people who micromanage have a poor understanding of the difference between overseeing their team members’ work and controlling every aspect of their work. They may also use feedback as a mechanism for criticism rather than an opportunity for development.
• Lack of trust in their team’s capabilities. Some managers may have experienced underperformance either in their current team members or in teams that they have managed in the past. This experience causes them to micromanage activities to ensure that team members’ performance meets their standards and holds no surprises.
• Conversely, some managers are concerned that high performing team members may overshadow their own performance, so they micromanage as a way to maintain control and to ensure that they are seen as indispensable.
• High pressured work cultures can cause some managers to micromanage in order to feel that they are on top of all activities, when trying to meet their own manager’s expectations to deliver specific results, particularly if deadlines are tight or to minimise risks of failure.
• Some managers find comfort in overseeing every detail of their team members’ work and need to maintain a tight grip on all activities in order to maintain a feeling of being in control. They feel a sense of security and comfort in controlling everything.
• When a manager lacks trust in their team members to carry out their responsibilities and have no effective performance management strategy such as setting and assessing measurable objectives, they may resort to micromanaging as a means to ensure that work is getting done to the standards and deadlines required.
• Similarly, managers who do not employ efficient communication channels with their team members, micromanage to keep themselves informed about who is doing what, where and when.
• Home and remote working has presented challenges for managers who are unable to physically interact and monitor their team members’ activities, and some managers resort to micromanaging behaviours to compensate for this lack of hands on supervision.
• There are then managers who like nothing more than to nit-pick, nothing is ever good enough and they will double check everything with the view to finding some fault or something that they feel that the team member(s) could have done better. These managers are striving for perfection and hold the view that perfect outcomes are only possible if they are very hands-on.

Whether micromanaging is intentional or not, it has the impact of creating a negative work environment for those who are subject to the behaviour. it has the impact of creating a negative work environment for those who are subject to the behaviour.intentional or not, it has the impact of creating a negative work environment for those who are subject to the behaviour.

Negatives of Micromanagement

Micromanagement can create a negative or even toxic work environment in any organisation. Being micromanaged can be very demoralising and demotivating for all those who experience it. Micromanagers often have difficulty trusting their team members to complete tasks without their constant oversight, and they may feel the need to be involved in every decision and detail. This excessive control, lack of trust, and close supervision impact both individual well-being and overall team dynamics. When team members feel that their every move is scrutinised, it can have the psychological effect of diminishing their self-confidence and can undermine their belief in their own capabilities. It can also increase stress, frustration, and may lead to burnout and higher employee turnover.

When employees are micromanaged, they often feel as if they cannot do anything right, that nothing they do matters, this can negatively affect their job performance and productivity. They may also feel less motivated to get work done, or they may not even care about how well they complete a task as they know that the manager will change things anyway, the impact of this means that employees can become resentful, disengaged, or feel distrusted and as a result they can become less committed and less productive.

Being micromanaged often has a detrimental effect on the physical and mental wellbeing of employees. Whilst it may be hard to link micromanagement and health problems directly, the increased stress that this management style inflicts on employees and being constantly under pressure in a job, can lead to burnout which is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion. Some of the common signs of this include:

• Feeling withdrawn, losing drive and motivation
• Decreasing self-confidence
• Intense emotional reactions, for example, being more tearful, sensitive or aggressive
• Holding oneself responsible for negative outcomes
• Turning a positive into a negative
• Minimising successes due to focus on challenges
• Avoiding certain tasks
• Poor concentration
• Finding it hard to make decisions
• Being irritable or short-tempered
• Tiredness

Stress can also increase the risk of physical illnesses. For example:

• Headaches
• Difficulty in sleeping
• Back pain
• Altered appetite
• Digestive conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome
• Skin conditions
• Heart disease

Some people may also try to reduce the symptoms of stress with alcohol, cigarettes, tranquillisers or other drugs, which can lead to further, more serious health issues. Work-related stress caused by micromanagement is a growing problem that affects not only the health and wellbeing of employees, but also the productivity of organisations.

Team members are not the only ones that can be affected by stress, the manager who micromanages is also at risk of stress and burnout as micromanaging can be exhausting. It takes a lot of effort to not only keep on top of the teams’ workload in such an intrusive manner, but to also keep on top of their own work too, this can cause fatigue leading to reduced effort and output by the entire team, manager included.

When a manager controls every aspect of their team members’ work they often cause delays in productivity and deadlines can be missed by focusing too much on achieving perfection over completion. Constant interruptions and checking will also inevitably slow things down.

Micromanagement has the effect of stifling creativity and innovation, as employees are less likely to propose fresh solutions or improvements to existing products, services or processes when they lack empowerment and autonomy. Having ownership of tasks and projects enables employees to approach them in their own way, and to problem solve and find solutions to any issues that may arise.

Employees who are micromanaged have their development and learning opportunities restricted by a manager who constantly controls their efforts, as facing challenges, and making mistakes can provide some of the best opportunities to learn and grow. This not only impacts the employees’ growth, it also restricts the growth of the organisation as learning organisations are the ones that are continuously improving and innovating.

When employees are not able to do their jobs effectively, or are not given the opportunity to grow and develop their skills, they will often leave an organisation. Employee turnover due to micromanagement and the impact that this has on employee morale, as we have seen earlier, accounts for a substantial percentage of people leaving their jobs. According to HRZone, staff turnover costs British companies at least £4.13bn every year as new employees take up to eight months to reach optimum productivity levels, and the average cost for replacing a departing team member is £30,614.

Micromanagement can spread throughout a workplace, impacting the entire organisation and the negative effects that it can have on a workplace atmosphere and even culture can make it harder to recruit new employees, particularly as websites such as Glassdoor publish employer reviews for prospective candidates to read prior to applying for a job. Reviews stating aspects such as toxic workplaces and micromanagement will not help these organisations to recruit and may cause reputational damage that can impact the organisation’s business standing.

10 Signs of Micromanagement

Micromanagement is a negative style of management, a classic example of what micromanagement can look like in real life might be an instruction by a manager to copy them into all correspondence including emails so they can keep an eye on what is going on. The manager then proceeds to reply to correspondence and emails that they have been copied into, thereby undermining their team member’s ability to handle them. However, micromanaging behaviours can range from being blatant as seen above, to also being more subtle, and can sometimes be more difficult to spot. Micromanaging is characterised by a lack of trust and the need for control and it often manifests in various ways, including:

• Checking in on people or requiring people to check in constantly. Micromanagers need to know what everyone is doing all the time, and they often interrupt their team’s work to ask for updates. This shows a lack of trust and ends up interfering with their team’s work rather than just ensuring that team members are on track and establishing whether support is required.
• Managers who micromanage their team members closely dictate how tasks should be completed, they take away the team members’ ability to make decisions necessary to carrying out their work leaving little room for them to exercise their autonomy.
• Micromanagers can excessively monitor team members’ time by closely scrutinising how they spend their time and / or excessively monitoring task activities to see if their team members are working and what they are working on. Some micromanagers may overuse tools such as time tracking and / or surveillance equipment such as CCTV to keep a close eye of their teams’ activities and they may employ an excessive control of time management.
• Micromanagers often struggle with delegation; they often prefer to handle important responsibilities themselves believing that no one could do a better job. Team members can feel that opportunities to utilise and develop their skills are being stifled by this lack of trust.
• If the micromanager does delegate work or when they are assigning tasks and/or projects to team members they provide excessively detailed instructions and/or specifications. This obsession with even the most minor details often leads to overcomplicating the task, and leaves little room for the team members to have any personal input into how to achieve the outcome.
• Micromanagers are typically resistant to suggestions or ideas input from their team members or others as they prefer to maintain control. They can even disregard or dismiss the expertise of others, making decisions based on their limited perspective and/or experience.
• Managers who micromanage have a tendency to involve themselves in every detail of tasks and / or projects, no matter how minor, even when team members are perfectly capable of completing tasks and / or projects without constant supervision.
• Many micromanagers regularly interrupt their team members’ work to provide unsolicited advice and guidance. This not only disrupts team members’ activities, it also has the effect of undermining team members’ capabilities and confidence.
• A manager being over critical of completed work and / or requesting revisions in finished work without clear justifiable reasons, in other words nit-picking, can be an indication that a micromanager is taking control over a team members’ work.
• Team members who appear to be experiencing heightened stress levels, frustration, decreased job satisfaction, reduced productivity and diminished morale due only to their manager’s management style are likely to be reporting to a micromanager.

Being able to recognise the signs and behaviours of micromanagement and being able to differentiate them from the behaviours of good supportive, effective management is important to foster a positive, productive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered.

How to deal with a Micromanager

Dealing with a manager who micromanages can be challenging, but it is possible to navigate this situation effectively. Building effective communication with your manager is crucial for establishing trust and minimising misunderstandings.

Start by clarifying your manager’s expectations when you are given a task or begin a project, this helps to reassure your manager that you are committed to meeting their brief and producing high quality work. Use active listening during these conversations, paraphrasing and reflecting back what has been said. This will demonstrate attentiveness and willingness to understand your manager’s instruction.

Provide your manager with regular updates on your progress, achievements, and any challenges that you may encounter in your work. Give them these updates before they ask for them, such as sending them emails letting them know what you plan on getting done in the next day or week. This will help to pre-empt their constant checking, and keeps your manager informed. If you take the lead and schedule regular check-ins to discuss updates, seek feedback, and address any concerns, you can help avoid unscheduled interruptions and demonstrate that you want to keep your manager informed.

Try to come to these catch-ups prepared with potential solutions to any challenges, demonstrating your problem-solving abilities and showing that you are more than capable of managing yourself. You might also suggest tasks where you can work with more autonomy, providing feedback at agreed intervals, this can assist your manager to increasingly let go of control.

If your manager continues to micromanage, arrange a meeting with them and in a non-confrontational way, give them specific examples of when their management style led to unproductive results and explain how this makes you feel. You may say for example “During the project, when you check my work so frequently, it makes me feel that I am doing something wrong or that you don’t trust me to do this”, then provide your manager with practical alternatives to keep them updated.

There will however be cases when you may need additional support when dealing with the challenges of a micromanager. Your organisation’s Human Resources professionals should be able to help you with guidance on navigating the relationship with your manager and exploring possible interventions. If your organisation has an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), this resource often offers counselling services and support for employees facing workplace challenges.

Final Thoughts

Micromanagement at work is a negative management style that has detrimental effects on employee morale, creativity, and productivity. By understanding what micromanagement is and recognising the signs, you can take proactive steps to address it and begin to build a more collaborative and trusting relationship with your manager.

Organisations also have a responsibility to recognise the toxic effects that micromanaging has on their employees, organisational culture and productivity, and they need to provide managers with the appropriate training to ensure that they can learn to empower their teams and effectively manage their performance without the need for controlling and excessive micromanagement.