Am I being micromanaged? And what do I do about it?

[Allornothing9]

Hopefully this isn’t completely outing.. but..

I’m an Executive Assistant. I’ve been one for 8 years in various companies, so I’m confident at this point I know how to do my job. I started with my company almost a year ago, at which point we reported to our Executive as our line manager.

A few months after I started they employed an Admin Manager, who is now mine and my fellow EA’s line manager. We have weekly meetings where we relay our workloads to her, she asks us to create spreadsheets to show what we are doing hour by hour each week. She checks our diaries and questions who our meetings are with, what they are about. She asks our Execs for feedback on our performance. She reads our emails before we send them to ‘sense check’. We now have a central inbox as opposed to individual ones so she can monitor our workloads.

It all just feels.. a lot. I’ve never ever had this level of management, I’ve always reported to an Exec that was too busy to question that level of detail, but I am run off my feet busy most of the week.

Others who have been EA’s probably understand the role is very busy, fluid and varies day to day. Something totally left field can come in and it’s difficult to plot your week on a spreadsheet. I’ve spoken to my colleagues who all agree it feels heavy handed. I’ve spoken to my Exec who has said they are very happy with my performance/support and have no issues.

Is this a normal level of management? I plan on having a conversation with her to voice how I feel but I don’t know if I’m being a bit unreasonable or if in other roles this is usual.

Open to any opinions.

Oh yeah, please document the spreadsheet. I reckon it must take you at least 15 minutes a day.

That reminds me of a time when I wrote in the Lessons Learnt section of a project conclusion document that the Lessons Learnt section of project documentation needed to be reviewed and acted upon by the programme office, otherwise there was no point project leads filling them in. I was not surprised that the programme office didn't follow me up on this comment as none of my numerous other Lessons learnt had resulted in action. The same programme office gave a member of my team a hard time for not completing an exception report within the stated timescales. The team member had worked his socks off to meet the go-live date for a web project, staying in the office by himself until 5am to give everything a final check. I'm still not sure, years later, whether my little talk to programme office about managers needing to see that project management needed to serve the needs of the business andnot the other way round, hit home. Ah, the joys of Prince 2.

What would happen if you just told your Micro Manager no? What could they do? It may prompt a review or a disciplinary process - thus getting the upper management involved. If the outcome is not the one you want, at least you know that it is a good time to leave as it won’t get better.