"Are there times when it makes sense to micromanage?" 👀

"Are there times when it makes sense to micromanage?" 👀

That's a no for me, dawg... 🙈 BUT it's a question I get a lot from leaders. Well, it's actually more of a comment -"sometimes you HAVE to micromanage!!"

And while I respectfully disagree, I can understand where the comment is coming from.

Check out this week's #lockerroomchat for a more *productive* approach.

• Transcript

  [00:00:00] I led a leadership development workshop for Boise State leaders today. Something I do about twice a year, which always brings me great joy because I love Boise State. The topic of today's session was how to create a culture of success.

  And I don't want to spoil the whole thing. It's super fun and applicable. One of the topics is on micromanagement and why it's not such a great thing.

  But how do you steer away from it? How do you still set clear expectations without being a micromanager? And there's a question that comes up every single time I teach this content. I always have people who go, well, wait a minute.

  Sometimes you need to micromanage. Here's the instances that I hear as to why people think they need to micromanage. And I want to talk about how to view that differently. I often hear that micromanagement is okay or even encouraged if we have someone who's brand new and doesn't know what to do yet.

  We've got someone who's on a performance plan or maybe is struggling with performance. If there's a safety issue, [00:01:00] etc. In those instances, you're still not going to micromanage. Micromanage means doing someone's job for them.

  What people are really talking about here is very closely managing someone's performance. If micromanagement is doing the job for somebody, When you're really closely managing someone's performance, they're still doing the job.

  You are just checking in more frequently, setting more expectations and clearer expectations than you might for other people. And you might be holding their hand a little bit.

  helping them learn how to do the task until they can do it by themselves.

  So while I will never say that micromanagement is okay, and we should definitely not be doing that. There are absolutely instances where you want to closely manage someone's performance. I like to think of this as proactive performance management. We should be proactively managing the performance of our teams all the time.

  So that way we can give people everything that they need to succeed and make sure that they have the clear expectations, the follow up, the accountability to be excellent at their job.