The Stupidity Of Micromanaging

Micromanaging is something many employees can relate to across industries.  Although it really exhausts the energy/focus or wastes the time of all parties, it is a commonly complained about phenomenon that could have miscellaneous triggering events, like a misperception that feeds thriving distrust or contempt.  However, it is always stupid.  Situationally or temporarily enhanced oversight could be crucial to specific workplace achievements or be used to monitor legitimately problematic employees.  These things are not where micromanaging stops.  To micromanage, someone with (usually) more power than the managed person relentlessly or fallaciously makes demands or launches investigations into how the minute details of a given task are completed or into what a worker is generally doing.

Micromanaging interferes with genuinely necessary components of a job by virtue of imposing intrusive and objectively unnecessary check-ins, requiring lengthy updates about work that could very well already be getting completed without a problem, or pushing for actions that are not the most effective, even aside from any additional stupidity of the more abstract philosophical kind.  More steps that are not truly needed does not make work more efficient.  This is an impediment to speed and success, not that such facts would deter an employer or manager hell-bent on making sure their petty preferences are adhered to.  As for the reasons why they might insist on such nonsense, attempting to conceal their own incompetence or irrelevance to foundational operations (not that this is applicable to all employers) or trying to intimidate people with displays of power as "punishment," or merely make themselves feel powerful and therefore supposedly significant.

Of course, it is a "secret" certain employers and managers want kept unspoken that they might not have anything truly useful or more productive to do, and thus they want to feel important or involved although they can be the most irrelevant figures in the entire organization, depending on the circumstances.  In many cases, work is done first and foremost by hired employees, without whom the company would crumble or have to maintain a much smaller size and scope.  Managers and the executives above them can, if they choose to, embezzle money from consumers and workers in more comfort and with immensely greater compensation than the employees who help provide them with their coveted status and revenue.

Then there is another potential motivation behind the idiocy of micromanaging: the exercise of power simply to feel powerful, a delusional expression of egoism, by forcing/pressuring someone to utilize their time and energy in a given way to meet arbitrary or counterproductive goals.  A person is not ultimately important aside from their rationality and moral character, yet some business figures with power want to feel as vital or as unconstrained as they can by making sure their whims are met.  Why would their mere whims have philosophical authority?  They could not possibly, since they are subjective desires and thus meaningless on their own.  Such people are not rational to begin with, so they only pursue whatever brings them personal convenience or happiness at the expense of possibly all else.

An asinine employer could even micromanage as a form of sabotage to create an alleged "reason" to get rid of a worker they do not like, such as by delaying a project to make an employee look bad.  On all fronts, micromanaging is objectively stupid.  It by necessity entails at least one of the following: the company-harming slowdown of work, the expression of pride simply because someone has power, or malicious manipulation of situations to terminate people who might be great workers (also for the sake of meaningless subjective gratification).  It is logically possible for a worker to never face micromanaging, but very unlikely.  The world is full of fools and becoming entrenched in business leadership is easier in a sense when you disregard reason, morality, other people, and even sometimes pragmatism in order to brandish the social construct of corporate power.