Business LockerRoom Blog

The Invisible Trap of the Most Important Management Activity

by Kelly Riggs

Here’s a silly question: What is THE most important activity for a manager?

• Is it to keep a close watch on employee productivity, ensuring the company receives a good return on its payroll investment?
• Is it to manage to the budget, controlling expenses and improving efficiency?
• Is it to allocate resources, ensuring that all projects are on schedule?
• Is it to be a good leader, prioritizing employee health and creating a workplace environment that engages employees?

See? Not the best question, it? After all, each of these activities is really important, right? But, just for the sake of argument, in the course of a typical day or week, if you could only do ONE, could you argue if any one of them be the MOST important?

Maybe the true answer lies in the question itself.

What I mean to say is that – for managers – perhaps the process of determining the most important thing is the most important thing they do. After all, someone has to determine the priorities of the team. Which is to say that perhaps THE most important thing for a manager to do is to make sure that the priorities chosen are the right ones.

Great thought. Except that this well-intentioned idea can also cause a team to drive off a cliff.

Here’s how: If a manager has been led to believe that she, and she alone, is capable of determining the team’s priorities – that only she is capable of understanding how to create the best results for the team, and that she must make every decision and solve every problem – then, ultimately, the most important thing in that manager’s mind is not the team’s execution of those priorities, but her execution of those priorities.

So, upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the “team” is not really a team after all.

Instead, it is a self-limiting team of exactly ONE person. With some assistants.

Business management is a wide career with opportunities in varied fields. Every type of business can have a management position that may need specific educational background. For instance, one can opt for healthcare management, finance management, aviation management (if this interests you, you can check out a few Aviation management courses), facility management, etc. In every field, a manager has to oversee the overall functioning of the department, control the work process, plan, organize and direct employees to enhance the workability of the business.

The World According to Micro-Managers

Of course, what I’ve described is extremely common, and it fits the definition of a micro-manager. The micro-manager is someone who manages “with great or excessive control or attention to detail.”

The key word here is excessive.

Although there are times when a significant amount of control may need to be exercised – when someone is newly hired and inexperienced, for example – it is extraordinarily rare to find high-performance employees who want or need “excessive control.”

However, many micro-managers I have observed do not see themselves as being bad for the team, or being bad in any kind of way, actually. In fact, many micromanagers believe that their excessive control and attention-to-detail is exactly what the team needs, and is exactly what makes them good at their jobs!

They have NOT come to the conclusion that the most important thing in the workplace is to develop the full performance potential of each employee. Instead, they believe that the most important thing is the final result produced by the (so-called) team, which he/she determines and controls.

In other words, the perceived end (good performance) justifies the means (micro-management).

So, here is the question: Are you a micro-manager?

These descriptive statement about micro-managers may provide you with some answers:

• They believe that being a manager means that they have more knowledge and/or skill than their employees.
• They believe they can perform most of the tasks of their staff, probably better.
• They believe that they care about things (quality, deadlines, etc.) more than their staff.
• They feel it is more efficient to do the job themselves than give the job to a staff member.
• They are overly critical of their staff. When they review the work of staff members, they tend to find at least one thing wrong each time.
• They don’t allow their staff to learn from their mistakes
• They get irritated if staff make decisions without consulting them
• They spend an inordinate amount of time overseeing single projects
• They pride themselves on being “on top of” their staff’s projects.
• They are overworked, and their staff is not.
• They come into the office earlier than any staff member and leave later. If they are away from the office, they call in at least twice a day, including when they are sick or on vacation.
• They seldom praise staff members.
• Their staff appear frustrated, depressed, and/or unmotivated.
• Their staff do not take initiative – they have to check with the manager before doing anything
• They have been referred to as controlling, dictatorial, judgmental, critical, bureaucratic, suspicious, or snooping by staff
  [Excerpted from “What Is Micromanagement? And What You Can Do to Avoid It,” by Steve Lemex. Global Knowledge White Paper.]

No wonder micro-managers think they are exclusively qualified to determine the team’s priorities – they just think they’re smarter and more capable than anyone else.

Sounds kinda harsh when you put it like that, doesn’t it?

But how many of those statements sound a bit like you?

There is one piece of good news in all of this: You can be successful as a micro-manager! No doubt about it, micro-managers often produce good, even great, results. However, you have to realize that the “team” (such as it is) will never succeed without you.

If you insist on doing everything, that is exactly what will happen, so quit whining about your employees’ lack of initiative. The team will likely suffer a high turnover. Employees will tell you they got a better offer, but they really just want to work for someone that will give them a chance to grow and develop. The team will not be innovative, because the “really good” ideas always come from you.

When you drive off the cliff, it might be a long, long way to the bottom.

On the other hand, if you want to create a high-performance team – and be able to take a vacation without being tethered to your email and cell phone – “the most important thing” you can do is to make sure that developing your employees is the most important thing you do. There should be no need for you to do anything work-related if you’re on time off. You should be able to trust your team members enough to know that they will get the job done, without having to check on them every hour. Your attention should be on finding, say, how much does a private jet flight cost, so that you can organize and go on a luxury holiday in peace. As you plan your vacation and start booking travel and accommodation, that’s what you should focus on, and not on your work.

Additionally, in order for them (employees) to grow, they need to learn to be able to manage a day or two in the absence of their employer, especially if they can see on the Vacation tracker (if your company uses one) that you’re on leave.

Then, all those day-to-day priorities you establish can be identified and accomplished by the people you actually hired to do them.

Wouldn’t that be great for your next vacation??