Riddle us this: What can be found in the workplace, in homes, in schools and in church organizations? It can be positive, it can be negative. It can be helpful, and it can be damaging.

Any guesses? (And don’t cheat with the subhead of this article.)

Answer: The fine art of micromanaging. (You cheated, didn’t you?)

Micromanaging, by definition, is close supervision where a manager is extremely attentive to and is closely watching the actions and decisions of those being supervised.

“It can be good or bad, depending upon the training and the expectations that have been created between a manager and a person being supervised,” says David Cherrington, a professor of organizational behavior at BYU.

Every organized unit has to decide how to deal with it, and depending on how micromanagement is conducted, it can be a wonderful experience or a destructive one. Read on to see where you can falter and where you can fly.

The negative
When employees are micromanaged, they can feel they’re being treated unfairly and that their employer is not bestowing them adequate trust.

Translation: An extremely unpleasant work environment.

“Micromanaging can be used in a rather negative way, suggesting that supervisors are being heavy-handed and showing a lack of confidence and trust in the subordinate,” Cherrington says.

Cherrington has seen the negative effects of micromanagement begin in the classroom. When students work on a group project or on a research team, a group leader might micromanage the team and re-interview a person and re-analyze the same data. Not only can this lead to a lack of cohesiveness, it can also be a downright waste of time.

“Do you have confidence in one another, and {are you willing} to be OK saying, ‘We’ll just add it all together?’” Cherrington says. “Or do you have a lack of trust and confidence?”

Christian Faulconer, of Orem-based Franchise Foundry, is strongly against micromanaging in the workplace.

“Micromanaging de-motivates your employees, results in less creative thinking and limits scalability,” Faulconer says. “Micromanaged employees feel less autonomy and therefore less responsibility for the end product. They are less likely to deliver a creative solution to a problem and more likely to do something very ordinary.”

Faulconer finds a large difference between micromanaging and ensuring quality, but they are often confused for one another. He believes ensuring quality is the proper approach.

“Ensuring quality means training your team to do things the right way, developing processes to ensure consistency and checks to verify quality,” he says. “A good quality program is scalable and leaves the employees feeling responsible for their work and responsible for improvement.”

The positive
Although micromanaging can be negative, it can also be a beneficial tool.

“There are times when some decisions have to be carefully monitored because they have to be coordinated with other areas of the company,” Cherrington says.

Micromanaging can be successful when someone needs to take control and ensure everything runs smoothly and that proper channels of communication are in place.

“Not only when you have a greater division of labor do you need more micromanaging, but also when someone is not adequately trained,” Cherrington says. “A new trainee could be very desirous of micromanaging. If you’ve created the proper expectation, then it’s not a problem.”

Dustin Tibbitts, executive director of New Haven in Spanish Fork, says a mentor educated him about micromanaging.

“He said, ‘Never be afraid to micromanage something you feel strongly about. It’s one of the most powerful ways to communicate the task’s importance to the success of the company,’” Tibbitts says.

Tibbitts has developed “strategic micromanaging.” Tibbitts pushes his employees while keeping an open line of communication. He doesn’t hesitate to step in when he sees an employee who needs help, and he assists the employee with setting goals and following up to ensure progress.

In the end, it’s all about balance.

“There are some people whose attitudes are if you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself,” Cherrington says. “The reality is there are some jobs where there’s one right way to do it, but there are a lot of jobs where there are lots of ways to
do it.”

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