Micromanagement Reconsidered
I cannot imagine an approach to management that has been subjected to more jeering over the years than micromanagement.
Management journal headlines make micromanagement sound like a bad habit at best and a disease at worst: “Signs You’re a Micromanager,” “Why Is Micromanagement So Infectious,” “3 Ways to Kick Your Micromanaging Habit for Good,” and “Micromanage at Your Peril.” (These are from the Harvard Business Review.)
Although little research has been done on the topic specifically, authors in scholarly journals have lumped micromanagement in with “destructive,” “ineffective,” “toxic,” and “mean” leadership behaviors.
Here and there, you’ll find references to situations in which micromanagement is necessary—for example, for a start-up organization or to supervise an inexperienced staff member. But these are treated as exceptional, time-limited situations, to be avoided if possible and ended when feasible.
If the conventional wisdom holds that micromanagement is a negative practice to be avoided, that same conventional wisdom identifies its desirable opposite as delegation—with promised benefits for the delegator (e.g., more time for “higher-payoff tasks”), the delegatee (e.g., improved skills and judgment), and to the organization (e.g., “a climate of trust and empowerment”).
I certainly do not want to advocate “mean” management practices, nor do I want to denigrate trust. However, I fear that an unexamined view of micromanagement as wholly negative is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, with some really important management practices being cast aside as being associated the much-maligned micromanagement.
A Case in Point
I have attended dozens and dozens of meetings between health system executive teams and rating agency representatives, at which the rating agency probes the health system’s market conditions, strategy, revenue, expenses, liquidity, and capital structure. These meetings are critically important to establishing the organization’s credit rating, which in turn is critically important to the organization’s cost of capital and ability to fund its long-term strategy. These meetings are where a health system needs to present at its absolute best.
At most of these meetings, the health system CEO makes an opening statement, hitting key points about strategy and major initiatives, and then hands off the presentation to his or her designees on the management team—primarily the chief financial and strategy officers—to supply the details.
This approach is not inherently bad. I’ve seen such sessions go well, with positive results for the organization.
However, the meetings at which I have witnessed truly exceptional presentations, the meetings at which the rating agency staff have appeared exceptionally impressed, have been meetings at which the CEO was very much an active participant in the details of the discussion: in command of the nuances of everything from balance sheet issues to rollout of new initiatives. You could see the eyes of the rating agency representatives light up at the sight of a CEO who is clearly monitoring, contributing to, trouble-shooting, and helping decide the why, how, where, and when of a wide range of elements contributing to the success of a highly complex and broad organization.
What Micromanagement Means
This example begs the question: how does a CEO attain this sort of broad and deep command of details? I cannot imagine that it comes about by reading or listening to reports from senior management delegatees, who doubtless also delegated responsibility to others.
I suggest that the way a CEO attains this impressive command of what is happening in his or her organization is by micromanaging: by being personally involved in the details of organizational initiatives and activities. And the only way to do that is to intrude yourself into those initiatives and activities in ways that, in some organizations, may not be welcome or deemed appropriate.
Lacking a formal, validated definition of micromanagement in the management literature, let me present some examples of what I believe micromanagement can entail for a CEO, and, in the process, perhaps help this management approach shed its bad reputation.
Probing organizational initiatives at various stages of development, including initial assumptions and work in progress, before an initiative may typically be deemed “CEO-ready.”
Asking questions not just about performance levels and outcomes, but about the process and structure associated with that performance, trends over various time horizons, and performance anomalies and their causes.
Questioning the conventional wisdom by asking why assumptions are made and posing alternative conceptual frameworks.
Requiring specific, often quantitative information where general, qualitative information might typically be presented.
Putting himself/herself in the shoes of various stakeholders—consumers, staff, business associates, board members, and other stakeholders—in assessing organizational strategies and operations.
Working across the established organizational chart, being willing to communicate directly with staff at various levels rather than only through an established chain of supervision, and even, in some instances, creating new organizational structures for specific situations.
A CEO who behaves in these ways can expect a certain amount of resistance. However, the potential benefits of this sort of “micromanagement” are significant. As a CEO, you are far less likely to be caught unaware when something in the organization is either not going to plan or is misconceived. The organization is less likely to succumb to groupthink or me-too strategies. Staff at various levels are required to exercise careful, critical thinking. And the CEO’s unique perspective and experience are brought to bear in a more thoroughgoing way.
Testing the Limits
One of the very few scholarly articles on micromanagement made the interesting point that, in addition to there being no accepted definition of the term, there is no validated scale of the behaviors associated with it.
For the behaviors I have included under micromanagement, every organization will accept or resist them at different points on a scale of intensity. Some successful organizations may accept only very light levels of such CEO “intrusion,” while in others, a higher level may be business as usual.
Similarly, I recognize that individual styles of the CEO and staff play an important part in where the type of micromanagement I describe lands on the continuum from stimulating intellectual debate to counterproductive interference.
That said, I suggest we are at a stage in the management of large organizations at which leaders should take a fresh look at some of the management approaches reflexively rejected as micromanagement, testing the limits of what each organization will accept.
In the world of hospitals and healthcare in which I have spent my professional life, we are seeing intense, new challenges that require innovative frameworks of thinking and ways of responding, including challenges to Medicaid and other forms of reimbursement, rising labor expenses, and pressure from large, well-funded competitors. At the same time, we are being challenged to incorporate AI initiatives so sophisticated that their function and implications are barely penetrable for most members of the C-suite and board.
Therefore, the “micromanagement” questions of the moment are these:
How much information and strategic and market assessment does any particular CEO need to know, and how quickly does he or she need to know it, in order to operate his or her hospital or hospital system at its very best, given the unprecedented level of almost hostile externalities?
And does any particular CEO believe she or he will gain such information within the normal reporting process?
The answers to these questions will determine whether micromanagement is, in fact, the almost fatal business disease as described above or, rather, a hospital management style mandated by the hardest healthcare circumstances in memory.
Ken Kaufman is Managing Director and co-founder of Kaufman Hall.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Kaufman, Hall & Associates, LLC, Vizient, Inc., or their affiliates.