When The Boss Is The Devil In The Details

I remember having some direct reports being switched from a former boss to me. At the end of the first week, [Former Boss]’s people sent me everything they did all week in fifteen-minute increments. I am not kidding you.

Me: “What the h*** are you sending me all this for?”

Them: “We had to do it for [Former Boss] every Friday. He used it to keep track of us each day.”

Me: “How many hours a week are you spending on this report?”

Them: “Maybe three to four?”

Me: “That’s three to four hours that you could actually be spending doing your job and maybe clocking out earlier?”

Them: “Clocking out… early? I don’t understand.”

I told them that I trusted them to do what they needed to get done, and if they weren’t getting the job done, we’d have that conversation. But then I also had a life, and I wasn’t going to be remotely interested in what they were doing in fifteen-minute increments. That wasn’t my job. My job was to make sure the big picture was being done, and to help them do that.

Me: “I never realized that somebody could be that kind of an insane micromanager! Anything else he told you to do that I should know about?”

Them: “He used to shout at us for sitting down next to the printer when we were getting a large print job. We couldn’t walk away because the document was sensitive, so we had to stand there while two hundred pages would come out, but we weren’t allowed to sit.”

Me: “I think I know why [Former Boss] isn’t with the company anymore…”

Sadly, bosses who micromanage to this extent are usually people with a lot of anxiety, and they don’t realize that it is actually going to get them the opposite of what they want.