To all my friends out there, know that I think of you often. I wish time would slow down a bit, and that we could hang out more, enjoy some good food, and talk about all the great things we are planning to do.

What is micromanagement?

BNET.com, an online publication that “provides action-oriented intelligence for managerial professionals that’s smart, useful, and always right at your fingertips”, defines micromanagement as:

a style of management where a manager becomes over-involved in the details of the work of subordinates, resulting in the manager making every decision in an organization, no matter how trivial. Micromanagement is a euphemism for meddling, and has the opposite effect to empowerment. Micromanagement can retard the progress of organizational development, as it robs employees of their self-respect.

BNET’s definition is consistent with that provided by Merriam-Webster:

to manage especially with excessive control or attention to details

Why is it important that we are aware of and avoid micromanagement?

Those who micro-mange are hurting our institution’s ability to fulfill its mission and goals — micromanagement has a negative effect on “communication, creativity, productivity, problem-solving, flexibility, trust, feedback, and openness” (Fracaro, 2007). Trust is consistently at the top of employee’s list of what they want from their work place — credibility, respect, and fairness are also amongst the top five things listed in the Great Place to Work Model (Newing, 2006). Employees need to see the organization be willing and able to make changes. For example, at Microsoft two managers were moved after two rounds of unsatisfactory staff surveys (Newing, 2006). A decision to do nothing to support staff will yield dire long term results and impacts on productivity and return on investment.

What can be done about micromanagement?

Fracaro recommends taking three simple/logical steps to reverse symptoms of micromanagement — steps that can enable any manager to become more effective:

1. Determine if you are indeed micromanaging your employees before initiating subsequent steps to correct your harmful behavior. 2. Determine who or what you are micromanaging, when and where it is taking place, and why it is occurring. 3. To change your behavior, acknowledge several factors that von must accept, communicate with your employees in a specific way to foster their input, and choose one or more alternative methods to cease your micromanagement.

Additional resources

The following resources may be valuable in conceptualizing micromanagement, identifying the risks of being a micro-manager, and strategies for avoiding negative habits, practices and actions associated with micromanagement. The articles listed in this resource section describe strategies for all levels of an organization: staff, management, directors, and executive boards.

Micromanaging Defined — And How to Avoid It

Overview: Successful managers know when micromanaging is okay and when it’s not okay. In short, micromanagement is not okay when it affects the mental health of your staff or the efficiency of your organization.

This white paper is a great resource for business leaders who want to avoid micromanaging. It defines micromanagement and explains:

• When micromanaging is okay
• When micromanaging is not okay
• What constitutes unnecessary input or oversight
• How to recognize a micromanager
• How to change your micromanaging tendencies

10 Tips for Preventing Micromanagement [as a member of a board of directors, or as an executive director]
by Richard Male & Associates

Management do’s and don’ts, according to your staff
by Toni Bowers, TechRepublic

Vol. 10 No. 05 Managing Micromanagement Part 1
The Why and How: A guide to make everyone’s life a little better.
By Julie Adamen

How to Motivate Under-Performing Personnel
by Vicky Therese Davis, William R. Patterson, D. Marq

How to Keep Trustees From Being Micromanagers
By RICHARD P. CHAIT, Chronicle of Higher Education

References

Why is this needed?

While the WMU news and the university home page provide announcements about specific institutional related events (e.g. graduation, board meetings, presidential appearances etc.) many of us have observed and commented on the absence of a community calendar for communication of campus events for student groups, departments, offices, etc.

In order to know what is happening on campus we need to visit too many different Web sites.

One source for all event information would be ideal for our marketing efforts and promotion of events, public speaker series, and meetings that are academically oriented.

What features should our community calendar have?

1. The calendar for the entire university should be accessible from one location (e.g. http://www.wmich.edu/calendar/)
2. The calendar should be accessible privately in the portal, and publicly from the Web
3. Any member of the university community should be able to add an event to the calendar
4. A filter for displaying specific types of events should be available
5. A search tool for locating future and past events should be available
6. The calendar should feature RSS feeds, for those who want to subscribe to announcements for specific types of events, or individual/group promoting an event
7. The filtered results from the calendar should be re-usable on departmental Web sites using RSS/PHP/Syndication/Content Management

How should we go about creating a community calendar?

1. We should organize a small group to complete a needs assessment of other features the calendar should include.
2. Review potential open source or commercial product offerings
3. Consider development or modification of a calendar tool in house
4. Implement a beta of the calendar
5. Try it for 3-6 months
6. Review feedback from the community
7. Make necessary changes
8. Launch the finished tool

Related posts:

• Create your own chalkboard wall calendar
• Community open houses

Collaboration and team work can be nurtured through open communication, willingness to share, ability to compromise, and the ability to lead as well as follow.

Who is part of your professional team within your office and across campus? Do you have partners who you can help as well as get assistance from?

What more could you accomplish if you were part of a larger collaborative group?

A recent article in the Kalamazoo Gazette demonstrates how feedback can be obtained from students. When asked about their impressions of the new Western Edge student success program, students indicated that the attention they expect to receive via the Edge may keep them motivated to stay in college (Davis, 2007). Another student emphasized the importance of personal attention — prior to moving his major to the School of Music he felt that he did not receive the personal care and attention he needed to succeed (Davis, 2007). One potential downside of the Edge, indicated by a junior attending WMU, is the expectation by WMU for freshmen to complete 30 credit hours — such an extensive workload may be too much (Davis 2007).

From the interviews conducted by the Kalamazoo Gazette, we can see that a student’s concept of student success appears to primarily focus on receiving personal care and attention in addition to advising, being able to get the course they need, and graduating on time.

Based on this feedback, our next steps might be to consider methods for enhancing personal attention for each student as well as providing alternative success strategies to those students who, in order to be successful, need to take fewer credits per semester. Note that the later appears to be an indication that there is academic success defined as gaining conceptual and applied knowledge abilities as well as financial success defined as graduating in four years in order to reduce debt at time of graduation.

How might we increase the quality of personal attention at each point of contact with our students? Consider that potential points of contact with students include and are not limited to when a student is considering a college, application, admission, housing, financial aid, student life, buying books, attending class, completing coursework, staying fit, receiving health care, academic advising, financial advising, career advising and placement, course registration, transcript processing, graduation audit, graduation, and alumni relations.

Reference

Related posts:

• Exploring the concept of student success
• Explore what others have done: National student success efforts

As a student at WMU from 1996-2000 I slowly learned about all of WMU’s hidden gems and ‘secret/underpulicized’ services. I had to seek out information about where to find a lab with scanners, photoshop, and multimedia software — at that time, it wasn’t easy to locate the Instructional Technology lab that was located in Sangren Hall near the Educational Library. When I spoke to students working in the two main campus labs, to find out where I could work with multimedia equipment etc, I got shrugs — eventually, I found the service on my own. It is a little easier to find excellent services on campus today — but there is an opportunity to help students discover these services on their own.

“How,” you ask?

Add a recognizable icon to WMU Web pages to serve as a guide for new students to find “secret” and valuable information on WMU Web sites. The icon could be a recognizable black with gold and silver lettering. Label it something simple like ‘discover the secrets of wmu’. Add the icon to all WMU service information pages and chain each page to the next with forward and back options, as well as a link to an index or directory of all ‘wmu secrets’. Using this solution provides an easy way for students to easily browse across all pages that have the similarity of delivering information about a valuable ‘service’.

If you are new to WMU, and don’t know a lot of people here, finding associates with the expertise that you need can be a challenge.

If we were to create a database driven Web directory of WMU staff that includes areas of expertise — enabling staff who seek collaborative assistance to discover potential resources based on query based searches, then we would be able to better nurture, support and foster a community of support and innovation.

There are many factors to consider: tuition, housing, books, fees, etc. While efforts have been made to make tuition easy to understand, because there are so many variations it still has the potential of being confusing. Is the student in state or out of state, are they upper or lower division, are they per credit, flat rate, or above flat rate, are they EUP tuition, or graduate rate? Add to this the many options for housing. Students could live in a dorm, in an apartment, off campus, they could have one of many meal plans. Books for classes can range in price from $20 for one book to nearly $200 for another. Then there are fees (lots of them). There is a records initiation fee, a student assessment fee, an enrollment fee, an online course fee, a lab fee, a graduation fee. Here a fee, there a fee, every where a fee fee.

As you can see, figuring out the costs of attendance (so that a student and their family can draft a workable financial plan) is still challenging.

We know that online calculator tools for estimating the cost of a car, home, or computer purchase are helpful in determining overall costs. Knowing what the ballpark bottom line price will be helps us to plan ahead.

A WMU online cost of attendance calculator could simplify the process of figuring out how much college is going to cost. Prospective students and their family could be presented a series of questions and the total cost of attendance would be dynamically calculated. For those who didn’t want to spend the two minutes required to do the analysis could select one of several pre-built options and then customize the plan as needed for their own needs. If a student needed more specific detail, then we could provide links to the full information stored on tuition, residency, housing, and EUP pages. We could also guide students to discussions with institutional financial aid experts as a next step.

The technology and knowledge for building this is easily accessible. We could use PHP and or JavaScript to implement the calculator (we have several developers on campus who have the skills to do this), a prototype could be quickly developed in a week or less, the prototype could be reviewed by institutional leaders, revisions implemented, and a final calculator deployed.

Enabling students and their family to plan financially for attending college is amongst the most important factors that could influence their decision to attend our university, go somewhere else, or not attend college at all.

Related posts:

• Simplify the cost of attendance: combine or eliminate fees

Adding a small panel to the student and staff pages of the goWMU portal that would contain sports scores would enable everyone in our online community to enjoy current, relevant and timely information about accomplishments of our students who participate in bronco athletics. Information could be updated daily, weekly, or when any athletic realted news breaks.

Throughout football, hockey, basketball and baseball season we would be able to get information about the broncos standings in the division, who our next game is against, and more.

The panel could also include player profiles, opportunities to participate, news/updates/commentary from the coaches. What a great way to get students into the game!