How to beat micromanagement
Micromanagement kills motivation and joy in every type of work. Design is no exception. Recently, I heard a story from a young designer that some of you may relate to:
Imagine you work at a small company. One gray fall morning you sit down with a warm cup of freshly made coffee for an energizing day of creative brilliance. You open your computer but something is different. Figma has turned into a crime scene: your designs have been dismembered. Significant changes have been made in various places. These changes are not good. They violate a host of design principles, accessibility guidelines, and the human spirit.
Turns out, the CEO has been personally making significant changes to your design files. Replace CEO with product manager if you work at a larger company.
You try to push back skillfully but your boss is taking things very personally and very negatively. He starts making passive aggressive comments at every turn. The power imbalance is making you increasingly uncomfortable.
Ultimately, you’re responsible for the design so you’re doing your best to make sure it’s as good as possible. Regardless of who or what made it bad… it’s on you in the end. But the barbaric rube simply does not appreciate that fact.
Luckily, there is an ancient technique, spoken of in whispers, that may just extract you from this waking nightmare. What might it be?
Ask questions
You need to put yourself in your boss's shoes. Have you ever been a back seat driver? What prompted that? Maybe you had different ideas about where you should be driving or how. Maybe you wanted to go faster, or slower, or take a different route.
Why didn’t you just grab the steering wheel? Because it would be unsafe to do so. It would clearly create a terrible outcome. Within this little scenario lies the key to beating your micro-management problem.
Your boss wants to be heard. He wants to have a say on where you’re going and how you get there. Let him have his say. Ask genuine questions. Try to understand where he’s coming from.
By asking questions, you can help him improve his ideas and you can both move towards a better design outcome that you're both bought in to. People tend to have much less resistance to questions than being told what to do. Especially genuine, non-leading questions seeking to understand and explore what the best solution might be.
The second thing you need to do is stop the boss from grabbing the steering wheel.
Luckily there's a second technique you can use here, so secret, so powerful that only a small handful of people ever dare to use it. Are you ready?
Ask more questions
If you don't want your boss to grab the steering wheel, you have to convey that doing so will create a worse outcome for him.
How might you do that? Again, ask questions.
Hey boss, I noticed you made some changes to the designs. What prompted that? What were you trying to achieve there? Did you consider these tradeoffs? I noticed your approach is not consistent with our general approach. Which one should we use across the board? Why? If we use that interaction paradigm, it'll cause these issues. Are we okay with that? Where will the data come from to support this design?
Don’t make it feel like an interrogation and never make your boss feel (or especially look) stupid. Have this meeting one on one and ask these questions from a place of genuine curiosity. Let your boss actually answer them. Don't cut him off.
As you ask these questions, your boss will hopefully see that you have the context and design knowledge to implement his feature ideas much better than he could on his own. He'll see you as someone who can make him more successful instead of as an obstacle to his vision.
But maybe your boss is a great rationalizer and somewhat obtuse. Maybe he just doesn't get it and keeps micro-managing you despite all your influencing, listening, and conveying the issues that arise from his micromanagement.
There's a third technique.
Escalate in directness
Set a meeting with him and explain the negative impact his changes have had on you and on the product. If you can, explain how you felt about it as well. Did you feel stressed that you may not be able to integrate these changes coherently because they were made without you? Say that.
If that still doesn’t work, it’s time to turn to our friend Epictetus. There are things you can control and things you cannot control. If you’ve tried to influence, escalated in directness, and your boss is still micromanaging you, it’s time to start looking for a new role.
Alongside that, take solace in the fact that your only duty is to do what you can. He’s the boss and if he wants to screw up the product, so be it. It’s not worth your mental health to obsess about something that you don’t ultimately have ownership over. As long as you’ve done your best to influence your boss and done the best design work you can, you’ve succeeded.
Of course, it’s easy to say that when you're reflecting from afar but we spend most of our lives emotionally wrapped up in things we can’t directly control. It takes practice to let go of the endless barrage of uncontrollables and focus only on the small set of vitally important things we control. So get started. Take this as practice. You will be happier and more successful for it in the end.
To summarize:
- Ask questions to understand what your boss is trying to accomplish and why. Once you understand, help him accomplish it.
- Ask more questions to help convey the nuance and implications of the design work being dictated by his micromanagement.
- If those don't work, escalate in directness. Explain the impact his micromanagement is having on you, the product, and the team.
- If none of those work, detach and focus on what you can control. If he insists on screwing up the product that's his prerogative. Your job is to do the best work you can.
- If the first three steps haven't worked yo also may want to start searching for a new role.