It's worth taking a moment to identify what's so bad about micromanaging -- which turns out to be a serious fail for multiple reasons. First is the obvious day

It's worth taking a moment to identify what's so bad about micromanaging -- which turns out to be a serious fail for multiple reasons. First is the obvious day-to-day impact on the subordinate, who finds it exasperating to be second-guessed so much on little stuff, or to burn up so much time briefing the boss on things that don't deeply matter. Second is the inability of both boss and manager to focus on the big picture. Ten tiny tweaks on a misconceived project measure up poorly vs. one bold decision to redefine (or kill!) that project. The third factor is subtler but perhaps even more important. People grow by making a certain number of fixable -- or unfixable -- mistakes on their own and then figuring out what to do next. That's how we build up a full repertoire of tacit knowledge that lets us make good decisions going forward. If we're getting micro-calibrations all the time from someone else, our ability to have confidence in our own decision trees never takes shape. I spent three years in my 20s working on a big U.S. company's expansion into Europe that had only middling results. Our targets were high and the bosses had only a faint idea of what initiatives we were trying. That meant there was unlimited room for learning by doing. I came out of that with an enduring sense of "Yeah, that usually works," or "No, you're going to add a week of redo to the project if you try that." And no amount of micromanaging would have got me there.