Way to Deal with a Micromanaging Boss

Ok, I am going to be brutally honest here. Some may not like it.

Micromanaging is complicated. When I was in a leadership position I was the happiest boss when I could let people just do their thing and come back with great results and we'd be all happy. And that's how I loved working with my bosses before as well.

But then again, I had some employees I had to micromanage. I really, really abhorred it. But there was just no other way to achieve results. The truth is probably that I should have gotten into more serious talks with those employees instead. But before you fire people, you have to invest to be absolutely sure you're doing the right thing.

What I am trying to say is: As an employee, try to be as a reflective person as you ask your boss to be one. Maybe your work is the reason for him/her to be micromanaging you.

This hits home. I recently quit a job (~2 months ago) that was exactly the situation described. I had never encountered micromanagement to that degree before and was initially, naively, willing to accept my boss's criticism as "learnings" for myself. He was of course totally unavailable until ~6PM, after which he would dive into the weeds on my work product for the day. "This chart's axis aren't clear enough". "Line colors are too similar". "Please justify why you made XYZ technical decision this week". Sometimes I would be working until 10PM responding to his questions.

Eventually it really started to take a toll on my self-confidence. I started feeling like I didn't know what I was doing, questioning if I was cut out for the company. Just as OP states, I woke up every day in a TERRIBLE mood. I stopped caring about the quality of any first-pass work product. Why bother, when he's going to find something to critique anyway? Ironically his micromanagement made my work quality go way down.

Anyway, I quit with nothing else lined up (and am still looking for work, if you need a data scientist :)). But I don't regret it at all, if only for my mental health's sake. I STILL feel like I somehow did something wrong in the situation even though looking back on it, he was clearly just an asshole (and many current and former coworkers came out of the woodwork to agree when I made my quitting public knowledge).

The advice here seems practical but only if you have a very fixed mindset about who people are.

That might be appropriate sometimes but I think it’s worth trying to heal relationships. On the theory that managers are also humans, try to imagine why they are micromanaging.

One of the biggest problems in computerland is that we promote technical specialists to manage people and strategy. Many people are far more comfortable with, and nostalgic for, the craft of programming. Such a manager ends up dictating solutions that would have been brilliant about 5 years ago, but which don’t match current practice.

Other managers are coping with the trauma of employees who wasted tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on things that don’t work out. This manager trusts themself technically so reluctantly (actually not so reluctantly) they try to dictate solutions.

The common characteristic here is someone who perceives themselves to have high technical skill but very shaky skills with management and hiring. They feel fear and uncertainty in that domain and fall back on technical skill + their new authority to command people. Imagine if you were in draining meetings all day struggling with abstract squishy problems under limited information. They want the joy of feeling _smart_ again.

Some organizations can support such a manager to buff their people skills but that’s rare. If this person’s ego can take it, it’s worth using your 1:1 to point out the dysfunction and trying to ask them what it would take for them to be more hands-off. They probably are in some kind of pain that causes them to micromanage and maybe in a small way you can relieve that pain.

This won’t work with everyone! If your boss has ego or narcissism issues they cannot see you as an equal.

It is often a no-win situation but in some cases I still think it’s worth trying.

This article, written by a career engineer/non-manager it should be noted, attributes pretty incorrect intent to the micromanagers the author has apparently worked for.

It’s pretty easy to solve this, and it can be summarized as “manage upwards.”

Every micromanager does it out of a lack of trust. Not so much not trusting the specific employee, but more not trusting the specific process that generate the information and results for the process the micromanager is “managing.” They also might suck at delegation, and they also might (usually are) getting info request after info request from their bosses.

It all flows down to you as a line worker.

Either way, every micromanager I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with some really intense ones, have been solved:

0) rule out that you actually know how to do your job, as maybe your manager is really hand holding you for a reason, and that reason is you’re an unorganized mess. That aside…

1) by tactically empathizing with the manager’s plight. You don’t have to know why they’re asking for stuff, but it almost always derived from the above situations.

2) understand that the root of it, no matter the cause, is need for information.

3) figure out the timing and cause of the waves information requests, and *just start preempting them on a schedule your manager can anticipate and start to rely on*

Provide that manager every gosh darn piece of info you know they’ll ask for, and do it on a scheduled basis. This will work. It builds the manager’s trust in the process generating the results he has to manager into existence. It implicitly runs on the manager’s “needs” schedule, as you learn it and preempt it. The manager will then start looking for those 10am, 4pm updates instead of to you, as you provide them like clockwork and they’re well done and detailed.

I promise this works. It’s hard to understand why if you’ve never been in a manager role. Weak managers deal with the pressures of it by micromanaging.

I think "Trust" is the primary reason for Micromanaging. If a person doesn't trust their subordinates they try to micromanage. This just doesn't happen at work, at home as well (eg. between parents & kids).

I’m probably the exception, but I’m actually glad my relaxed/lazy boss was replaced by a micromanager early on in my career. All of my positions up until I was 22 had busy work deadlines-don’t-matter type cultures and made me an extremely lazy person. My micromanaging boss came in, lit a fire under my ass and made me realize that’s not how the real world works. I hated it at the time, but now in my 30s I realized it was probably the best thing for me.

That being said I was a poor performer, and most people probably don’t think of themselves as poor performers.

A lot of comments here about trust being the key to software dev management, with the implication being that managers should trust their subordinates. I agree with that, but also it needs to go the other way: as a subordinate you need to trust your manager; this isn't just for ICs, it goes all the way up the management chain. To be clear, this is not about your manager looking out for your interests per se—that should be table stakes since you have a mutual interest in your team's success—but rather you need to know that your manager is competent. If you haven't had much experience, this is incredibly difficult to suss out since you really don't know what's involved in management, however they should be able to engage any question you have about why they are asking things be done a certain way. If they aren't able to listen and address your concerns in a meaningful way, that's a red flag. Also, if what they are saying is not aligned with what you hear from higher-level leadership that is also a red flag.

The other thing to call out here is that the word "micromanaging" is already framing the conversation around the worst connotations of high-touch management. But the reality is that sometimes people need high-touch management at certain times in order to be successful. In an ideal team, the manager understands each subordinate well enough to give them exactly the right guardrails that they have the autonomy and decision-making power commensurate with their skill, while also leaving room for mistakes and growth. For junior to mid-level this means assigning tasks and projects, for senior to staff level this means taking more input from them and aligning with organizational priorities. At any level it's possible for an IC to feel micromanaged, which is why two-way trust and open communication are so critical.

People don't quit companies, they quit managers/bosses.

Talk to them directly about it and tell them how you _feel_ about it or move on/leave. You can also talk to their supervisor/boss/manager as a last attempt.

> The boss doesn't listen, even when the subordinate is an expert in the field in question, and the boss is not.

I've seen way too many cases of the opposite. The subordinate thinks he's the expert, when his boss has 20 years of experience. Fire time.

I've been on both sides, both as a "servant leader" and as a "servant".

Context matters. The only time I micro-managed a team myself, was when someone at the top was instigating a blame culture. I did explain all the goals in detail to the people, and explained why it mattered that we delivered exactly according to the specs, even though it wasn't really functional. Sales always blamed IT for failing to deliver according to specs, while the sales intake was actually fubarred, resulting in way too low quotes and everyone blaming IT, resulting in a negative downfall.

I have been micro-managed about 3 years ago for about 3 months, but this was when I was consulting in a highly political organisation with very complex regulation (EU airspace), so it was part of my initial training. Once trust was there I spent most of my time engaging with all the counterparts according to the explicit and implicit protocol and rules ("continuous improvement manager" for the curious, but what's in a name...)

What I have done quite a few times, is not micro-managing, but micro-coaching: sitting next to a person every waking hour available for help, assistance and spotting potential frustrations. This is usually part of a bigger, risky change trajectory where I decide to start with the one person "impossible to convert"; in a lot of cases these people actually became some of the ambassadors of the whole project, and this is a big win for such projects...

Edit: some more details regarding the "being micro-managed" part.

I was going to comment without reading TFA. I'm happy I read it because it says the same I was going to write :)

Just one nuance from experience: sometimes the micromanager tries hard not to seem like one, even to himself. I had a very humble, very caring micromanager that praised my technical competence and beat the bush for a long time but eventually second guessed everything I did.

I have my real name in my profile here so I'm not going to comment on the last straw.

My worst experience was with a manager who had no software development background. He had about 8 years of project and product management and was assigned to lead a team of 12 developers on a new initiative. Everything had to be implemented his way that he read on some blog/article even though the team would show why it doesn't apply to our use case.

Not surprisingly, people quickly started leaving one by one (including myself) and eventually his team was merged with another and he was let go. A micromanaging boss is bad, an incompetent micromanaging boss is a disaster.

I think micromanagement can be a manifestation of the pressure a person is under. It can come from outside or inside, but whenever you feel that too much is at stake you might start micromanaging.

It's hard to generalize, sometimes the issue is the boss, sometimes it's the employee and often it's both.

Managers need to understand that the goal is not and should not be 'employee performed this task exactly how I would have'. Especially if the differences aren't material. But so I often I see managers kill initiative by focusing on stylistic or minor issues. If you want it done exactly your way, do it yourself or hire a clone.

Basically two scenarios here:

A. Your boss is not doing his job well, or B. You are underperforming. Your boss is trying to work with you to improve performance instead of firing you

A couple of years ago I got what I thought was a dream job - my title was Research Scientist. I was working for a manager that was 20+ years younger then myself. What I didn't know going in was that he'd never managed anyone before - and suddenly he was managing 6 people.

From the start it was clear that he was in over his head. He'd come into meetings (late because he had so many meetings) and start firing questions at people like a machine gun. He wasn't listening to the answers. He wasn't listening to our input at all. He was constantly second guessing everyone in the group. He'd ask someone a question in a meeting and then after they answered he'd ask someone else if that was the right answer and keep going until he got an answer he liked.

After a couple of months he started having several of us give him 2 status reports / day. We were working on deliverables for another group and our manager clearly had not communicated with that other group to gauge their expectations - I had done that and knew what they expected and it was a lot less than what our manager thought they expected in the given timeframe (if he were right we would've all had to be pulling all-nighters for weeks and even then... well, that just doesn't work). I put up with this for about a week. I was at least 25 years older than all the others in the group and several of my coworkers were on H1B's and thus were scared to rock the boat, so I figured it was up to me. Finally I sent the manager an email in which I told him that in 30 years of work experience I had never had a manager that micromanaged to the level that he was doing and that I thought it was best if I moved on - essentially I quit. He called a hasty meeting with me for that afternoon and he was all apologetic and promised that he'd try to listen and do better as a manager. I reluctantly agreed to stay on. He did do better (at least to me, not to some of my younger coworkers) for about a month. But then he started slowly slipping back into his previous ways. I found another job and left. There was really no other alternative. I felt sorry for my coworkers who felt stuck there without any recourse. One of the other workers who was closer to my age quit the day I did - without giving 2 weeks, he was just gone - can't say as I blame him. The bottom line is that this guy should have never been allowed to manage people - and definitely not 6 people - without having had a lot of training in how to manage.

Only way to look at management is that you are there to support. You are there to provide a best possible environment where an employee can express themselves. Employee only needs one other thing from management - "What is the expectation". If expectations are set right and communicated well and reiterated frequently, you are set up for success.

I don't think that good work can be achieved if people in the same team do not trust each other, at least on software projects.

If you believe that an employee has to be micromanaged to be productive, then there is something wrong somewhere, and you should probably fire them.

One advice I've read back in the day for how to deal with a micromanaging boss was "Overwhelm them with updates" and it anecdotally always worked for me. Lucky for me there was only a couple occasions I had to deal with a boss like that.

The idea that one can 'manage' another seems very primitive to me. Every one that did good job for me did so because they genuinely wanted to do a good job, not because I 'managed' them somehow. All I did was to steer the work towards the goal. If they didn't like the work to begin with or didn't have enough skills and inclination to learn, no amount of 'management' would have corrected that situation.

just quit!

The way I deal with it is by leaving the team immediately. My life is too short to put up with being treated like a slave. I am too good at programming.