Micro or Specific?

Earlier this year I began managing a small, outsourced team. I’ve led teams before but they were always in the flesh, with similar credentials, and in the same time zone.

Managing remote workers with none of those commonalities is particularly difficult because their engagement with the company vision isn’t written on their faces in meetings, or implied by how late they stay at the office.

To cope I’ve started to observe the tone of emails, the expediency of deliverables, and the rise/fall of fresh ideas versus “yes sir” compliance to existing tasks.

After awhile I found this measurement of ambiguous data points to be off-putting, so in an attempt at self-awareness I asked myself:

“Am I becoming a micro-manager?”

Before I could assess myself, however, I needed to define what micro-managing is.

Here’s what I came up with:

Micro-managing is the brutal insistence on how to achieve something.

Key word, how.

Put this way, I noticed some alarming similarities between micro-managing and the way I assign work to my team.

And that’s when a self-defense mechanism kicked in…

I thought of One Minute Manager and How to Win Friends and Influence People and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and found myself considering another term, one that is discussed much less frequently: specific manager.

Of course, this needed defining too:

Specific management is the brutal insistence of what needs to be achieved.

Key word, what.

As a manager it’s easy to let a vision of specific results become an obstacle to the creativity and ingenuity of how your colleagues will produce them.

Looking back, I’ve certainly exhibited a mixture of both micro and specific managing, but with any luck I’ll continue learning how to focus my attention on the end, and not the means.