Lets talk micromanagement

I HATE IT!

Seriously, I hate micromanagement with all my heart. I hate micromanaging because I just hate for that to be done to me. Over the years I have been lucky to be trusted and not being micromanaged. If there’s a toxic trait that leads to burnout it has to be micromanagement. It’s even worse than a 5 year old asking when the snacks are coming every 1 second.

What is micromanagement?

Most of us will be familiar with it already and have faced it at some stage or another.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines micromanagement as “manage[ment] especially with excessive control or attention to details”.

In essence, you are being controlled all the time and have no space to even utilise your skills. Over time being micromanaged will lead to burnout. Even kids hate being micromanaged, why do you think they throw tantrums? When you feel you have no control over what you do, your brain just goes crazy and wants to throw everything on the floor and call it quits. Whereas as a kid you can do it, as a professional you end up bottling it up until you either quit or burnout.

Where does micromanagement come from?

It comes from lack of trust. You don’t trust your team so you are on them all the time. Mostly this comes to the fact that you don’t trust yourself, so you pass that mistrust onto others. In order to confirm you still have power, you need to FEEL in control and be on top of others all the time. It feels good for a micromanager to show that he/she has power.

Lets dig deeper:

• Impostor syndrome – If you don’t believe you deserve where you are, you will be more obsessed with control, hence you will try to control every step your team does leading to micromanagement.
• Seeking power – By controlling your team you are telling them you are the one in control, in power, and that feels good. If there are other situations in your life you don’t have control (e.g. your family situation for instance) it will feel like at least you can control something: your team.
• You don’t trust yourself – If deep inside you don’t trust yourself, how can you expect to trust others?
• Perfeccionists – These struggle to delegate, so you end up being on top of every task you delegated to your team.
• Fear of losing control – You want to be seen by those above you that you are in control, so you feel the need to control every move of your team and be in copy of every single email. Again here also comes from a trust perspective.
• You are being micromanaged yourself – Micromanagement promotes more micromanagement. If your own boss is being micromanagements, the odds are that “style” will be cascaded down.

Impact on the team

Micromanagement leads to a toxic environment where no one trusts one another. By just following orders the team will shut down their own thinking – there’s no incentive to be creative, to bring ideas to the table because they know they won’t be heard. Micromanagement promotes a culture of “shut-down”, you don’t want to be in the fire line and do just the bare minimum without ever suggesting anything different. You just do what you are told.

Eventually the environment will be so toxic that people will either burn out or leave.

Some people actually need “some” micromanagement

Something I can’t comprehend, but some people have been so  ingrained in being told what to do, they can’t cope with the freedom of articulating how to deliver a given piece of work and they expect all the tasks to be spoon fed. I have had people in the team that operate like that. It’s just very time consuming and not the way I like to operate.

What can you do instead?

If you are resorting to micromanagement to manage your team I would step back and try to assess where that is coming from. If you don’t trust them, then you shouldn’t work with them. If you don’t trust yourself then try to understand why and where is that coming from.

I know a lot of managers struggle with this, just because you have amazing productivity working by yourself, doesn’t mean you will have all the required skills to be a leader. Some people are just amazing SME’s or decision makers but not necessarily good at managing people – well I would go as far as they shouldn’t even be in a position where they have to manage people.

Let me tell you a secret: if your team shines, you shine stronger. Empower your team and they will raise you up too! (this is what micromanagers believe they are doing but end up getting the exact opposite).

In order to be a true leader you need to:

• Trust your team – If they are there it’s because they are meant to be experts in their areas. Listen to them, you might develop yourself. You don’t need to know every single step they are doing, this is why they are there. You just need to ensure they have the right guidance from you in terms of what the goals are and you help them remove any roadblocks they might face along the way.
• Empower them – Once you shared the goals with them, listen to what they have to say and their ideas to meet those goals or even augment them. If you give them the right tools you will be surprised on how far they go. Let them shine as you will shine brighter yourself too.
• Have their backs – And they will have yours. People will tend to go above and beyond when they feel they are protected and their manager is there for them. Don’t believe me? Give it and go and see for yourself.
• Guide them – Help them reach the answers they seek, propose other people they could go and speak to and in essence let them grow. How amazing is it to work for a team that looks up for you and wants to deliver the very best for you?

If there’s someone that despite all the above doesn’t work, then have the right discussions and either that person would be better off working on another team or just leaving altogether.

At the end of the day, whereas work is just work, having the right manager will be the one thing that makes or breaks. If you empower others, they will be the very best and trust you to share bad news because they know together you will find solutions and move on. Everyone will want to work with you and they will help you go where you want to go and that is where great work gets done.

Great Expectations

How great expectations are leading to great disappointment and it’s all our fault.

Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with the book from Charles Dickens (or maybe it does).

Let’s face it, we live in a world with unprecedently great expectations. Everyone expects something out of you, you expect a great deal of those around you and on yourself as well. With all the technology around us, we just expect more more and more.

You are expected to be a great parent, the best employee your company can have, the best partner at home and be extremely fit – both physically and mentally. Although we always had expectations – it’s part of being human after all – the imbalance started to come when suddendly work expectations just kept on growing as if not even the sky is a limit.

In a post-covid world, companies got hooked to the long hours we were doing when working from home while at the same time they started to demand all employees to be back at the office, some the full 5 days others some kind of hybrid in between.

The concept is a lot older really, but did indeed accelerate with technology and the rise of the smart phones. You can have emails and internal messaging 24/7 so you are expected to pick up on those email and messages all the time. Bit by bit we started to do so. We wake up in the morning and check emails and work messages (not just instangrams and tik-toks). In the evening, while you are doing dinner, you end up checking emails too and after dinner might even be back to your desk – now that we all know we can work from home – and continue just to catch up on a few things.

Then weekend comes and because the week was so crazy we end up doing some work over the week too. What was meant to be just a quick scroll through the emails and to dos, easily becomes a few hours which are not eating from your personal and rest time. Little by little we do more and more.

This keeps getting encouraged when celebrating success at your organisation. How many individual or team awards will contain something in the lines of: “This team or individual worked weekends and really long hours to get this work done! Amazing, well done!”. I can’t but roll my eyes at this as I know it keeps on fueling the expectation that we need to carry on to do more.

If you see your whole team logging late and sending emails over the weekend you will end up – unconsciously – feeling guilty and also wanting to be there for the team. But the more everyone does, the more management expects you to do.

The reward for good work is always more work.

Now breaking news, it’s all our fault as well.

Gen Z has a point here (Good summary from Deloitte on Gen Z here). All other generations believe they are lazy, spoiled and don’t want to commit to anything. But what if they have a point? They want to do meaningful work and want to feel connected and don’t seem to be willing to accept workism. I say they do have a point and we should try to see the world from their point of view.

If we all continue to fueling the constant rising expectations how can we expect they will become realistic? It’s everyone’s role to bring them down to earth.

Protect your boundaries

We all have the same 24h, but if you want to avoid burnout or end up consumed by work (workism) then you have to protect your boundaries. Yes there will be cases where indeed you have to do more work. There are major milestones and it’s really critical you are there. But then you need to be able to step down when it’s no longer critical.

A lot of the work that comes late – including requests to work late evenings and weekends – comes down to bad planning. If we don’t challenge those asks, the people responsible for articulate the plans will never step back and revisit what they are doing, they will just continue to use your personal time (and all your team’s time) as contigency to get work done.

Always start by asking: is this really critical? Is someone dying? Will the organization go down or could this result in a major reputational risk? Or does it come down to someone doing bad planning and now you don’t want to say no to the leadership team? If it’s the latter, I’m afraid to say it, but step up to your mistakes. A lot comes due to missing communications between those responsible for planning and the team actually doing the work.

I would never expect someone to be able to plan everything in isolation, you need the experts to tell you how long it takes. With experience, the ones responsible for planning can judge if the estimates are being conservative or not, but that dialogue needs to exist. Just don’t come and ask for your team to work every weekend (or quite a big number of them).

Don’t be afraid to challenge the asks by having a constructive dialogue with your line manager, you might find both learn quite a lot along the way.

As for the organisation’s point of view – as I’ve written quite often – a well rested brain is more efficient at resolving difficult situations and bringing up creative to either resolve big problems or keep on adding more value to clients and stakeholders alike.

When you don’t break, you break

I receive this article a few times this week (from different colleagues) and I guess it probably says a lot of what almost 99.9% of us are feeling.

If you haven’t read it already please do. As a short summary it highlights the importance of taking breaks (which we all should already know about), or in essence you’re the one who breaks.

In the world of covid, all of us are working from home and with that it meant 5 minute coffee chats were replaced by 1h meetings. We are simply having meeting overload. And if you end up with far too many your brain can’t really have the necessary breaks to recharge. Here’s the picture from the article:

My personal story

Given I’m a project manager working with people accross multiple locations I do end up having a ton of meetings. On average I’m between 10 to 14 meetings a day! I end up being dragged in a lot of meetings in the capacity of SME as well. Whereas I’m protecting my team from too many meetings, I’m not protecting myself at all. I have huge meeting fatigue (despite me implementing all the rules I shared under show your calendar who’s the boss).

Also I am in a really stressful project at the moment, and what the meeting fatigue above is adding to is that I am just exploding in meetings where I feel incredibly frustrated that the right things are not being followed. This Friday I received a ridiculous email which took my stress levels throught the roof. Given I had blocked my calendar I went for a walk (and also to get my daughter’s school uniform). On the way in I was still fuming and feeling really stressed out, but on the way back I was feeling a lot better.

I have also tried to go back to mid day meditation. When I was pregnant (and due to the stressful nature of my work), I ended up using one of those meditation apps and during 3 years I did it every single day, so now trying to incorporate quick breaks to just breathe in and out.

My take on the breaks

The article advises for breaks in between meetings, but I would rather plug all the meetings together and then manage to get a 2h slot of uninterrupted work. I find that on the few occasions I manage to sit down and focus on a piece of work and complete it, my brain feels happy and I feel good about it. 45 minutes and 15m break allow you for a comfort break but I would never get any work done. Although, this is really specific to my own case I guess.

My ideal day would be something like this: start by looking at my calendar, scan through the emails to see if I received anything critical overnight, then get 2h uninterrupted work (after breakfast), plug in a few meetings. Lunch break with a quick walk outside, come back for more meetings and then another 2h of completing work and preparing for the next day.

So really, find what works for you but ensure you get good quality breaks in your day, otherwise you’re the one who breaks and no one will thank you for it.

When less is more

I will never forget the words of a friend of mine when he told me: “Don’t work harder, work smarter”. I think this is a mantra that has stayed with me despite me struggling to follow it.

On this note I was having a chat with my husband around how we couldn’t see ourselves going back to south europe (me spefically) because I can’t tollerate their ways of working. As we can’t travel right now, how about a cultural travel to the different ways of working and use them as a debate if longer hours represent more productivity: spoiler alert, they don’t.

I guess most people’s diagrams will be similar to the one below (you can notice my lack of drawing skills):

For most of us at least (I still can’t compreenhed the vampires out there who are very productive in the evening. At some point at uni that’s the only point I could focus not because I was more productive but because the looming deadlines would trigger an adrenaline to finish), the most productive slot is actually the morning. As per my “how to show your calendar who’s the boss” post, that’s the slot you should reserve for your most important tasks.

Then there’s lunch and we all know after lunch all energy is in trying to diggest so it’s not a very productivy slot anyway, then you focus on the last few activities and after a while there’s a point where if you continue to work longer there is a big risk you’ll do mistakes (negative productivity) and next morning you’ll want to slap yourself because you’ll have to rush to fix the mistakes you didn’t even notice you were making.

I remember once I was doing something in excel and I was so tired I was not even thinking of the best way to get it done, my husband asked me what I was doing and he proposed a much faster way of completing what I wanted (using formulas vs doing something totally manual). If I had not been so tired I could have thought about it too.

So how about a little travel?

Disclaimer: I’m using only the examples of the places I’ve worked from or where I’m familiar with, I’m sure there are many more that could be added here.

South Europe

Not productive at all! I started my career in south Europe and a normal day goes like this (for private workers, for state workers it’s probably closer to the Swedish model ahahahaha):

• Arrive to the office around 09h, turn on the coffee and go for breakfast
• Around 10h get together in the coffee machine and do a break for coffee (and coffee chat)
• Around 11h30 most people are thinking where to go for lunch
• From at least 13h to 14h people are out for lunch – except if there are critical meetings or deadlines (not uncommon to have a 2h lunch break). Lunch is always sitting down with your colleagues
• Then another coffee break in the afternoon
• At 17 something that’s when your line managers will remember something you need to deliver next day
• Leave the office between 19h to 20h if not later
• Arriving late means something 30m later (I had meetings who were delayed for like 1h30)
• Until covid there was no such thing as working from home, if the “boss” doesn’t see you, no one believes you are delivering work

London (or any UK big city)

• Most people arrive to the office around 8h30 (I was in the office at 07h because I need silence to start my day)
• Between 9h to 10h most people will do a 15m break to get a coffee and have a chat with some colleagues. It’s not uncommon to use this slot to have mini meetings to discuss more confidential topics which can’t be discussed with the wither team
• Lunch is mostly at the desks with a quick break outside for a quick walk or some people manage to squeeze going to the gymn. Most people only spend like 30m in total with a lunch break
• Most people leave between 17h to 18h given there is a long commute home
• Arriving late means 5m delay and people will appologize
• Work from home was already quite common before covid

Germany / Paris (Can’t really say about the rest of France)

Similar to UK but lunch is sitting down with your colleagues. It tends to be around 30 to 45m. Work from home was not very common either

North America

Also similar except people will work much longer hours, especially in US

I’ve never worked in North Europe, but would love to, in order to have hands on experience with the swedish model, whereby people work a much shorter work week and parental leave is properly shared between women & men.

Why less is more

If you know you have less hours to achieve your goals you will cut the crap and focus on what you need to do. Unlike south europe where the million breaks and the volume of chit chat would mean every hour @ work was not productive and meetings would be delayed you had no control over your calendar. I remember having colleagues teasing me if I was leaving at 18h! Then there is this culture that you need to stay longer to show to your “boss” that you are very committed and if you know you stay late you will try to squeeze in as many breaks as you want. Then people wonder why they are burnt out!

If you can discuss with the team all the key priorities for the day, then reserve morning to get most of the work done and afternoon for all the other team meetings I’m sure most of us would be able to leave much earlier, spend time with the families and have time for hobbies, which in turn will probably contribute to more creativity at work.

If you are tired and burn out, the longer you work, you will be stressing out that it’s getting late and late and sooner or later you will do mistakes. Sooner or later you will end up burnt out. Is it worth it? Absolutely not.

Do you have any specific cultural views which different from those I’ve shared?