The Micromanagement Flaw
Yesterday, I wrote about Kathy Sierra's interesting article: "BrainDeath by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function".
It really is hard for some people to understand that micromanagement does not produce great results.
Down at the bottom of her article, there are a people showing resistance in the comments. For example Ed Borasky says this:
I'm reminded of the scientific catch phrase of "a beautiful theory murdered by a gang of brutal facts".Brutal fact number one: Most of us work in an organizational structure best described by the phrase "accountability hierarchy". Those two words are important -- people are *accountable* for their actions and business results, and the structure is *hierarchical*. Your boss is accountable to his or her boss for what you and your teammates say and do.
Brutal fact number two: The financial success of a business depends more on the *customers'* perceived quality of its products and services relative to the competition than it does on the way people inside the organization treat each other.
....A "micromanaged" employee needs to understand that his or her boss is almost certainly accountable to a higher-up for business results. And an employee wishing to change something -- anything -- must demonstrate how it ultimately affects the perceptions of products and services by *external* customers, not *internal* ones.
Ed presents a reasoned argument, but his assumptions are flawed.
If you boil Ed's argument down, he is saying that because employees do not understand the big picture, they have to be micromanaged. The big picture includes everything management is accountable for and everything that external clients care about.
The flaw in the logic is Ed's assumption that employees can't understand the big picture, and never will understand the big picture.
In my paper, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, I outline the Characteristics of an Environment that Fosters Innovation Creators. The first two are:
- Innovation creators need to know who is who: This problem plays itself out in most large organizations. Solving the tactical problem of “who is who” is critical to creating an environment that generates innovation.
- Innovation creators need to know what is going on: Helping people know the big picture, the small details and preventing repeat research are critical tactical steps.
Innovation creators are employees who help execute because they want to help the company succeed. They get involved. They care.
They help the company succeed because senior management has taken the time to given them full information about the company's constraints, its goals and its objectives.
An employee who is fully aware of business goals and external customer needs is an employee who can actually help achieve those goals.
Managers need to ask themselves do they want a team who helps them succeed on the playing field, or have they simply hired all those employees to be cheerleaders fetching water bottles, leaving the boss to do all the work.
The answer is obvious.
The next question becomes how do you efficiently engage and inform your whole team.
I believe the solution is to use Web Office technology, such as enterprise blogs and enterprise wikis.
