Micromanagement

Date: Tuesday. 26th of April, 2022.

Ugh, I'm tired! I feel like I need a massage and a one year paid vacation. Anyway, I hope you had a good day.

Today, I want to discuss a story I read online and it involves micromanagement, but I'll first start with explaining what micromanaging means. Micromanagement is a situation where a superior is too controlling and too involved in the work of their subordinates. Now, yo my story...

A company, for some reasons were losing workers and those who stayed had to pick up their work and were doing extra jobs than they were supposed to. Not long after, the company was sold and a new boss arrived. The problem with the new boss was that, unlike the previous one, he was a micromanager. He complained about everything even something as little as using "save as" instead of "ctrl s" even though it was explained to him that using ctrl S overrides the previously saved file and both were needed.

This man would go out of his way to enforce rules without seeing if they made sense, request changes without trying to find out the reasons things were done in a particular way in the first place. Being a small doctor's office, the nurses had to attend to patients and the boss told them to ask patients if they were happy with their weight so that he can charge them extra for weight counselling and he had them document this so that he knew they were actually asking.

Eventually, the nurses started talking. They had a secret meeting where they all decided to apply for new jobs and leave that one and in a few weeks, they all got job offers. One day, one of the most hardworking and important nurses was less than 10 minutes late because her child was sick and she had to go to the hospital. The boss went off and started berating her. He then started complaining about other silly little things like the way she writes. At the end of the day, the nurse tendered her resignation letter but the boss got mad and fired her instead.

That incident worried the rest of the nurse, so instead of leaving their 2 weeks notice they decided to start clearing out their belongings during the week and leaving quietly. During this time, the boss was complaining about one of the nurses who got fed up and quit and the boss yelled that they can go after all they still had the other nurse. The second nurse then informed him that she was also leaving. The third nurse also left and the business was shut down and eventually sold at a loss of 1.25 million dollars.

The point here is to give allow workers work without trying to have a tight control of everything. Allow them the space to be creative, all ideas doesn't have to come from you, figure out why they are doing some certain things and stop complaining about every little thing. You might be a business owner but it doesn't make you a slave master.

Some signs of micromanaging to look out for include:

• Being too involved in employees work

• Having all decisions pass through you

• Requesting frequent updates

• Giving unrealistic deadlines

• Being unsatisfied always

• Being pissed when independent decisions are made and not allowing space for creativity or feedback

• Having employees do tasks exactly as you want it without them giving an input or ideas

These are just some of the many points one should watch out for whether as an employer or employee.

Thank you for reading, I hope this helps someone!