Simple, Yet Powerful Management Methods

Method	Appropriate For
Micromanagement (MM) (Also appropriate for a while for new relationships to get up to speed on each other's strengths, weaknesses, and style)	Individual Contributors
Management By Objective (MBO)	Experienced Managers (possibly supervisors)
Management By Exception (MBE)	Experienced Executives
Leadership	Business Managers, CEOs, GM, Managing Directors

 

Micromanagement is constantly looking over someone's shoulder, this can be minute to minute or hour-to-hour but is typical in situations where employees are new (high turnover), low skilled, or simply not well motivated.  For example, in a telemarketing operation callers are monitored very closely using physical supervisor presence and/or much electronic monitoring to ensure work is carried out properly and with sufficient effort. I believe is it completely appropriate to micromanage all new employees for some period of time until you understand their abilities and limitations, and they understand what to expect from you as well.

Management by Objective means you can lay out goals and trust that the employee has all the necessary skills and experience to perform THAT TASK without outside help or resources. This could be daily, weekly or even monthly goals depending on the industry, task, and other factors, but typically any good manager should be able to go a week or more without needing help from their superior. This can be easily done with repetitive work, especially when it is event drive-by outside factors. i.e. a car wash attendant can be managed this way with little training because the cars keep coming, and the job is relatively simple. 

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Management By Exception is when not only can you trust the employee to carry out the task, but you can also trust them to understand when they are outside their own abilities and experience and come back to you for additional help and resources.  This really must be earned and is rare without lots of management experience, high confidence, and ability.  There is also the supposition here that the person has the experience and skills to identify opportunities that might come out, which were outside the scope of their objective. In other words, this employee will seek out and find new opportunities to help the company, which was not part of their objectives. In this "mode of management," you may be meeting with the employee once a month to review progress.  Only 5% of people will ever achieve this level of expertise, and these people are the most valuable in your organization because they have leverage and can cause resources to be used in such a way as to generate profits.

Leadership is the next level where a person is ready to successfully start and/or run an entire business and does not need to be managed at all. By this, I, of course, do not mean running a simple sub shop or dry cleaning service, but a complex organization where multiple departments, levels, and/or disciplines must be used to deliver value to customers.  This has a large set of skills that could fill a book and most people will jump in before they are ready, but that is how we learn too. Unfortunately, it is easy to find people who consider themselves executives but are not able to perform at this level for many reasons, which might include a poor history of managers, simple jobs with support systems that never required this, or even corporate structures (which you, and they may not have in a new position) that did not require this level of performance. Today, many organizations have frozen growth because they have people without the correct level of ability in positions of responsibility. Often this is even the owner, board of directors, or CEO, who can not begin to let go and delegate to more senior people who can be trusted with key tasks. 

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As organizations grow, it is easy to have key positions filled by people who limit growth.  Therefore, replacement of some people is inevitable as an organization grows it must shed some skin because few people can keep up with a fast-growing organization completely.  It can take decades to develop all these skills, and a company can go through fast growth spurts. Some larger organizations spend a fortune on organizational development (OD) to ensure this does not happen. This is valuable, but often not necessary until a company is very large to reach optimum performance.  Any company under $1 billion in revenue should be able to have its CEO select and replace the senior staff appropriately. If this is done right, then that senior staff will be able to do it on the next level down.