What’s define micro-manage ?
Do you think I’m a micromanager? It’s a common question that pops up in the minds of many managers, especially new ones. Some realize it when they hear complaints, while others start feeling like they’re running out of time.
How can I be certain things are done correctly if I don’t keep an eye on them? But where do we draw the line between staying on top of things and being a micromanager? What’s the magic formula?
What if i tell you there is a framework to do it ? and it adopted from Lean Six-Sigma, wow that sounds complicated right ? need not worry cause it actually very intuitive.
What most SIPOC cover about is the left to right arrow, but our focus here is the right to left arrow which is control & monitoring.
We won’t be talking about the Process Management under Lean & Six-Sigma. If you want, google it, there are plenty of references there.
I’ll give example from my actual case, i’d like my team to come-up with quarterly sales-performance analysis.
As the boss/customer, I laid out requirements: What questions I want to be answered (quality), how many pages to expected in the report (quantity), and when I needed it all done (time/speed). These three things hold the key to any requirement in any situation.
These sequence from right to left is what i usually do during monitoring, so i’d consider myself a micromanager if most of the time i jump questions directly to the earlier process.
However there is a caveat, it all depends on your team’s seniority. Let say you got a new joiner without any experience whatsoever, you might want to do some mentoring or tag along with a senior first, from there you develop the newbie to understand the process.
Excited to share experience and never stop learning!
