[dogman144]

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.

[alexpetralia]

Great points. One of the major roles of effective managers is to provide context on what they need to do, such that you can identify what you need to help solve their problems.

If they don't provide this context, "managing up" is effectively soliciting this context such that you can help them do their job.

At the end of the day they just want their problems solved, and if you can do this for them - with or without them - all the better.

[dogman144]

Yeah great point! I usually phrase “context” as “intent” but yeah that’s the idea.

[alluro2]

Good points and I agree that they can help in a lot of cases. However, I would argue that, if you're an engineer and the best use of your time is to report 2 times a day, for things to be "working", it might be that you're just empowering a flawed manager / process / organization that way.

[dogman144]

Hm perhaps, but look at it this way assuming a job/team change isn’t possible.

If you can condense a winding conversation with your manager at whatever time they decide to intrude with this behavior into a timeline and format that you control, but also works for their needs, that IMO is a significantly better outcome.

The other side of this is this tends to sort of heal micromanagers as a pleasant side effect. Managing upwards usually really tunes down the behavior to ab entirely manageable level, in most situations except the “time to leave the job” types.