my boss gives me “constructive feedback” multiple times every day

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
A reader writes:
My very well-intentioned manager loves to give what he calls “in-the-moment constructive feedback.” Multiple times a day he tells me how I could have done something a bit better or how he would have handled a situation differently if he were in my shoes. To me this feels like nitpicking, and it is exhausting. These aren’t situations where my actions have had significant negative consequences or where he has had to step in to fix a problem, they’re just times when I didn’t act 100% perfectly from his point of view.
He has also told me that I’m the highest performer on our team and my performance reviews have been great, so I don’t think it’s just that I’m terrible at my job.
With such frequent feedback, inevitably some of it feels contradictory — sometimes it’s “you should have called that person on the phone instead of sending an email” and sometimes it’s “an email would have been better than a phone call.” Or sometimes it’s “you should have prioritized project X over project Y” and sometimes it’s “why are you working on project X when project Y isn’t done yet?” I’ve asked how I should be deciding on email vs. phone call or deciding which project to prioritize, and he hasn’t been able to help me understand how I should be making these decisions in the future — he only explains why the decision I made was wrong in a particular case.
This constant criticism makes me feel like I can’t do anything right. I’ve started asking for his input before I take action, but he tells me that I need to act independently instead of asking him what to do. We’ve talked about this constant feedback and he says that as my manager, he needs to be able to give me feedback, and that if he were in my shoes, he would be grateful for the feedback so he could keep improving. I get it, and I also want to keep improving, but this isn’t helping me improve — it’s just making me constantly second-guess myself and agonize over everything I do. It’s a miserable way to work.
Do you have any suggestions for how I can help him improve his methods of giving feedback and how I can steer him towards more effective ways of managing? Or is this appropriate behavior for a manager and I just need to learn to take the feedback?
Your manager really sucks. I’m sorry!
If he wasn’t telling you that you’re the highest performer on the team and if your performance reviews weren’t glowing, I’d be worried that you were getting this level of scrutiny and correction because of problems with your work and judgment. I’d still take issue with how your boss is handling it, because if someone truly requires this level of oversight, then their manager needs to address the pattern , not just each individual instance , and figure out a plan for handling it (whether that’s more training, more time if they’re in a new and unusually hard-to-learn role, or concluding the person isn’t right for the job).
But your manager is telling you that your work is great! So this is about him, not you.
He’s a micromanager who doesn’t trust that even his highest performer will do anything right — and to him, “right” looks like “exactly how I would do it myself, down to the smallest detail.”
Not only is it incredibly frustrating and demoralizing to work for someone like this, but the irony is that he’s forfeiting most of the benefit of hiring good people in the first place — which is that they’re force multipliers. Hiring good people, training them well, and then giving them space to do their jobs with a reasonable amount of independent judgment means you’ll get exponentially more done than you will if you insist on controlling every aspect of how someone approaches their job. Giving good people space to manage their work — and to do things differently than you might do yourself as long as their outcomes are good — generally means you get better results, because people who feel ownership over their work and are trusted to experiment and try new approaches tend to come up with new ideas (often better ones than you would have thought of yourself, because that’s the benefit of multiple perspectives), work harder to get the right outcomes, and generally perform at higher levels. They also tend to stick around longer, whereas people who work for managers like your boss tend to get fed up and leave.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard to change this type of manager from below … not impossible, but hard. I suspect yours might be a particularly difficult case because you’ve already tried talking to him about it and he’s told you to be grateful for what he’s doing. So, he’s not exactly open to self-reflection, even when his best employee tells him things aren’t working.
That said, you can try. Often with extreme micromanagers, their behavior stems from a fear that if they back off, they won’t have any way to spot problems or course-correct when it’s really needed. Because of that, if you can propose a system that gives them those things, you can sometimes convince them to try a new approach, like a weekly report that shows them how work is progressing plus regular check-ins so they have a specific time when they know they’ll be able to ask questions and give feedback. (Often they’re more likely to try this if you frame it as a time-limited experiment — “can we try it this way for a month and see how it goes?” — rather than asking them to commit to a permanent change.) Here are a few posts that talk about how to do that:
my boss is a micromanager
can my micromanaging boss be rehabilitated? she makes me take all calls on speaker phone…
help — I work for a micromanager!
However, I’m skeptical it’s going to work with this guy. His corrections are so constant and so micro-level that I’m doubtful he’ll have it in him to back off in the way he should. Typically getting a manager like him to change requires pretty intensive coaching (by a manager above him or by an outside coach). It’s not something you’re likely to have a lot of luck changing from below.
That doesn’t mean you need to just accept it though — this sounds miserable and it rises to the level of things worth changing jobs over.
You may also like: when I give my staff feedback, they complain that I didn't tell them earlier -- but I'm telling them pretty fast I need to give my employee more positive feedback my emotionally fragile employee is sobbing at work multiple times a week