John Hersey Leadership Blog

Motivation Through Micro-Management

One of the hazards of these challenging times is that we are seeing a significant upswing in micro-management. There are three problems with this.

First, if you absolutely feel you must micro-manage then you really have more of a talent problem than a management problem. Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great, recently said, “The right people don’t need to be managed. If you need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.” Instead of micro-managing, your time would be much better spent by getting on with the business of either training your people or replacing those that need to be micro-managed.

Second, micro-management is, often, a self-fulfilling prophecy. We think people need to be micro-managed so we do so. By micro-managing we remove all of the fun and creativity from people’s jobs. They settle and stop contributing, giving rise to the need for micro-management. If we would just get out of the way, be specific about expectations and the consequences of not fulfilling on these, people would just do their jobs.

Finally, by micro-managing we create an environment that is simply unattractive to good people. By micro-managing we actually create turnover, costly turnover and not superior results.

Please, share your thoughts on micro-managing by adding a comment below. And, pass this on to a friend.

John

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