How to Dominate Your Micromanager Boss

Happy Friday Kings and Queens

Author

Jack Lawler
July 15, 2022

Guy Who Just Finished His First Year of Law School

How to Dominate Your Micromanager Boss

Nothing sucks total ass more than a micromanager boss. It doesn’t matter if you hate your job and just want to get to Friday or actively enjoy your work and want to do well. No one can operate fully with someone constantly watching over their shoulder, focusing on minor details, or making your do the tasks you’re over-paid to do.

If your boss looks something like this guy, here’s a few ways to get out alive.

1. Gain Their Trust

Getting off on the right foot is essential to having a successful relationship in any capacity whether it’s professional, romantic, or with your neighbor that you make weird eye contact with at the mailbox every day and it’s kinda too late to say hi because you’ve lived for 11 months and you’re probably not resigning your lease.

To make sure things go smoothly, try assuming the best of your boss. Sure, it’s more likely that this person is an anxious, controlling, tyrant who projects their own feelings of insecurity onto you by assuming that no one alive is capable of doing anything without them hanging over your shoulder and making it even harder to do your job. However, it is possible that your boss isn’t a micromanager, they’re just detail-oriented with high expectations for you and want to see you produce the best possible deliverable you can. Obviously, that is much, much worse but at least their heart’s in the right place.

The quickest way to get a well-meaning micromanager off your back, is by gaining their trust early on and convincing them you don’t need to be monitored at work. They can save the surveillance for their wife and teenage children who are 10000% watching porn on the family laptop when everyone goes to sleep.

Surefire Ways to Gain the Boss’s Trust

  • Never make the same mistake twice

  • Furiously take notes when you meet together, even if you’re just making a grocery list or writing down bad business ideas like ‘Fast Food Clams’

  • Get them to tell you an important secret while they’re wasted. Never tell anyone but hold it over them constantly.

  • Kill a rival in front of them to prove you’re not a cop (this works very well in Mafia situations and sometimes mid-size digital marketing firms)

  • Do the job you were paid to do at a competent level.

If you’ve done all you can this and they still won’t get off your back, it’s time to….

Tony Soprano was way too hands on

2. Overwhelm the Shit Out of Them

You’ve played this the honest way. Now it’s time to be passive aggressive and give them a taste of their own medicine. You want to be in control constantly? Here’s what it looks like.

You want to swamp your boss and show them that their micromanager tendencies actually will create MORE work for them in the long wrong. On the whole, we as humans are a very selfish species and are motivated to do what is in our own best interest.

Ideally, you want to show your boss that their life will become a lot easier if they leave you alone.

Quick and Easy Ways to Overwhelm Your Boss

  • Loop them in to every single email

  • Send them your response email in Slack and ask them for approval before sending

  • Bring a meeting to a screeching halt by loudly asking “PERMISSION TO PISS SIR?” in the middle of someone’s presentation.

  • Look at their calendar and determine when they’re busy. Set up a daily check-in with them at that time. When they decline, you can now claim you tried to keep them in the loop.

  • Sit on their lap at the office since they seem so eager to constantly look over your shoulder.

  • Book off a 30-minute touch base to discuss font options for your next presentation.

3. Hide from Them

If overwhelming them with everything you’re doing STILL doesn’t work, there’s really 2 main reasons you can point to.

  1. Your boss is an extremely competent person (get a life loser)

  2. Your job actually isn’t that important or taxing and they’re now realizing that maybe they don’t have to pay a full salary and benefits to someone who cannot operate Microsoft Excel at a middle school level.

Either way, this plan has completely backfired and it’s time to do the courageous thing and hide from your boss until you can find a new plan or a new job.

How to Hide from Your Boss

  • Camp Out in the Lactation Room(assuming there are no new mothers. Even if there are, they might be a little kinder thanks to their newfound maternal instinct and shelter you during your time of peril)

  • Pick a bathroom on another floor to watch Netflix in

  • Block off time on your calendar with fake meetings

  • Break your camera on your computer so you don’t have to show your face on Zooms

  • Fake a long term illness. Considering staging your death for maximum impact

  • Don’t be afraid to incorporate prop work and costuming into your daily

  • Set up fake meetings in the office with your work friends so you can talk shit and look busy.

Alternatively, you can make yourself so unpleasant to be around that they will hide from you. The easiest way to do this is make the fact that you ‘hate small talk’ your entire personality and force them to have deep meaningful conversations every time you pass each other in the hallways or at a happy hour. Or just stop showering.

the best place to nap in the office

4. Confront Them

Well, it’s time to stop running from your problems and actually face them. Stand up to your boss you little bitch. Tell them how their actions are creating stress, tension and holding you back in your career. Loop in their boss to take this to the top. Sleep with their spouse in front of them. Write a strongly worded LinkedIn post. Make your Slack status “totally hate my boss because he’s so hands on.”

Or, just smack the shit out of them with a keyboard

Let’s be honest, you’re probably not gonna confront them. So just find a new job.

Historical Photo of Hippo Hanging of the Week

Vibes

Longforms of the Week