How do you handle micro managers? I’m a second year transactional associate and for the most part the partners and senior associates I work for trust me to get the work done. But this one guy is constantly checking up on me, asking for status of deliverables long before the deadlines he gave me, and just generally pestering me on everything I do. I am going to go insane if don’t figure out a way to stop this.

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Yep. Do good work but don't be excellent. He won't ask for you again, problem solved. Did this with a senior associate when I was a first year and never had to work with them again till they left when I was a second year! I still got plenty of other work from everyone else in the group.

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There’s micro managers everywhere and they are very annoying at all levels. I try not to take it personally. Just respond as you otherwise would. Also, it’s helpful to try to see things from the more senior person’s perspective. As you get more senior there are significant additional pressures put on people. They are responsible not only for their work but yours as well. Many people have a lot of trouble letting go and trusting people. It doesn’t make their leadership style the best but I didn’t realize how easy it is to become a micromanager until I was responsible for large teams that were actually doing the early work. One way to help yourself is to stay in fairly consistent, regular communication with the senior person. That way, they hopefully have more comfort that things are being handled and they will bother you less.

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I was gonna say- communicate, communicate, communicate. It sucks at first but keep them up to date on even small tasks’ progress by cc-ing them on emails/forwarding them as “FYIs.” If you give a status update to the micro manager, cc the senior partner on the matter etc. They’ll either appreciate it or ask you to stop. Hang in there.

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There are micro managers everywhere. Look around, do others typically work with him or are you the low man on the totem pole having to work with him as a right of passage (since your colleagues aren’t going to do it). Don’t stress over it and just respond to him in normal course as you would anyone else and then he’ll likely stop wanting to work with you (but if you otherwise do good work it should be fine).

What level is your micro manager, OP?

This is actually pretty common with senior associates and junior partners who are learning to manage, still think of things more or less like they did as associates, and have a very hard time letting go. For what it’s worth, in my experience there actually is a correlation between being a really excellent associate and having trouble transitioning to a supervisory role in which delegation is imperative. I have a partner who is one of my favorite colleagues in my career and who is just a brilliant lawyer, but who at 50 still can’t delegate worth a rats ass. We talk about it all the time. In his case, it’s almost pathological.

So, it’s inevitable that you will run into these people throughout your career. Two pieces of advice. First, don’t become one of them. That is, learn from your experience and, as you become more senior, spend as much energy on becoming an excellent delegator as you are now spending on becoming an excellent associate. Second, Work really hard to communicate clearly and often, beat deadlines, and learn the seniors personal style, so you can mimic it as much as possible. I think a lot of the micromanagement comes from anxiety about perfection, and the closer to “perfect“ you get and the far in advance of deadlines you deliver your work, the less these folks have to be anxious about. Otherwise, it’s really a matter of tolerating what you’re experiencing out of an understanding of where it comes from.

likehelpfulsmart

As someone on the more micro-managing side, try not to take it personally and communicate a lot (e.g., when something comes in, immediately email to say “I will handle by x time” so they’re not left wondering)/cc senior on everything. Second year is still very early and not sure how much you have worked with this senior before. You may be an excellent junior, but not everyone is. Senior has probably been burned many times by (even great) juniors forgetting to do things/dropping the ball/not even realizing something is their job, so he is over communicating with you to make sure stuff gets done. When you duck up, the partner doesn’t want to hear “oh I trusted junior to do it, and didn’t follow up and they ducked up”. It is my job to make sure everything gets done, so I follow up to make sure it’s getting done. As you work with this person more, they will (hopefully) start to trust you more and bug you less.

If you don’t want to work for this person in the future, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t be following the advice of do a bad job on purpose so they don’t ask for you again…

Also, consider having an honest conversation with this senior and tell them “hey I can handle xyz tasks and you can trust that I’m doing that, you don’t need to follow up everytime”. They may have no idea how much they’re annoying you. I did that as a junior with a micromanaging senior and it went well. It was frustrating at times working for him, but honestly I learned so much from him and became so much of a better lawyer from his perfectionist ways.

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