Why You Can’t Stop Micromanaging

By Ian Traynar, Executive Coach

Micromanaging and overthinking are often one structure with two outlets. One asks whether it is being done properly. The other asks whether you have thought of everything.

I wrote about the second of those in a recent piece on overthinking. This is the first.

Both are someone trying to reach certainty before they can feel safe. The overthinker looks for it inside their own head. The micromanager looks for it in other people's work as it happens. They stay close to it because what they cannot see feels unsafe.

The difference is who pays. Overthinking mostly costs the person doing it. Micromanaging costs the team.

The board pack

A head of finance operations I worked with, who I will call Helen, had produced the monthly board pack herself for six years. Her director told her to delegate it. She gave it to Tom, a very capable senior analyst.

She briefed him well. She gave him last month's pack as a template, told him there was no need to copy it exactly, and said make it your own.

He did exactly that. He opened with a one-page cash-flow narrative instead of her usual variance table, which he moved to the appendix. He left out a footnote on a warehouse lease he judged immaterial that quarter. He took a day longer than she would have, because he rebuilt two reconciliations from scratch rather than rolling hers forward.

The draft landed on her desk at six on Thursday evening.

She opened it at home. Within the first page, she noticed her jaw tightening, enough that it had started to ache, and her stomach going tight with it. By page three she was rewriting. At twenty to midnight the variance table was back at the front, the lease footnote was restored, and Tom's narrative had become three bullet points.

She told herself it was quicker than explaining.

On Friday morning Tom found his work changed. His version had not been wrong, only replaced. Helen said, "Really good start; I have just tidied it up.”

Next month he will wait to be told what she wants. Within the quarter, she will be telling her director that nobody on her team takes ownership.

What was actually bothering her

When I asked what specifically troubled her about the draft, Helen talked about gaps. Pushed on the lease footnote, she accepted the item was immaterial. Then she said this:

If the chair asks about it and it is not there, it looks like we don't know our numbers.

I asked who we meant.

Well, me. It is my name on the pack, whoever wrote it.

That answered a question I had not asked yet. In her mind, Tom's work sat inside her.

So I asked what it would say about her if the chair caught something missing.

That I’m not on top of things. That I let things slip.

And what kind of person lets things slip?

Someone who’s coasting. Someone who’s been found out, really.

A rule with no finish line

The shape of that is worth noticing. She was working away from being found out, rather than towards being anything.

A rule like that has no end point. Every pack that goes out clean does not prove anything. It only means she has not been caught yet. So the next one has to go through her hands, too.

It had a starting point, though. A board meeting four years earlier, when a new chair asked about a provision figure she had not personally checked, and she had to say she would come back to him. Nobody else in that room remembers it. She remembers the silence and the heat in her face. Since then, anything leaving her team with her name on it goes past her first.

What the rewriting was for

I asked what rewriting the pack did for her. Her first answer was that it made sure it was right.

So I asked what making sure it was right preserved.

That I’m the one they can rely on. That’s the whole reason I’m in this job.

That is the part people miss. Quality control was part of it. Protecting her worth was the larger part. If the pack went out perfectly without her, a quiet question opened up about what she was actually for.

Which is why telling her to delegate more was never going to work. You are asking someone to stop doing the thing that answers that question, and offering nothing in its place.

What it costs

A manager who keeps taking the work back isn't just spending their own evenings. They are training a team to hand over less than their best, because everyone has worked out that the real editing happens after it leaves them.

Ownership goes first. Then development, because people only learn by carrying something all the way. Then, eventually, the good ones go somewhere they can finish their own work.

By the time it gets named out loud, it has usually been renamed. A team that lacks initiative. People who need too much direction.

So the question worth asking is what taking the work back does for you, and whether there is another way to do it.

Common questions

What are the signs of micromanaging?

Rewriting work rather than returning it with feedback. Needing to see things before they go out. Telling yourself it is quicker to do it than to explain. The clearest sign is usually the feeling underneath it: discomfort at not being able to see something.

Why can’t I stop micromanaging, even when I know I should delegate?

Because the behaviour is usually protecting something, and knowing you should stop does not change what it is protecting. For many managers, it guards against a specific conclusion about themselves, often about being found out or not being on top of things. Until that changes, letting go genuinely feels unsafe.

Will better delegation skills fix it?

They help if delegation is the actual gap. If someone briefs badly or chooses the wrong person, technique is the answer. But most managers who take work back can delegate perfectly well to some people and not others. That pattern points somewhere else, usually to what they feel personally responsible for.

What does micromanaging cost a team?

Ownership, development, and eventually people. A team that knows their work will be rewritten stops putting their best version forward, because the real version is produced after it leaves them. It usually reaches the manager as a complaint that nobody takes initiative.

If you want to find what a pattern like this is protecting in your own case, the full process, including an exercise you can run on yourself, is laid out in The Effort Myth.