Micromanagement
Etymology
A twentieth-century business coinage joining Greek "mikros" (small) to "management" (ultimately from Italian "maneggiare," to handle, from Latin "manus," hand). The prefix marks the pathology: management pushed down to a scale too small to be useful.
noun · /MY-kroh-MAN-ij-muhnt/
A style of supervision in which a manager controls small details of subordinates’ work rather than trusting them to execute.
What it names
A specific managerial failure — excessive control at fine grain — giving workers a word for a dynamic that otherwise gets excused as “thoroughness.”
Example
He rewrote every email his team sent, a level of micromanagement that made them stop thinking for themselves.
Related idea
It is the opposite of delegation, the healthy transfer of authority and trust; where delegation frees a manager’s attention for higher-order work, micromanagement consumes it on detail others could handle.