As regular readers know, a recurring feature of Vision & Balance is an occasional post on the theme “Two and a Half Cheers for…”. In these posts I discuss leadership and organizational practices and principles that are often denigrated but that, despite their possible downsides, perhaps deserve more respect than they get. Past installments have address issues like publish-or-perish culture, meetings, and the “scarcity mindset.”

This time I wanted to discuss a topic that probably doesn’t deserve a full two and a half cheers. But — hear me out — I think it may rise to the level of one and a half.

The topic today is micromanagement. And before I offer my thoroughly half-hearted cheer for that much-maligned approach to management, let me offer some full-throated caveats:

To be clear: micromanagement itself is not actually a good thing. Leaders and managers who are constantly breathing down their employees’ necks, who don’t give them a reasonable amount of space in which to figure out their work and determine the best ways to carry it out, who get elbow-deep in unit-level or even individual workflows, and want to review every purchasing decision are not being effective leaders, and are driving their employees crazy.

The thing is, “micromanagement” can be very much in the eye of the beholder, and just about everyone gets it wrong sometimes.

On the one hand, there are some employees for whom virtually any management feels like micromanagement. Sometimes they’re self-conscious and don’t like the feeling that their work is being watched. Sometimes they’re deeply invested in particular ways of doing things and treat any kind of supervisory guidance as the threat to their preferred workflows that, of course, it really can be (and sometimes absolutely should be). And sometimes — very occasionally — they just don’t fully understand that they’re employees of an organization rather than independent agents and can’t figure out why someone else thinks they can tell them what to do.

On the other hand, some leaders and managers are so afraid of being seen as micromanagers that they hang back and give their staff so much space that the staff are left really wishing they were managed more closely (or at least got more attention) from their leaders. Often these leaders have heard so many complaints about micromanagers and are so anxious about being disliked or bring seen as meddlers that they shy away from the real work of management.

My guess is that many people reading this post have had at least one experience of both a too-distant manager and a genuinely crazy-making micromanager.

And of course there’s at least one other fairly common scenario: leaders who use the avoidance of micromanagement as a convenient excuse to shirk their real duties as leaders. Not wanting to put in the hard work of understanding what their people do, or not being willing to risk conflict, they decline to do some of the most important work of leadership and rationalize it as being “big picture” leaders or having a “hands-off” management style.

So when it comes right down to it, maybe it’s not so much that micromanagement itself really deserves any cheers at all — it’s more that avoiding micromanagement can lead to problems just easily as micromanagement can.