Wednesday 14 February 2007

Micromanagement

Chinese New Year is coming soon; just in four days from now, all the Chinese worldwide will celebrate their New Year. So, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my Tionghua friends "Happy New Year", "Gong Xi Fa Cai" and "Xin Nien Kuai Le". Not to forget, I also would like to wish my friend (ex-housemate during my uni years), MTG "Happy Birthday" as today is his birthday. Just coincidentally happen that his birthday falls on Valentine's Day.

Forget about the Valentine's. I just recalled back the discussion between me and few of my friends regarding the micromanagement during our coffee break. One of my friends told us during the meeting that his CEO in his speech to the staffs mentioned clearly about micromanagement. He mentioned that he and his management team will not micromanage the organization as this will lead to disaster. He mentioned clearly that everyone should play their roles and the managers shouldn't in their position to micromanage their subordinates. Micromanage here means go into details and sort of intervene in every move that needs to be made every day.

He added that all the managers should give some space to their subordinates as everyone needs breathing room. He ended the speech by saying that, "Nothing kills the spirit of your subordinates quicker than a boss standing over every move that needs to be made".

In order for us to understand better about this micromanagement, let me gives some quickie and simple explanation. The word micro by definition means too close for comfort. In a business term, micromanagement is a management style where a manager closely observes or controls the work of their employees. Normally, macro-managers will give general instructions on smaller tasks while supervising larger concerns but micro-managers in contrast monitors, assess and intervene in every steps involved. This can be related to the term commonly used by Malays as "Gila Kuasa" (in can be right or wrong depends on the context).

Another friend of mine shared her views on this micromanagement. She told us that her boss is practicing this micromanagement concept in their organization. The boss (a guy) is controlling everything until the extent that everyone feels hard to breath and gets fed-up with their routine works. Everyone feels de-motivate, no mood to work and this definitely leads to poor performance of the organization. They feel threatened, unwanted and less appreciated when every move they take has to go through the manager. It seems like the manager has no trust in them and they have no rights to say though the manager claimed that he is open to opinions/views. My friend added that the office environment is no longer as merrier as before. No more happy faces, no more proactive moves, no more enthusiastic working styles and many other no more thingy to be listed. They just work for the sake of working and earning monthly salary.

In one case scenario to prove about her annoying micromanage manager, my friend said that during the preparation for a farewell party (her VP was promoted as a Senior VP and relocated to the Asia Pacific HQ in Australia), her boss monitored and controlled every single items such as type of foods, decoration styles, seating arrangement and even the font of the invitation cards. We couldn't imagine how suffer she is and other colleagues of her. While enjoying our hot coffee, we agreed and made our conclusion that micromanagement can lead to disaster and a manager should be a person who is well respected for their leadership qualities and one who gets consensus among his/her subordinates.

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