Micromanagement = Lost Sales

There are three things that are inevitable in this world: death, taxes and lousy management. And of all the many manifestations of lousy management, surely one of the worst is micromanagement.

I was recently talking about this with Sam Reese, CEO of the sales training firm Miller Heiman. He once worked with a telecommunications company that required sales reps to record every single prospect call and customer call, and list out exactly what had been accomplished in each customer meeting. If you didn't toe the line, and failed to record a certain minimum activity for the week, you'd be subjected to a humiliating conference call with the sales director. "He lambasted them and then made them put their forecast for the next week 'in blood,'" says Reese. "It was a real waste of time and energy," says Reese.

Sales process guru Michael Bosworth, co-author of the bestseller CustomerCentric Selling, once worked with a major computer company where forecasting was an obsessive nightmare. During the final month of every quarter, sales reps were forced into to weekly conference calls where they were supposed to commit personally to what they were going to sell that week. What was ironic and stupid about this was that the company's products had a long sales cycle, so that it was unlikely that the last minute management attention could have any impact on actual sales. What's worse, the sales reps quickly became aware that having nothing to close was not an acceptable answer, so they began promising closings that weren't going to take place. "Fabrication was the order of the day and salespeople became quite adept at getting their manager off their back for another week," says Bosworth.

Probably the worst kind of micromanager is the one who is simultaneously narcissistic. I once had a manager who insisted on signing off on every decision, no matter how trivial and he would only make that decision after being presented with reams of data. At the same time, he thought the world revolved around him, so he thought nothing of making everyone wait for a hour or more for scheduled staff meetings -- which was where he would view the data and make the go/no-go decisions. Sometimes he didn't show up at all, which meant that everything in the department ground to a halt. Needless to say, all of this was a colossal waste of time and effort, and when the company experienced a downturn, our group was the first targeted for layoffs. By the way, this idiot is now the president of a major division of a major corporation.

I've heard plenty of advice over the years about how to deal with micromanagement, and even wrote about it last year in my BNET article package about managing your boss. Still, I'm not sure that the advice is all that useful. I suspect that there's some kind of weird psychological undertow that locks managers into this kind of behavior.

Have you run into a micromanager in your career?

If so, how did you handle it? Did you just plug away? Did you look for another job? Did you try to change the manager's behavior?