Communication – Crisbie Coach

How to Thrive Under a Micromanager: Empower Yourself for Success

Imagine Alice, a talented graphic designer at a marketing firm. Alice loves her job and takes pride in her creativity. However, her manager, John, habitually hovers over her shoulder, constantly checks her work, and provides unsolicited feedback on every minor detail. John insists on approving every draft before Alice can move forward, often making her redo tasks multiple times. This constant oversight leaves Alice feeling frustrated and undervalued, stifling her creativity and reducing her job satisfaction. Alice works with a micromanager.

Does it sound familiar to you?

The workplace today can be tough, especially when you are supervised by a micromanager. But what is micromanagement? It can be defined as a management style where a leader controls every detail of their team’s activities excessively. This often signals a lack of trust in employees’ abilities to perform tasks independently. Instead of fostering a collaborative and innovative environment, micromanagement can hamper creativity and reduce job satisfaction. While their intention might be to ensure quality and control, the impact can often feel suffocating.

However, there are strategies you can use to manage this situation effectively. Have a look.

Strategies to Thrive Under a Micromanager

Build Trust Through Communication: Regularly update your manager on your progress. Proactively sharing your achievements and challenges can build trust and reduce their need to micromanage.
Clarify Expectations: Ensure you understand what your manager expects from you. Ask for clear guidelines and deadlines, and confirm your understanding to avoid misunderstandings.
Seek Feedback and Act on It: Request constructive feedback and show that you are implementing it. Demonstrating your willingness to improve can help alleviate their concerns.
Document Your Work: Keep detailed records of your tasks and progress. This can serve as evidence of your productivity and reliability, helping to build your manager’s confidence in your abilities.
Set Boundaries: Politely but firmly set boundaries if the micromanagement becomes overwhelming. Explain how excessive oversight affects your productivity and suggest a more balanced approach.
Focus on Solutions: Instead of dwelling on the negatives, focus on finding solutions. Offer suggestions on how you can work more independently while still meeting their standards.
Seek Support: If the situation becomes too challenging, seek support from HR or a trusted colleague. They can provide advice and help mediate the situation if necessary.

Dealing with a micromanager can be tough, but by taking proactive steps, you can create a more positive work environment for yourself. Building trust, clarifying expectations, and focusing on solutions can help you thrive and succeed, even under close supervision. Remember, your goal is to empower yourself and demonstrate your capability to work independently.

Have you ever worked with a micro-manager? Or if you are a manager, what about your management style? Let me know in the comment box here below and don’t forget to sign up for my blog!

Do You Like Your Job?

You finish the chore tasks of the day in an hour and you dedicate yourself to kill the time you have left to complete your workday. You might ask your boss something more to do, but you would rather go out. If they need you, they will call you.

It sounds like an enviable plan, but as soon as you have posted something on social media, searched for the best book deals to buy, and eaten a sandwich, you wish the call would come. It does not come, and you realize that you have already become chronically bored, and you feel undervalued. It is not normal.

This type of boredom is called by specialists bore-out syndrome. According to psychologists, this boredom can be as damaging as overwork exhaustion, the best-known burnout syndrome. We tend to think that a bored employee will take the opportunity to pay more attention to performing a certain task, but this is not often the case. According to a study by the University of Lancashire (England), bored people actually perform poorly at work and make more mistakes.

Of course, to avoid getting involved in the source of their boredom, people with this syndrome tend to be distracted by social media and may even develop an addiction. Food, alcohol, and tobacco are great candidates to fill in your time.

Does it sound familiar to you?

It is important to distinguish normal, even healthy, boredom from constant and chronic boredom that ends up making you feel useless. Chronic boredom can generate profound anxiety and can negatively affect all aspects of life, from private and family life to social life.

We already know that, usually, the things that bore us are the same things that we do not like. This lowers the levels of motivation and involvement, the levels of responsibility and makes you adopt a passive attitude. You are procrastinating. However, there is more.

To begin with, know that getting bored during the working day does not depend on the type of work you do, but on the type of interests you have. You can have the best job, even be the boss, but feel deeply bored and undervalued. In other words, working on something that does not match your education or experience, and that does not allow you to develop professionally, is a time bomb. Other causes of demotivation are also lack of communication with others, carrying out monotonous tasks that do not represent any kind of challenge and having a definite contract.

All of these factors increase when you have no other choice than taking a whatever job, or you cannot afford to change your current job. The situation is getting worse in these times due to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. People in that situation, run a much higher risk of boredom and exhaustion because they do something they know from the start that they do not like. Their only motivation is financial and over the years this becomes hard to bear. It is extremely serious because people spend about 33% of their day at work, and sometimes even more.

To limit the damages you could try finding small motivations that could be incorporated into your work. The idea would be about making each day meaningful and interesting. Communicating interest and commitment to superiors by developing new tasks could also help. Finding an exciting activity to bond downtime at work would be interesting but sometimes impossible to do. In those cases, you could, for example, move it to immediately after working hours.

If despite this, your motivation does not increase, it might be better to look for another job that best suites you, something you could do while keeping your current job. Indeed, it would not be wise to replace the anxiety generated by the lack of motivation at work with the one arising from being unemployed. You could consider a part-time job or volunteering activities if you have enough resources to live on.

What about you? Do you like your job?

Has the Pandemic Made You Select Your Friends?

The blow the pandemic has been giving us is clear. Even in the same city, restrictions force us to select who we want to see and who we don’t. A difficult decision, but it can have a positive side: selecting those friendships that contribute most to our well-being.

This selection could be actually a good thing. It has been studied that qualitative relationships are limited. And in the current context, we cannot expect the number of friends we have to be the same as before. The pandemic is teaching us to prioritize and truly care for the people we consider important. This is an improvement that compensates for a possible loss.

But how to choose? The answer is not that difficult. If we think carefully, we realize that the people we have stopped seeing are mainly those people we have never seen regularly (for example, the colleagues we only met at work). This situation shows clearly who we must meet in favour of those with whom we want to meet. What makes a friendship satisfactory is presence and dedication.

In her book “We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships“, Kat Vellos talks about what she calls the “seeds of connection”, which are proximity, frequency, compatibility and commitment, and which help to identify good friends.

Studies conducted define the four characteristics of authentic friendship: trust, sincerity, fidelity and reciprocity. When you lose one of these pillars, you may want to say goodbye to your friend.

But the pandemic has not only made us stop seeing some people, it has also made us fight with some others. We are all more anxious and stressed. Also the fact of wearing the mask incorrectly could trigger a conflict. When this happens, it is advisable to stop relationships until the tension fades away. We already have to endure all what the pandemic entails that we don’t need to add any more stress.

For friends who have passed the “selection”, it is time to find time and space to share with them to interact without distractions and have a relaxing chat. Looking into each other’s eyes when we speak, taking care of the posture of our body, using appropriate tone and words, are only some elements of an effective communication also among friends..

Maintaining and caring for our good friendships can also improve our health and increase our ability to bear stress.

To have a full and healthy life, we should spend more time with friends, albeit only in a virtual way for the time being. With the difficulties caused by the pandemic we must find new ways to relate to each other, and continue to invest time in finding new subjects of conversation, for example talking about a series that you are watching, being on platforms to carry out online activities together, or having a drink together on a video call.

These are just a few ideas for maintaining your friendships during the pandemic. What do you do to stay in touch with your friends?

The Challenges of Communicating Across Cultures

I live and work in an real multicultural environment.

The city where I live is Brussels that hosts about 150 different nationalities. The place I work with is the European Commission where all the 28 European Union nationalities are represented.

Sometimes it is difficult to communicate to each other, as you have to pay much attention to other’s sensitivity, emotions and feelings.

Day after day, I learned that each culture has their own approach to communication.

I found a very interesting the book of the anthropologist Edward Hall, Beyond Culture. He identified the importance of context in communication and raised the attention on the “invisible” type of communication, by which groups of people understand and interpret the world.

The framework proposed by Hall for approaching intercultural communication is high-context and low-context cultures, which refer to the values cultures place on indirect and direct communication.

It is important to note that no culture is completely high-context or low-context, since all societies contain at least some parts that are both high and low. For example, the United States is a low-context culture while doing business, but during family gatherings tend to be high-context.

Let us see now the main features of the two cultural types.

High-Context Cultures

A high-context culture relies on implicit communication and nonverbal cues. In high-context communication, a message cannot be understood without a great deal of background information. Asian, African, Arab, central European and Latin American cultures are generally considered to be high-context cultures.

With people belonging mainly to high-context cultures, you may encounter the following:

Misunderstanding when exchanging information
Impression of a lack of information
Large amount of information is provided in a non-verbal manner, e.g. gestures, pauses, facial expressions
Emphasis on long term relationships and loyalty
Unwritten rules that are taken for granted but can easily be missed.

Low-Context Cultures

A low-context culture relies on explicit communication. In low-context communication, more of the information in a message is spelled out and defined. Cultures like the Germans, Scandinavians, Americans and Australians are generally considered to be low-context cultures.

Dealing with people belonging mainly to low-context cultures, you may find the following:

All meaning is explicitly provided in the message itself
Extensive background information and explanations are provided verbally to avoid misunderstandings
People tend to have short-term relationships
People follow rules and standards closely.

To avoid “diplomatic incidents”, I try to pay much attention to my interlocutor languages and “imitate” them using the technique of the mirror, namely, repeating the body language, the type of words they use, how they overall handle the conversation.

What about you? Which culture do you think you belong to? Which technique do you use to better communicate across cultures?

Unplug your mind, find yourself

When e-mails, text messages, conference calls, Webex, Whatspp, FB, Instagram, Tweeter, Google and anything else from your partner to your boss invade our lives, it becomes necessary for our survival to stop for a while and be silent.

Our always connected minds take us away from the best of ourselves and our creative potential.

Referring constantly to what one or the other has said, we forget to connect to our essential being, which is unique and precious.

We have become individuals driven by technological change that moved away from ourselves, from our awareness of being human, from the first component of Emotional Intelligence (EI). EI is recognized today as a condition of success in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, as it is the one we live today.

Refocusing, looking inside, listening to silence and our inner voice. In the depths of ourselves we find an enormous amount of resources and our most authentic creativity: it is our treasure, a unique, rich and colorful, magical place where everything is open and possible.

In this space, we can find synchronicity, messages and insights that will enable us to make the right decisions for our lives.

In this space real relationships can arise, authentic relationships between sincere people who are now masked by the ego that continues to rule us.

What to do then?

Give yourself moments of silence! Be for a while without your mobile phone. Go out for a walk without it, walk with no direction in the nature and feel, look, listen, use all your senses to the maximum.

Be present in this unique moment and let yourself be pervaded by the harmony that surrounds you.

Practice your favorite hobby, and if you do not have it, think about finding one. Quietly cooking at home, knitting, painting, drawing, gardening and all the other activities that you may be passionate about.

Stop for a moment and stop moving from one activity to another, from one piece of information to another. Your brain can not take it anymore, it also needs a rest. Give yourself time to deepen the reasons of your choices and discover the reason of your being, your purpose.

So many people today cannot make a decision, if it has not been recommended by someone, a friend, a colleague, or a family member.

People feel lost. Most probably they are really lost: they have disconnected from themselves to live in connection with the social networks.

It is not my intention to condemn social networks and sources of information, I also use them. The problem is their overuse: a lot of people nowadays lives constantly with an external reference and far away from their real life.

I can accompany you on a journey where you will learn to clear some space for your inner needs. I will show you techniques to manage your stress that will help you to go back to your daily occupations in a more balanced way. And live your life fully. You deserve it!