Micro-Management Is Maximum Management
The term micro-management has received a lot of negative attention in the workplace over the past few years, but I think it’s time to reconsider how so-called “micro-management” has become synonymous with poor management. In fact, detailed and attentive management can lead to the most optimal results, leading to maximum management.
Consider the fact that those who manage departments generally do so for a good reason. People aren’t assigned to run teams because of random chance; indeed, cultivation and careful consideration are key to such decisions. An organization is a hierarchy, a veritable food pyramid where as one approaches the top of the pyramid — the capstone, or fats, if you will — the talent and ability are superior. Truly, those making decisions about who will run departments are themselves even more highly qualified than those leaders, meaning that the very best are those who are making the decision about who to place in charge of an organization’s teams.
So we can agree then that team leaders are clearly the most knowledgeable and capable in their area of expertise — but they can’t do it alone. Modern companies have many moving parts and a massive volume of work that needs to be performed to accomplish organizational goals. This is where it becomes necessary to hire employees that can assist the team leader in carrying out their duties.
The management of employees requires constant vigilance. Employees are tasked with performing portions of jobs that the supervisor themselves excel in, yet are unable to perform due to the temporal constraints of the vexing space-time continuum. A supervisor not only must act as a mentor, but also ensure that the same quality of work they would create is performed by their team, thus bringing the ability of the team up to the level of the highly-skilled individual tasked with running it.
This is obviously a challenge, as employees on a team are simple technical laborers and have no ownership in a company’s strategic direction. An employee’s primary motivation is the basic collection of pay — the extraction of resources — from the organization.
A manager’s primary responsibilities are therefore twofold: 1) to ensure that their employees are producing work at the level they themselves would output and 2) to make certain their employees are working as much and as hard as they themselves would work.
It’s clear that the only way to fight the constant pull of employees to work as little as necessary to collect a paycheck, therefore, is to provide them with constant attention and oversight down to the smallest details. While this may indeed reduce the manager’s ability to produce, it will exponentially increase the team’s ability to produce the highest-quality material at the very lowest level.
A large enough team may require that intermediate managers be hired, but over time even these managers can be trained to look out for red flags in production that can be brought to the team leader and addressed appropriately.
This management style has become derisively known as micro-management and has been lambasted as stifling the independence and creativity of employees. However, when employees are lifted up, they are able to produce at their highest level and output the most possible. This is best for everyone involved. The organization will reap the rewards of the greatest possible product, and the employees will feel the satisfaction of knowing they have provided their best work by emulating the work of someone far more capable than themselves.
Perhaps it is time to move beyond “mico-management” to something that should perhaps be termed “maximum management.” Maximum management will allow an entire organization to operate at the level of its strongest link and will provide unparalleled productivity for the workplace. And really, isn’t that something for which we should all be striving?
