How Information Affects Micromanagement

A friend recently confided in me that he had a new Regional Manager to report to. His company is a national distributor of industrial supplies sold primarily to manufacturing companies. He didn’t know much about his new boss, other than that he suddenly wanted to monitor all sales activity in all the offices in the southeast, of which there are several. To do so, he asked the sales force to email him all of their daily customer contact lists and sales transactions for the day directly. In other words, the Regional Manager was interceding and doing the analysis that local Sales Managers normally do. The regional manager went a step further and began communicating directly with the sales force instead of through the sales managers. Translation: The regional manager had embarked on a micromanagement program instead of letting the local sales managers do his job for him.

This got me thinking about how the regional manager was doing his job and the systems that supported it. When specifying information requirements for a company, you need to consider the types of actions and decisions that need to be supported and which can be classified by PCO, ie Policy-Control-Operational. Within any company, there are three critical levels of business functions that must be supported:

* Policy Information – Used by executive management to direct the business and includes items such as operating summaries, forecasts, and trend analysis.

* Control information: used by middle management to control operations and report to executives; this typically includes status reports, department summaries, quota analysis, and schedules.

* Operational Information – Used to support daily business activities such as placing and processing orders, checking order status, and many other activities to help customers.

The information also has the nuance of being time dependent to perform the various business functions in a timely manner. Not surprisingly, a business requires a quicker response at the operational level than at higher levels. To illustrate:

* Operational information is generally required “On Demand” (also known as “On Demand”) or daily. Ultimately, this represents the basic business transactions to collect data. Daily information is also useful for end-of-day summaries and formulating daily schedules.

* Control information typically consists of daily, weekly, and monthly summaries for middle management to monitor operations. Random “on-demand” inquiries may be made periodically, but are not normally part of the normal routine of middle management.

* Policy information typically includes weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual summaries and projections necessary for long-range planning. Once again, random “on demand” consultations may be held periodically, but are not normally part of the normal routine of executive management.

If a manager spends an inordinate amount of time doing “on-demand” processing, as my friend’s new boss seems to be doing, it means a couple of things: first, in all likelihood, the manager isn’t delegating responsibility correctly, and has established his area of ​​the company on a path of micromanagement. Second, it means that the company’s information systems are not serving the business well, or that the new regional manager simply doesn’t know how to use them and is instead trying to reinvent the wheel by devising his own system for getting the information. If it’s the latter, he may be working at odds with the company’s IT department, thus introducing redundant processes and data that can lead to conflicting results (also known as “dirty data”). In my friend’s case, I suspect the Regional Manager is guilty of all of the above.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to get the right information to support the business functions you’re in charge of, but if it’s creating employee morale issues or invalid information, you have to ask yourself if the wrong person is running the program.

Managers should do some soul searching; do they really need that information or are they interfering with the responsibilities of others? My advice to managers is simple: delegate responsibilities, hold people accountable, and don’t get in their way. “Manage more, supervise less” – Bryce’s Law

Keep faith!