You Don’t Need Permission To Do Your Job.
Let us start with an assertion:
Micromanagement is bad.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, for the purposes of this article micromanagement is when someone tells you how to do your job. Not in an educational way like “here is how you operate this machine”. That’s fine. There’s generally only one (safe/optimal) way to operate a machine. As soon as your job involves interacting with people, or solving problems, or being even a little bit creative… you have options. There’s different ways to get the job done.
Micromanagement is when someone insists that you do it their way.
There’s all sorts of problems with this, which are covered by all sorts of articles already. Engagement, retention, innovation, productivity… they all suffer. The micromanager suffers too, since telling people how to do their jobs isn’t terribly scalable. Outside of a few contrarian megalomaniacs, this is a well accepted fact.
This article is not going to be defending micromanagement. I’m sorry if that’s what you were looking for. I am merely contrarian — megalomania is too much work. This article is instead about one of the consequences of this assertion.
You don’t need permission to do your job.
