Nearly eight in 10 employees are victims of a micromanaging boss. Here's how to cope.
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THOSE WORDS RANG in Rebecca Weingarten's ears every time her unit turned in work to her supervisor. "Everything came back covered in red ink," says Weingarten, who now can look back and see her team as a classic victim of micromanagement. Under her old boss, Weingarten's job performance had been considered exemplary. But with her new supervisor, suddenly, everything Weingarten's unit touched needed dramatic improvement and was accompanied with a blistering critique. "I felt frazzled - like a kid again. Controlled. Everything started falling to pieces," says Weingarten, who ultimately fled her job and now is a New York-based career coach who, not surprisingly, often works with victims of micromanagement. "I've been through it. I know how terrible it feels."

"We are in a micromanagement pandemic," says Dr. Robert Trestman, vice chair for clinical affairs at the University of Connecticut Health Center. It's so widespread that 79 percent of us say we have been micromanaged, reports Harry Chambers, author of My Way or the Highway: The Micromanagement Survival Guide. Chambers says 71 percent of us indicate that micromanagement has interfered with our job performance, and 85 percent say morale has suffered as a result. How could it be otherwise? A micromanaging boss, by definition, robs an employee of independence and freedom to do the task. Suddenly, every speck of work has to be put under a managerial microscope and, usually, subjected to endless rounds of criticism as a micromanager painstakingly deconstructs the job until, finally, it's exactly as it would be had he done it himself.