I was reading recently a write up on “The marks of a manager” penned by Marshall Goldsmith in Harvard Business Org.

According to Marshall, a micro manager is one who thinks he or she needs to be involved in everything that happens within the company. Because they indulge in and interfere in everything, they will be in a way closing out the talents of the others.

In my view, real managers will manage by letting others perform. Great managers will divest themselves from the day to day problem activities of the organization and they would guide their team members in solving these problem activities. They will prefer to maximize strategic and relationship building efforts.

Instead, our micro managers will pull all the work and decision making to their table thereby causing bottleneck at their desk. If they are away from their desk even for a day, the entire team will be clueless and the day’s output would be lost.

In my limited corporate experience I have seen couple of micro managers and they exhibit the following qualities

- In all internal meetings they would always like to lead the discussions

- Only they would make the presentation on behalf of the team

- Only they would answer all questions posed to the team

- Even if some from the team take initiative and provide the answer, the micro manager will restate the same answer but in a different language and style

- Such micro managers will exhibit sweet tongue in external meetings but bitter one to their team members

- They will get into such minutest details trying to gather all the inputs at one go

- Since they want to personally excel in everything they do, they get in to dicey situations sometimes by addressing some less critical issues inappropriately in their anxiety to get the best out

Though I have extended my total co-operation and support for such micro managers, I always felt that they are driven by the fear of failures. In the process of micro management, these managers have lost their team’s support at crucial times.

If one were to probe deeper in to the issue of attrition in organization, one may come out with this finding - Critical and key resources leave the organizations they work for only because of such micro managers.

But I have sympathy for these micro managers. They are individually too good and in a team they are not. Hence there is a greater responsibility on the organizations to identify such micro managers and allocate such work and departments to enable them to excel and allow them to perform as a single man team.

It will then be a win-win situation for the organization and the micro manager