Micromanagement? No thanks!

It’s probably tempting, if you’re a subject leader, to try to compensate for the uncertainty and fluidity associated with the sudden shift to online education by tying everything down as much as possible. However, unless your school is already fully online, or operating as near to a normal timetable as possible, you could end up achieving less than if you’d have adopted a less hands-on approach.

I only have my own experience to guide me, of course, but here are my thoughts on the matter. I’ve always believed that you have to delegate responsibilities rather than tasks, and I’ll admit to having found it difficult, sometimes, to adhere to this belief. After all, if you have a clear idea of what you want to happen, and a good idea of how to make it happen, why sit around hoping that they come up with the same brilliant solution as yours?

There are four reasons that it’s better to let people think of their own approaches:

First, if you just tell them what to do, they’re likely to start to feel resentful, unfulfilled and demoralised. If they have any sense, they will do their best to vote with their feet.

Second, they could learn to be helpless or lazy. If they know that you will always tell them what to do instead of trusting them, they may stop even trying to think of their own ideas.

Third, as I said in an article about delegating, if you delegate responsibility to people they will probably come up with ideas that you would never have thought of, and all the better for it.

Fourth, it’s good training for them in case they wish to become a manager or leader themselves.

“The play’s the thing” department

People really don’t like being micromanaged, and sometimes even the most benign planning can end up being misconstrued. In the 1980s I was a member of an amateur dramatics society, and one year I was invited to direct a play. Planning always started three or four months ahead.

My experience of being a member of the cast of a play was that sometimes I would only find out whether or not I’d be needed in a rehearsal a week in advance. Even worse, on some occasions I’d turn up to a rehearsal and the director would announce that he or she just wanted to focus on a particular scene that evening, meaning that I needn’t have turned up at all.

So, when it was my turn to direct, I planned all the rehearsals three months in advance. Each person knew exactly which dates they should turn up, and what we would be rehearsing at that time. I thought that was quite good, but to my surprise a lot of people resented it. They thought it smacked of micromanagement!

With the benefit of hindsight, and having done quite a bit of management since then, I think what I would do now is draw up a timeline of rehearsals, stating what ought to be sorted out by when, and invite people to state their availability for rehearsals using an app like Doodle. Obviously, the internet wasn’t available when I was in the amdram society, but looking back I think I’d have elicited much more willing participation from the cast had I asked for more input from them at the planning stage.

Managing a computing department

The thing is about the amdram experience is that I meant well. I was trying to make life easier for the rest of the crew, not treat them like sheep.

Interestingly, I had a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of such “helpfulness”. I had joined a secondary school as Head of Computing, and the previous incumbent of the post had been promoted, and was now my line manager. I had my own ideas about what I wanted to achieve, and the changes I wanted to make, but found myself becoming more and more frustrated by the ex-head of department’s suggestions.

In the end, I asked for a meeting with him. I explained how I felt, and asked him if he could give me a term in which to try out my own ideas. If they failed miserably, I’d gladly implement his advice.

He was mortified. Like me in the amdram society, he had good intentions and genuinely thought he was being helpful. After that meeting, he let me get on with it, and everything worked out very well.

What about in a pandemic though?

I don’t see that being in a pandemic would justify micromanagement. You might feel that you need to be more in control than you are, but the way people feel about being micromanaged (as they would see it) is likely to be to resent and dislike it.

A much better approach, in my opinion, would be to agree a set of achievable goals, and then to have regular online meetings to discuss whether they are being met. If they are, maybe you could all be even more ambitious. If not, what can be done to address the situation?

An alternative and opposite approach might be to send out emails to your colleagues several times a week saying what they should have covered by now. You could even pepper these epistles with “uplifting” quotes to “gee them up”.

If you do decide to go down that road, I suggest you also devote a bit of time to drafting adverts for new staff, because once things get moving again you could see an exodus from your department.

The screenshot on the front of this post is from the website Classroom Timers. The screenshot on the top of this page is from Google.

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