This TED Talk features entrepreneur Che Huang recorded live at TED at BCG 2018.

What I'm really here to do today is talk to you about micromanagement and what I learned about

micromanagement by being a micromanager over the last few years of my life. But first off,

what is micromanagement? How do we really define it? Well, I posit that

it's actually taking great, wonderful, imaginative people like all of you, bringing them in

into an organization and then crushing their souls by telling them what font size to use, you know?

And so in the history of mankind, has anyone ever said this? John, we were never going to

close that deal with Times New Roman. But because you insist it on Helvetica, bam, dotted line,

millions of dollars start to flow. That was a missing piece. No one's ever said that, right?

There's actually physical manifestations that we probably see in

ourselves by being micromanaged. Think about some of the most tired you've ever been in your life,

right? It probably wasn't when you stayed the latest at work, or it wasn't when you came home

from a road trip. It was probably when you had someone looking over your shoulder,

watching your each and every move. Kind of like my mother-in-law

when she's over, right? So, you know, I'm like, I got this, you know? And so there's actually

data to support this. So there was a recent study in the UK. They took 100 hospital employees,

put an activity tracker on them, and then let them go about their next 12-hour shift all alone,

just a regular 12-hour shift. At the end of the shift, they asked them, do you feel fatigued?

And what they found was actually really interesting. So it wasn't necessarily the people who moved

the most that felt the most fatigued, but it was the folks that didn't have control over their

jobs.

So if we know that micromanagement isn't really effective, why do we do it?

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