4 Ways To Quickly Win Over Your Micromanaging Boss
Who likes micromanagement. Next to no-one. Yet nearly everyone has experienced some form of micromanagement. I am sharing 4 tried and tested ways to quickly win over your micromanaging boss. Each of these techniques is very useful in quickly building trust and gaining greater autonomy with any boss.
Early in my career I had a crash course in how to manage and impress bosses a lot more senior and experienced than me. For two jobs in a row – at PA Consulting and Williams Lea, I had to look after over 20 partners or senior managers.
four ways to quickly win over your micromanaging boss
- Carefully negotiate sensible and achievable expectations and goals
- Over communicate to build trust
- Educate them on how they will get the best from you
- Consistently overdeliver the results they need
I was in my mid 20’s and they were all 40+. I kept getting promoted during this time, so I knew I was doing a lot right. Since then, I have had very good relationships with a whole range of bosses and successfully dealt with all their leadership and communication styles, including those that wanted to keep close to what I was doing.
Before we dive into the 4 ways to quickly win over your micromanaging boss, it is important to understand why bosses micromanage their staff, and then I will share 6 clear signs you are being micromanaged.
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Why Bosses micromanage you
Firstly, your boss has trust and self-confidence issues personally. For example, this might translate into the perceived need for high levels of control of the staff they manage to maintain their self-confidence. Do remember, managers personal assessment and appraisal grade is directly linked to how well their team members perform. This is a scary situation for many bosses, and many respond with trying to control everything in the team.
Secondly, your boss simply doesn’t know how to manage others yet. Most managers are experts that are promoted into management without being taught how to manage. It is like being given a load of financial data and told to produce management accounts without being taught anything about accounting rules. Help these managers with positive feedback and suggestions – more on this later.
Thirdly, you might have missed deadlines, submitted work not up to expectations or taken, or not taken, specific actions. These slips have caused your boss to lose confidence in you and your ability to deliver the results they and the team need. They respond by getting much closer to what you are doing which can include micromanaging you.
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It is not nice to feel your boss doesn’t trust you. You can be proactive, and you can take really effective actions to change that quickly. I will cover 4 highly effective ways to quickly win over your micromanaging boss shortly.
6 signs of a boss micromanaging you
Knowing when a boss is micromanaging you or keeping a very close eye on you is useful so you can increase your efforts to win back or gain their trust quickly. Six signs you are being micromanaged:
- Your boss has to know everything about what you are doing and plan to do
- Micromanagers only delegate carefully explained tasks. They very rarely delegate problems where you have to work out the solutions for yourself
- Bosses that micromanage ask for frequent and detailed updates
- They discourage you from making decisions independently of them
- Micromanagers will dictate how they want tasks to be done
- Because of their constant checking up, you will feel they really don’t trust you
When you experience several of these signs, take each of the 4 actions to win over your micromanaging boss.
1 quickly win over your micromanaging boss by carefully negotiate sensible and achievable expectations and goals
Having clear, defined and measurable goals and expectations agreed with your boss is critical to enable you to build trust and demonstrate you deliver what is asked of you.
If you don’t know what your boss wants, it will be incredibly hard to deliver great work in their eyes. Agreeing clear goals and understanding what your boss wants is one of the most important steps you can take to winning over a micromanaging boss.
If your boss gives you general goals, go back to them with specific SMART goals and ask for their approval of these goals. The more goals you can make specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound, the easier it will be to deliver exactly what your boss wants.
Always remember to ensure you can deliver what is being asked of you in the context of your skills and experience, the resources you have available and what you realistically have control or influence over. If your boss asks for unrealistic goals, negotiate based on each of these factors.
Always negotiate SMART goals with your boss that you are confident you can deliver.
over communicate to build trust – The second way to quickly win over your micromanaging boss
Proactively make sure your boss knows what you are working on and how you are progressing against the realistic goals you have agreed to. With a micromanaging boss, it is much better to communicate too much rather than too little. Making sure they know what you are doing alleviates their fears and concerns. They also have a chance to input.
Find out how your boss likes to receive updates. A few examples:
- Sending an email at the beginning and end of each day summarising what you have completed and where you are with progress against remaining goals.
- Popping round to your boss’s desk to give them a quick update. I always liked to do this before 9am or after 5pm when they were less busy or didn’t have meetings
- Calling them on you way into work and when heading home from work to provide them an update.
Experiment and find out what works best with the boss you have. Keep asking them if they are getting what they need from you.
Over communicate rather than under communicate.
3 – educate them on how they will get the best from you
You need to build trust before you start educating your boss. Doing a good job and delivering what they are asking for from you is a great start. Understanding your boss’s pain points and pressures and working to reduce them is another very useful step. Do what you can to make them feel and look good.
Then you can start suggesting ways of working and approaches that will help you do better work. This might be giving you more autonomy. Or it might be providing more context for their requests. It might be giving you smaller problems to solve rather than them giving you detailed instructions of how to solve the problem.
Work out what you are going to ask for and then ask for one change. Demonstrate that this helps you deliver what they need. Then ask for the next small change etc. Keep repeating until you have a reasonable balance of what they want and what you want. You must keep your boss happy and give them what they need to stop them micromanaging you.
The fourth way to quickly win over your micromanaging boss is to consistently overdeliver the results they need
The most important results you can deliver are the results that help your boss hit their targets or make them look good to peers or their boss. When you deliver consistently, in the way they want, while taking up as little of their time and energy as practical, you will gain a lot of their trust.
The more they trust you, the less they will micromanage you.
Find out what their most important goals are. Ask your boss. Work out how you can move the team closer to goals through what you do in your day job. What pressures is your boss under and how can you reduce those pressures? What projects or additional work might you do to help your boss out or solve a problem that hinders the team. Start small and build up.
Doing the work is half of impressing your boss. The other half is making sure they know what you are doing and HOW it is helping them. Make this link as clear as possible in your updates to your boss. Tell them and follow up with an email summary.
Consistently overdeliver the results that your boss needs to reduce their micromanaging behaviour quickly.
in summary
Having a micromanaging boss is not fun. Use the 4 ways to quickly win over your micromanaging boss when have been through.
It will take work on your part to win their trust and demonstrate that they don’t need to spend time and energy giving you detail instructions to get the results they need. Putting in this work will make your job a lot more enjoyable, you will gain a lot more experience, and you will build your skills a lot faster than if you don’t put this work in.
The four ways to quickly win over your micromanaging boss are:
- Carefully negotiate sensible and achievable expectations and goals
- Over communicate to build trust
- Educate them on how they will get the best from you
- Consistently overdeliver the results they need
Take a look at our resources to help you win over any micro managing boss quickly so you have a much more enjoyable job to do.
If you have any questions on “4 Ways To Quickly Win Over Your Micromanaging Boss”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Micromanaging bosses are not fun to work with. The good news is that you can win micro managing bosses over quickly when you take the right actions to build trust and give them what they need.
Work hard at increasing the communication with your boss and give them a sense of input and control. Support them reach their goals and it won’t be long before they start trusting you and giving you more autonomy and freedom.
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