If you find yourself micromanaging your team, try applying practical ideas from Transactional Analysis, a longstanding theory about how you can analyse every interaction through âtransactionsâ which are: parent, child, or adult.
Hereâs an example to illustrate.
A client I work with complained that a member of her team took them right to the wire on a presentation for a client meeting.
The team member got their section of the presentation to her at 5pm the day before the client meeting, and worse, it wasnât any good. My client stayed til 10pm that night to rewrite those slides so they were good enough to go into the presentation.
We all know thereâs a big problem with that.
In the morning, the team member emailed to ask âhow were the slides?â
My client couldnât bring herself to say they were rubbish, so she emailed back to say thanks, they were great and sheâd only had to make a few tweaks.
We all know thereâs a big problem with that.
The team member now thinks that what she did is okay.
She might have suspected that it wasnât okay, and maybe noticed that her boss was a bit grumpy, but with no idea why.
She likely felt confused and worried, with no idea how to make it better. Next time she may do the same thing again, maybe not so late.
Meanwhile, my client was annoyed and tired.
This is disastrous.
My client had been micromanaging her team member and treated them like a child, and her colleague responded like a child.
Conversely, my client acted like a parent, and just did the work for her.
In all likelihood, this will have set up a recurring dynamic where her colleague will keep bringing work that isnât good enough⌠and my client will keep micromanaging her, until my client tells her.
So what to do?
The general rule is that if someone comes to you behaving like a child (eg âI canât do this, can you do it for me?â) if you respond as a parent, and either do it for them (micromanaging) or tell them what to do, youâre doomed.
Equally, if you treat people like theyâre children and tell them what to do and how to do it, then theyâll take the child role.
You can see these patterns happening in workplaces all the time at a really unconscious level, and everyoneâs frustrated.
If youâre the ‘child’, you want to be grown up, and youâre not allowed to because youâre not given any autonomy.
At the same time, the person thatâs being the parent hates it because they feel they havenât got any decent people working for them, and they get frustrated.
To fix it, rather than micromanaging, you have to acknowledge the pattern, and then shift it.
The solution is: behave as an adult.
This means, if someone comes to you as a child, donât treat them like a parent, nor meet them like a child, instead treat them like an adult.
So I coached my client and next time she said:
âAh, actually, this isnât good enough, I canât take it to our client, and as it has to be delivered tomorrow morning, it has to be fixed.
Itâs not good enough for this reason and this reason and this reason, and I canât work late to fix it, so what can we do about it?â
If you say something like that, you leave it for them to respond – hopefully, they say: âIâll deal with it, Iâll fix it now.â And not walk out at 5pm leaving you to carry the baby!
If you donât treat them like an adult, and donât explain whatâs wrong and then give them responsibility for putting it right, theyâre never going to get any better.
We default to these things very easily because weâve been institutionally trained to be like this – as kids, at school – and when we come to work we can still be stuck in those patterns.
You will know people in your organisation, in your team, or around you who behave in a child-like way. And youâll see people being parented, so you also know who the adults are.
Hereâs a link to the Transactional Analysis model so you can read about it in more detail.
How to stop micromanaging: use the TA model
The way to use this tool is to combine the model with a set of questions around it:
- Who are you parenting?
- To whom are you presenting yourself as a child?
- What can you do to move to being an adult?
Either party – parent or child – could decide to do this re-setting.
So for example, if you are being parented by your boss, you could go to your boss and say, “you know that thing you did, Iâve decided to do it in this way and this way, Iâve created some options and I wanted to discuss them with you…”, as opposed to asking permission.
You could make a recommendation. You could state your intention, rather than waiting for them to tell you.
With the Scouts example in my earlier story, weâre the parents and theyâre the children. And thatâs how it is.
However, on the Do-What-You-Like Day, we broke that rule, and asked âwhat would you like to do?â We treated them like adults. With amazing and unexpected results.
Relating that to an organisation: if youâre busy and find yourself being a micromanager, a bottleneck and everybody needing you – is that because youâve been parenting?
If that sounds like you, and youâve created ‘children’ who are culturally unable to take their own decisions, and need your permission to do everything, then, in reality, itâs your own fault.
Have a look at the Transactional Analysis Tool and see if it can help.
If you need some help with working on this â get in touch, at Then Somehow we help you build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff thatâs stuck.
If youâd like to discuss how we can help your team perform better, get in touch here.