TCW #025 | Helping your helicopter manager let go (of their tight grip on your career)
Learn how to build trust, gain autonomy, and give them confidence to retire their helicopter license for good.
This week, we’ll talk about how to confront a micromanagement relationship with your manager and make progress toward regaining your autonomy, agency, and creativity.
If you’ve ever felt that your manager didn’t fully trust your approach to work or your judgment, you know it’s the pits.
Some managers react to losing faith in our work by hovering more and trying to wrap us in bubble wrap, some inject themselves into our work (often uninvited), and others go full-on micromanagement and more or less take over our job.
No matter how your helicopter manager is reacting, it’s not good for your career.
Trust in the workplace is the foundation for psychological safety. It’s pure fuel for the kind of high quality, creative work that can only be accomplished with full agency.
But many managers have no idea when their behavior falls on this spectrum, and this post is all about how to confront and unwind these behaviors and rebuild your manager’s confidence in you.
Let’s dive in.
Below is a quick refresher on what it feels like to be in a micromanagement / helicopter manager relationship, and how it can impact your career.
🚁 The Helicopter Manager aka Micromanagement
The Helicopter Manager dysfunction occurs when a manager closely monitors and controls an employee's work. This can be very suffocating and demoralizing for their direct reports, and it often leads to employees feeling stifled, unappreciated, and limited.
Some common signs that you have a Helicopter Manager:
Tedious supervision: Your manager requires excessive dedicated time for the two of you after your ramp-up period (more than 2x/week). In those sessions, they consistently double-check your progress and revisit decisions you have made for your work. They constantly check-in with you and ask to review your work.
Constant critique: The manager provides unrequested feedback, frequently, and doesn’t seem to trust your skills or judgment. They may believe they can do your job better than you, and as a result may be overly critical of your choices or work product.
Micromanagement: Your manager closely monitors and controls every aspect of your work, and may often make decisions for you. They may even take over your meetings or projects.
Demoralization: Freedom and autonomy matter more to some employees than others. If self-direction matters to you, having a Helicopter Manager will cramp your sense of agency and ability to work creatively.
Decreased productivity or Disengagement: The pressure of being watched and monitored constantly has two common impacts on employees:
(1) in some cases, the pressure causes them to make more mistakes, reinforcing the manager’s micromanagement “spider sense” and justifying their behavior.
(2) the stress of being micromanaged becomes so overwhelming that your brain decides to disengage from your work — if your manager can do the work better than you anyway, why not just let them take the wheel?
Over time, employees of Helicopter Managers lose their ability to be creative and think freely, and they may lose their professional confidence.
Some employees report enjoying lots of management oversight, but the issue is that when you’re not the one making decisions and owning the consequences, your long-term development and growth are stifled, and you will quickly fall behind your peers. It’s a sneaky career saboteur.
TLDR: Helicopter Managers can bomb your confidence and limit your ability to learn and grow. This needs to be dealt with immediately.
Micromanagement behaviors exist on a spectrum
I first introduced the Helicopter manager relationship dysfunction in TCW #022 “The 6 dysfunctions in manager-employee relationships. After posting the article, I realized that it’s important to recognize that this manager-employee relationship dysfunction exists on a spectrum.
We often think of the endpoint of extreme micromanagement, but any management efforts that diminish an employee’s sense of agency, ability, or accountability ultimately fall under this umbrella.
I came up with this visual to tie observable behaviors to the spectrum of Helicopter Management that I’ve seen in the workplace (and I admit that I’ve fallen into these patterns myself at times).
If any of what’s on that spectrum is resonating with you, this post aims to help you point out the behavior to your manager, confront the problem, and build toward autonomy and agency.
💡 Psssst: If you’re a manager reading this and realizing you might be on the spectrum of Helicopter Management for one or more of your employees, this guide by Distant Job is a starting point toward self awareness and kicking the habit.
Manager giving Unsolicited Advice
If your manager frequently offers advice on how to do your work, without your request and not in formal work reviews, you probably feel like you can do nothing right. Over time, you may even decide to start submitting first draft work where final draft work is needed (your manager is going to have tons of comments anyway, so why toil and polish needlessly?)
The issue
The issue is that we all need validation. When you always hear what you’re doing wrong rather than what you’re doing right, you lose confidence. Another issue is that when you know your manager is reviewing everything, you will inevitably (over time) produce lower quality work because you know they have the final say.
How to start the conversation
“Hey manager, I noticed that you frequently offer advice about the way I approach my work, or my work product. While I appreciate that you want to help me be successful, I worry that if I always know you’ll review everything I do, I won’t have the chance to test and learn from my own ideas and approaches.
Can we find a way to balance the volume of feedback against the stakes of the work, so I can fail fast when I make mistakes, but not on critical projects?”