Rule 21: You Can Only Micromanage Ten Employees and About Six Hundred Square Feet

Overview

SNAPSHOT

Are you a micromanager?

Yes: 8 percent

No: 92 percent

You know what a micromanager is: someone who feels that he or she must control every aspect of the organization—from the color of the Post-its to the strategy for landing new customers.

There are a couple of simple truths about micromanagers. First, micromanagers tend to have very stable and relatively successful careers. They detect problems early. They know the details of their jobs so well that they are difficult to replace. Second, however, is the big downside. A marine colonel told me, "We do not promote our micromanagers. We love them right where they are." Bill Winter, chairman emeritus of Dr. Pepper/Seven Up, Inc., said almost exactly the same thing to me. What they meant by this statement is that there is a place for a micromanager, and it is squarely in the low to middle rungs of the organization. Bruno Schmitter of Hydromat agrees: "You need some micromanagers—in the right place." He adds that the right place is not at the top.

The colonel quoted above told me that he always has a micromanager running, for example, a supply room. "He or she will maintain tight control over everything that goes in and out of there; there will be no waste and no shenanigans. Perfect job for a micromanager." But you can be sure that this person will not be commanding the Third Army.

If your ambition is to have responsibility over a twenty-by-thirty-foot room full of supplies, micromanagement is the right style for you. It is very easy to build and maintain a very small empire through micromanagement. Many micromanagers can protect these little fiefdoms for decades, and they become downright proud of it. They can in fact become invincible in their very tiny domain.

The key to effective micromanagement is finding mindless people to work for you. As Richard Bell of HDR, Inc., put it, the only people who can work for a micromanager are "clones and robots." "You actually look for 'clock punchers' to work for a micromanager," the colonel referenced above told me. Anyone who really cares about or takes pride in his or her job will not want to work for a micromanager. But there are enough people out there who feel that a job is just a paycheck and who take pride in other areas of their lives that you can find a way to staff a micromanager's part of the organization, according to the colonel. The employees of a micromanager must be willing to do what they are told and not think much about it.

Mike Sears, executive vice president and CFO of Boeing, measures the domain of a micromanager not in terms of space but in terms of people. "How many people can you tell what to do every day?" he asks. "The number is between five and ten." But, he notes, the number of people you can lead is much, much greater. The human capacity for management simply does not allow you to micromanage more than a handful of other workers. Consequently, according to Sears, if you want to move to upper levels of management, you must become a leader and abandon micromanagement.

Juanita Hinshaw, CFO of Graybar Electric, provided a succinct explanation of why micromanagers never get too far: "Micromanagers are so busy doing someone else's job that they cannot focus on their own. For that reason they usually don't succeed in getting to the top."

So, yes, you can enjoy long-term professional success—on a very small scale—by micromanaging. But do you really want to look back on your career after you retire and say, "I was the best supply room manager the company ever had?" I hope not. Let's look for Plan B.