Micro Management vs Macro Management

More than often, we heard of these terms. How many of us try understand these definition and see how it impacts and influence the day to day activities.

By Definition

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Micro Management - Require one to enforce every of his/her staffs to report on their progress very frequently and reluctantly to delegate decisions. Also known as Bully Approach.

Macro Management - Delegate decisions to his/her staffs and monitor on the progress less aggressively. However, it is often that one delegates too much of decisions without some necessity knowledge of work.

Often we learnt about a leader when we start working in a team. We then come across many different style of management. Each style tells us, indirectly, what type of leader we work with.

Micromanage suitable only if: -

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• Start up company
• Incompetent team members
• Mission critical but proprietary knowledge of work

Manager with micromanage style suggests that he/she is still a better person to take on every lower level tasks assigned. Company with managers of tendency to micromanage suffers opportunities of losing their better employee to be a manager who does not manage well but love detail work.

Macromanage suitable only if: -

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• Well established company
• Not only competent but knowledge independent team members
• Generally all type of works

Manager with macromanage style suggests that he/she trusts the team members being knowledge independent and capable of producing good work. Decisions and rights are trustfully given with minimal supervision. However, that may also suggest that many manager involves in Macro Management style would lost his initial stint within the business and overly relying on his/her team members which results in decision dependencies and politically driven decision/outcome. Company must love these managers as they made themselves out of job while growing people to out cast themselves.

Conclusion

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While micromanaging managers suggest to delegate only risks to his/her staffs and claiming all credits to himself/herself when succeeded, macromanaging managers suggest to delegates credits to his/her staffs and taking the risks on their own.

Either way, you are either too good only to yourself or too good to your people. That only leads you into one way, failure! Yes, you got me right, it is failure! With micromanaging, higher management would have learnt and noticed that they can't scale in your department. You are too important that they need to find someone to manage you. You just missed the promotion by that. With macromanaging however, everyone is doing right and perform well enough to replace you, because you made them too good to put yourself out of job. You have higher pay then others, and why should I pay more if they are equally good as you with better details, but miles cheaper?

You need to struck a balance in your style. You have great people, do more macromanagement and learning the details from your team via some suitably application of micromanage. This way, you won't be thrown away by your people in your business knowledge, while letting them to take their deserved credit.

If you have average people, depends on how much the average is, apply the micromanage as you see fits while not letting the opportunity to slip away for your people to learn and excel with some delegation through macromanagement.

Speaking of a company perspective, I would love to have as many macromanaging managers than micromanaging managers. At least, I'm not tightening up my options on resources.