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Root Cause Analysis training by Sologic provides the tools, skills, and knowledge necessary to solve complex problems in any sector, within any discipline, and of any scale.
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You probably already know that micromanagement is dangerous for you, your staff and your business. And it certainly is. But maybe not for the reasons you think.
 
When we think about the pitfalls of micromanagement in the workplace, we are immediately reminded of the unbearable pressures it often places on staff; the continuous scrutiny, the endless documentation, the stagnation of creativity and the inevitable drift towards a toxic blame culture.  Let’s face it, nobody likes being micromanaged and in reality, few (aside from the occasional workplace psychopath) enjoy doing the micromanaging much either. 
 
The result is almost always disengaged and demotivated employees hounded by burned-out managers.  This in itself should be enough to discourage any of us from micromanaging but nevertheless, it persists and in some sectors it still thrives. 
 
So why is this?
 
In the field of Root Cause Analysis, we ask business leaders to look beyond the symptoms of a problem or event and encourage them step back in time through the longer chain of causality.  Only by discovering what these deeper causes are, and how they are related, can we uncover and apply solutions that make a significant difference.
 
When it comes to micromanagement the questions we should be asking are firstly ‘What is causing us to feel the need to micromanage?’ and secondly ‘What are the impacts of managing this way?’
 
Neither of these two questions are especially easy to answer. But if we consider how we as human beings typically view most of the problems we try to solve, it starts to reveal certain insights about human nature.
 
Telling Stories?
 
Initially we should think about how most of us try make sense of the world.  Humans are natural story tellers, we know that. In all cultures our stories are populated by heroes and villains. The most compelling of these stories, those that capture our attention and survive the ages, are almost always ‘action’ packed. 
 
The way we communicate in the workplace and the manner in which we make sense of workplace stories is no different.  Like in any good story we focus on the actions that took place and who took them.  For most of us, we try to make sense of ever greater workplace complexity by telling better and longer stories.  In fact, in order to look professional, we often redefine these ‘simple narratives’ as ‘grand analysis’.  Don’t believe me?  Turn on your radio or television and see how long it is before a news anchor or sports reporter hands over to a well-known pundit to eagerly ask them for their analysis. What they’ll receive in return is a set of personal opinions, focussing on who did what and who motivated them to do it. 
 
You’re really not that important!
 
In reality however, individuals and their actions are usually just a very small part of any problem. But they are usually the most obvious part of the problem.  In most circumstances people are nothing more than the final part of the chain of causality, making them very hard to ignore.  This creates the illusion that human action is primarily or even solely responsible for the event. Thereby fuelling the overuse of the explanation ‘Human Error’.  And how do we typically respond to this fallacy?  We attempt to drive these errors out via ever tighter management and monitoring of our employees. 
 
If, as managers, we do fall into this trap, we not only end up with disengaged and demotivated staff, we also become increasingly blind to the bigger picture.  We fail to recognise that the error was almost certainly a result of the interaction between the four sources of any workplace activity:
 

  • the people involved
  • the tools they used
  • the instructions they followed
  • the environment in which the activity took place
 
Micromanagement therefore is like a form of Managerial OCD – an obsessive focus on one area of risk that results in other, often more significant problems going completely unaddressed.
 
For example, in a busy Customer Contact Centre it’s not uncommon for an agent to give the wrong information to a customer.  If, as a result, we think the answer is merely to focus on the individuals, how will we ever discover if the underlying reasons for the error were in fact, a combination of ancient software, damaged headsets, badly updated scripts, too many products, rushed onboarding, inexperienced supervisors, faulty air conditioning and contradictory KPIs. 
 
And more significantly, if we do focus more and more of our ‘solution energy’ onto the individuals, are those underlying reasons likely to improve or degrade further as time goes on? 
 
Action for the sake of action.
 
Doubtless, micromanagement can feel like affirmative action from managers.  Managers feel like ‘they are getting things done’, it’s immediate and it’s reactive.  But it’s also superficial and it’s never ending.  In fact, it’s worse than that. Micromanagement is the architect of its own failure because not only is it unsustainable, it’s also contributing to its own necessity.  Put another way, micromanagement doesn’t reduce the need for further micromanagement, it increases it.   
 
When micromanagement becomes embedded, individuals will not only buckle under the pressure, the very conditions that are critical to supporting them are relegated to mere irrelevances. Therefore, it’s perhaps no surprise that micromanagement ultimately results in failure.  Maybe the only genuine surprise is that so few organisations realise this until it is far, far too late. 
 

RCA TRAINING

Root Cause Analysis training by Sologic provides the tools, skills, and knowledge necessary to solve complex problems in any sector, within any discipline, and of any scale.
Learn More
 

SOFTWARE

Sologic’s Causelink has the right software product for you and your organization. Single users may choose to install the software locally or utilize the cloud.  Our flagship Enterprise-scale software is delivered On Premise or as SaaS in the cloud.
Learn More