Micro-Managers are overpaid!

Let's suppose we have a manager who spends a lot of time micro-managing the work of the people under them.

I claim that they are overpaid and here's why.

Effectively, they are trying to do the work of lower level employees rather than just letting those employees do the work they are getting paid to do. Suppose the manager is being paid $60 an hour and the lower level employee is being paid $30 an hour. Then for every hour the manager spends micro-managing, that manager is being overpaid by $30 an hour.

But it gets worse.

Every hour spent on micro-managing is an hour not spent on doing the work the manager should be doing. So effectively micro-management is a form of loafing.

And on top of this managers who micro-manage create bottlenecks when they want to approve work that should simply be allowed to be done and in the process they create waste and delays which are a cost to the company. These unnecessary costs should also be deducted from their salaries.

And finally micro-managers disempower those who work from them and the employees end up suffering from learned helplessness - they become afraid to make decisions and manage their teams because they are certain that they will be second-guessed and over-ruled by their manager.

The lesson here is that micro-managers don't just not earn their own salaries, they also make it hard for those who report to them to earn their salaries as well, so there is a domino effect that undercuts the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation.