On the heels of Steve Jobs’ departure as Apple’s CEO many have written about his and Apple’s success. In many of these articles the word micromanager has appeared as his preferred management style—and the “secret” to Apple’s success. I think that in most cases that is an overreach!
Why?
As a career coach I work with many clients who come to me because how their managers manage them. Often, there are two extremes: Complete permissiveness, with little or no accountability on the one hand, and obsessiveness about minutia to point of suffocation, where people have no breathing room to create and enjoy what they do, on the other. In either case the manager has failed to provide the right environment for a person’s growth and has done a grave disservice to their place of work.
So, what is Micromanagement? Before I answer that let me explain what management is: A manager provides the right environment for their team to produce the greatest amount of value to their place of work. They do that by knowing and understanding the functions of a manager (the four functions I have often written about: Leading, Planning, Organizing, and providing Controls) in a way that allows those under them to provide the most value to each other and to their company, and an environment of growth through creativity, risk-taking, and learning new things. As a manager moves up the ladder they are expected to do progressively more management work, and less technical work.
With that understanding of what management is let us now look at some behaviors micromanagers exhibit:
A: Focus on the “How,” and not on the “What”
This characteristic of a micromanager has to do with how their team and each member of the team do what they do. Instead of focusing on providing a specific result of what needs to be accomplished as an end objective, micromanagers provide some vague guidance of what is expected from the team, and they keep checking on them as they shape their own view of what their boss really wants from them over time. Here, they focus more on how anyone on the team is going about doing what they are working on, than on what they are doing and why. They will obsess over the minutia such as when they come to work, how long they take their breaks, how they write their emails, and so on.
In the case of one client her manager expected her to respond to any email he sent to my client within two hours regardless of the time of the day or the week. Here, my client was a project manager in a development group, not a manager of a 24×7 operation. His boss was an obsessive compulsive individual with no family and no outside activities. In this case after guiding my client and coaching her on how to deal with this boss did not work, she had to move to another group.
B: Lack of consistency of expectations
Most people will respond to what is asked of them if it is communicated clearly and both parties agree that it is doable, or at least worth attempting. Micromanagers lack this basic discipline, but providing inputs as they make up the end objective over time and keep changing the requirements of the assignment. This makes it very difficult for their team members to function, as there is no clear vision that is driving the overall team. Many team members are frustrated by having to re-do what was previously done with no clear end in sight. This type of micromanaging is pernicious and causes much stress to all who are on the team.
C: My way or no way
Here, the manager has not grown out of his individual contributor mind-set and has not embraced bringing in the four functions of managing I have mentioned earlier, as a part of their growing into the new role. As an individual contributor the manager had achieved certain proficiency in their skill. So, now as a manager they expect all their team members to do what they did using the same methods and approaches. Instead of focusing on the right outcome they focus on the means and methods (once again, the How). This type of micromanagement stifles team members from learning new ways of doing things more efficiently or differently.
This is by no means a complete catalog of behaviors micromanagers exhibit, but merely a sampling and some underlying drivers. There are many other ways a manager can stifle a team’s creativity through various ways of micromanaging it.
Now that we have seen the behaviors of a micromanager, would it be fair to call Steve Jobs a micromanager? Absolutely not! Those who have clarity of purpose, a clear vision of the outcome, an ability to challenge the team to surpass its own limits, and a passion to deliver nothing but the best, a better descriptor would be “practical perfectionist,” not a “micromanager.” If Steve Jobs were a micromanager in the sense described in this article, then he would not have been able to attract the gifted team that surrounded him, and been able to achieve what he did for Apple!