Micro Managers Are Poor Communicators.
Micro managers and communication.
Here’s the rub – Micro Managers feel – nay – firmly believe they are the best communicators known to humanity.
And it’s the last thing they are good at.
Hence the problems in their lives. The problems they face each day stems from the fact they are horrible conveyors of what they are thinking.
They make lousy teachers – yet feel that is their strongest talent.
Hence the micro managing.
An article from Workolpolis.com says it all:
Here’s the rub – Micro Managers feel – nay – firmly believe they are the best communicators known to humanity.
And it’s the last thing they are good at.
Hence the problems in their lives. The problems they face each day stems from the fact they are horrible conveyors of what they are thinking.
They make lousy teachers – yet feel that is their strongest talent.
Hence the micro managing.
An article from Workolpolis.com says it all:
| Micro-management: Bad bosses are often micro-managers intruding into details of every decision and facet of the business. This may be because their own bosses expect them to be on top of things. But bad bosses often get activities and results confused. They may also have been embarrassed by someone's past poor performance or another major mistake and take the wrong measures to make sure it never happens again. |
JIM CLEMMER Friday, August 5, 2005 |
But a micro manager can not, for the live of them, convey what it is they want done. They assume important details are obvious and focus on inconsequential details.
They hear the conversation in their heads and assume others are hearing the same thing.
An example:
One of the best tenets, and something which is taught to every technical writer on the first day (and many advert executives to boot), is to repeat important facts three times. Why? Because people don’t often enter a document the same way as you write it. Some skim first, others zero in on what they need to know first and then circle outwards after they found it, while still others have trouble focusing on the material at hand.
Repetition is critical to good tech writing.
Yet I had a micro manager tell me to never repeat as it’s a waste of time and good readers should not have to have face this repetition. That assumed a lot to begin with, true?
A good writer … a good communicator she was not. She had many ideas about how to communicate but effectively was not one of them.
She confused the results with the activity.
Remember: micro managers are always the poorest of communicators. Be very aware of this. And when challenged to repeat what it is they said, they often get angry and defensive even if all you want is clarification.
Just weather the storm and seek out what you need to know. And force the non-communicator to do something they loathe – repeat themselves.
Dafydd
mibw@yahoo.com
posted by The Fetish Lair @ 10:46 p.m.
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