Worker Asks If It's Normal For A Boss To Critique Every Email They Send — 'It Feels Like A Control Thing'
It's definitely not normal and it's absolutely "a control thing."
wichayada suwanachun | Shutterstock There are myriad ways to be a bad boss, but in the pantheon of the all-time worst, the micromanaging boss is least in the top five. It pulls together all of the worst parts of a bad boss into one insufferable human being — undermining, controlling, deeply annoying, and super stressful.
Often, their demands are downright insane, like a worker on Reddit, for instance, whose boss's expectations when it comes to communication are frankly unhinged.
A worker's micromanaging boss critiques every single email she sends.
In her Reddit post, she asked, "Is it normal for a boss to critique every email you send?" No, beloved. It's not!
"My boss is a bit of a micromanager," she went on to say, explaining that despite her boss's exacting standards, she has "always gotten amazing feedback on my communication skills" in the two years she's been on the job.
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That is until now. "Lately, even though I’ve continued doing things how I’ve done them from day one (when I was being praised for my work), my boss has to critique my emails," she wrote.
Her boss sends her nitpicky critiques on each email — despite speaking English as a second language herself.
"If I send an email, not 30 seconds later my boss will call me (I’m [work from home]) and tell me how I should’ve written it," the woman went on to say. "Today her critique was that I should’ve added the word 'again' in a certain sentence."
That's bad enough, but there's a whole other layer to this absurdity: Her boss is Italian and speaks English as a second language — and frequently relies on this worker to proofread HER emails for her!
Nevertheless, "the last six months or so, myself and my coworkers can’t do anything without her pointing out something wrong with it," she wrote — despite her boss recently having been out of town for two weeks and everything running smoothly without her intervention.
"It feels like a control thing. She’s looking for things to find wrong so she can give her input," she added. "Is this normal? It’s genuinely starting to affect my self-esteem… It feels as if I’m a child who is being treated like they don’t know how to do their job all of a sudden."
Experts say the key to handling a micromanager is understanding why they do it.
According to Julianna Pillemer, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, "the majority of micromanagers probably aren’t evil." She told the Harvard Business Review that it's more likely "they just don’t know how to effectively help others."
Pillemer says that usually, micromanaging originates from some form of anxiety, and she urges workers in these situations to activate their empathy — even if it's not deserved — and try to consider what might be at the bottom of their boss's terrible management approach.
Given that her boss is clearly anxious about her own writing skills, it seems plausible that that may be at the root of the problem.
One Redditor took this a step further. "Sounds like your boss got a nastygram from THEIR boss about THEIR e-mails, so now she wants to make sure everyone she manages doesn't make a 'mistake' like she did and get her in trouble." Bingo.
Pillemer further suggests that "once you’ve established that the person is coming from a good place, you can work together to modify processes and develop some fixes," though she cautions that if their micromanaging takes the form of constantly undermining you — basically, as an act of aggression — then looking for a different job is probably the best solution.
Speaking from experience, she's right: I had a micromanaging boss who was so insane he didn't just critique emails — he would force us to sit beside him and compose them together. The rule was "no email goes out of this office without my approval," and that included the simplest of messages — even "yes" or "no" responses.
As you can imagine, this took inordinate amounts of time and angry clients upset about the snail's pace of our communication were a daily occurrence. Inevitably the boss would blame US for not being sufficiently on top of things. It won't shock you to know that every position at that company was a revolving door — one guy abruptly stood up in the middle of day one and simply walked out.
Hopefully, your micromanaging boss isn't THAT bad and is the type of person you can have a conversation with. Pillemer suggests taking this proactive approach and having a chat about expectations, worries, and how best to address them.
Sometimes, all it takes is open communication to get to the bottom of a micromanager's anxieties. Unless they're a psycho like my former boss, in which case — make like that guy who bailed on day one and get out of there!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.