In my experience, micromanagement is often a sign that you're managing by disaster. By that I mean you spend months, or sometimes years, not expecting your staf

In my experience, micromanagement is often a sign that you're managing by disaster. By that I mean you spend months, or sometimes years, not expecting your staff to make judgement calls for themselves, not communicating your intent, not building those relationships, and then there's always some project where something needs to be done. At which point, the only way that you can do that project, given that you haven't invested in those relationships, haven't built those skills, is to tell everyone pretty much precisely what to do. It's a bad situation, and I think it's fairly transparent to most people who've worked for any significant length of time that it's not a good way to manage, but once someone is in that sort of situation there never seems to be a good time to move to a better model of management without having to let some commitments lapse. That's a very hard sell to make to the rest of the organisation: Yes we're going to make mistakes, and yes we're going to miss some deadlines, (or need some forgiveness on deadline,) because we need to actually develop our staff. The situation is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that even where that time is available; you're working on a less intensive project; a lot of people want to think that what they're doing at the moment works. They want to think well of themselves. And there's a certain penalty that people, especially people with large egos, are going to pay in admitting that what they've been doing up until this point has certain flaws in it.