I relocated for a new job about 2 months ago. Two or three weeks in, my supervisor sends out an email to my team requiring us to submit a weekly status report. This includes any meetings held during the week, upcoming meetings, objectives, and upcoming projects. It's was very clear that this is due every Friday.

Is this the norm with a big company, or would this be considered a micro-managing action? Not gonna rock the boat since I am new, but feels weird having to do this every week. Especially since the team is full of experienced professionals.

sadly this is somewhat common. I would oblige the request and just do a good job with it,as painful as it might be. Eventually a couple things will become clear: 1) your supervisor will not read them and 2) might start communicating with you first hand, asking you what is going on or 3) hold status meetings.

If 2 or 3 occur, just point out the redundancy and inefficiency of it all and then they will likely go away.

If your supervisor might be unaware of a "future project" for you then they are just flat out of touch.

Pretty sure its a norm across most industries, though I'm not sure why it would be like that for an attorney.

Copy and paste is your friend for these things. Just populate a general report and fill in the large details.

It's common. Keep it brief and constructive.

We used to submit an Items of Interest (IoI) report every two weeks. Basically a running tabulation of high level notes. I actually liked them, I could put at risk projects on the IoI and reason for the risk. Then when the risk manifested itself I could point back to the IoI where I told the manager about the potential.

Keep it as short as possible. If you have more than a page, odds are you're doing something wrong. The idea, in my experience, is to make sure nothing really important slips through the cracks and to have some notes already prepared when executive X asks your manager for the latest on project Y. The written report is to save time compared to meetings and phone calls. Not saying that's what happens, but that's usually the idea.

I used to consolidate reports like that for executive leadership. Some people turned in 20+ pages with 99% of it copy/pasted from old reports because they thought the sheer size made them look busy and important. The result was outdated and full of mistakes, so it made them look incompetent and inconsiderate of other people's time.

Large independent O&G company here. We do them every week. All of my direct reports put theirs together Wednesday and I roll up important info to the director on Thursday. Most of the time I don't even read the lower level ones. But it helps my director stay on top of stuff he doesn't see daily.

Caveat...we aren't in O&G operations. Our group is a support group.

Offshore or onshore Maverick?

Onshore. Major Permian player.

All remote staff at my current employer keeps a "diary" type document on Evernote. We use this as a means to communicate competitive information to everyone else in the company, keep records of engineering requests, keep a record of things learned during meetings.

It's a great place to review prior to meetings with customers/dealers to make sure all requests have been addressed or where it's stands.

The owner of the company regularly reads our notes so he can hold Engineering accountable for handling our requests from the field and to ask fo some clarification.

I make a habit of updating my notes shortly after meetings so I get information to the parties quickly. Some folks update their notes weekly, some monthly and others daily.

We use a electronic board (Trello) to keep everyone up to date on what everyone is doing, especially since sometimes projects pop up or the scope of the projects change. We have a weekly meeting to review what everyone has and any projects that are coming up or changes to items others might be interested in.

I get something like this from the management that report to me. However, its not a report of what they are doing each week, its about maintenance, projects, outages, etc. on the pipelines and at terminals. I don't care what meetings my team is attending (chances are I am on the same calls) nor do I care how they spend their day, as long as their work is done on time and of high quality. Fridays we have senior management calls and these weekly updates help with what is going on with the assets so I can inform my superiors and the C levels.

In 2017 my managers had me doing this

- keep up CRM
- keep up seperate customer update sheet
- send in weekly highlights
- send in a monthly market update
- call/ email summary after business and association meetings for a recap
- Monday morning sales meeting call to discuss the previous week and what's upcoming And they normally called me Friday afternoon to recap the week.

Now, that was because I had a Director of BD and a VP of BD and they didn't have **** to do, and probably didn't have much of a clue of what to report for their weekly executive meetings.

They have both left now. And their positions won't be back filled. I'm pretty sure it was encouraged and my new manager is a dream. We stay in constant contact on important information so no reports are needed other than a CRM. It's about trust and efficiency. I hate redundancy and if you don't trust me, fire me. Wasn't going to last much longer with the previous regime.

So yes, pretty normal, but when it gets redundant I first have a conversation, and if they don't come around, I start browsing for a way out.

I would not sweat it. I have been in middle management (sales) and had to submit these updates for multiple teams I was managing.

I learned:
keep it brief (summary of each team's overall performance)
praise the people that had a great week
escalate any concerns from the team to send up
top deals for the month to close

after a while it's pretty much clockwork, and I believe it helps keep the pulse of your reps and they appreciate knowing their thoughts and efforts are being reported up to the VP level

Ulrich said:

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Keep it as short as possible. If you have more than a page, odds are you're doing something wrong. The idea, in my experience, is to make sure nothing really important slips through the cracks and to have some notes already prepared when executive X asks your manager for the latest on project Y. The written report is to save time compared to meetings and phone calls. Not saying that's what happens, but that's usually the idea.

I used to consolidate reports like that for executive leadership. Some people turned in 20+ pages with 99% of it copy/pasted from old reports because they thought the sheer size made them look busy and important. The result was outdated and full of mistakes, so it made them look incompetent and inconsiderate of other people's time.

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I've seen situations where this is asked for a roll up. I would ask him who the ultimate audience of the report is so that you can write it accordingly. You will probably get some clarification on what he is expecting when you ask the question.

Did you relocate to San Antonio by chance?

Use the status reports to practice telling your story as succinctly as possible.. saw this on LinkedIn and thought of this thread:

I've done that before. My boss was a hardcore micromanager. His group (along with his boss) has more turnover than any of division in the company and it's a BIG company.

Win At Life said:

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Don't forget to put the new cover sheet on your TPS report before sending it to your boss.

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Did you see the memo?

Farmer1906 said:

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I've done that before. My boss was a hardcore micromanager. His group (along with his boss) has more turnover than any of division in the company and it's a BIG company.

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THIS!!!

In my last job, 2nd to last reorg before getting laid off, my supervisor wanted the 50 of us in his organization to submit weekly activity reports to his "management team" which was him and his 6+ subordinate leaders and a few select other folks (subject matter team leaders). I never submitted a single report in 10 months working for the guy. My colleague submitted them every week. We both wound up getting laid off at the same time.

In my experience, this is indicative of the following scenarios:

• a supervisor who has no idea what his staff is doing
• a supervisor who is unable to articulate the value that each of his staff members bring to the table
• a supervisor who is too lazy to write their own reports so they cherry pick from staff reports
• a supervisor who is not confident enough to question upper management about why we're doing weekly status reports

Unfortunately, you probably don't have much choice. But, brevity is certainly key.

One of my former managers gave me this sage advice - your supervisors are all "really smart" and if they want more detail, they'll ask.

I ask my leads (approximately 50) report in once a week and I don't think that is unreasonable. The style is flexible, in person (agenda 12hours in advance), via email or teleconference(again agenda 12 hours in advance) but basically I want to know:

Are we on budget(time/cost)?
Are you waiting on me for anything?
Are their issues I should be aware of?

I read, comment and reply to all of them. 50% of my job is synthesizing and trouble shooting for my 50+ team leads and reporting status to the big boss, who I update basically weekly. Then the other 50% is sales driven in which the status reporting is update by automatically generated reports. Succinct is key.

My prior job had it. I hated it at first, but it ended up really helping me organize and stay on top of things. My current job doesn't have it, but I do a version of it for myself.

For your profession, that seems a little strange/micromanager-y.

I asked for a daily report when I first took over. Then I realized I was too busy to read them, so. I just have a weekly status meeting to cover top level issues.

I tend to think you're being micro managed. I am not sure what exactly your job is, but if it's legal, maybe meetings and advising is how you provide value to your organization. I'll assume so.

It's been a long time since I've been a line manager, but I've always wanted updates on the important stuff. The definition of important has changed over time, but certainly not the mundane aspects of a job. It seems like your boss may be viewing their job as task management vs outcomes management. There's a big difference between those two.

Want to score brownie points? Play the new guy card and ask what it's needed for. If you get a "I just want to keep tabs on what you're doing", offer to put it together and review it in a weekly 1:1. If it's needed for your boss' superiors, ask what's put together and optimize for that. You might even want to volunteer to consolidate yours plus others for your boss and distill a narrative. Knowing what everyone else is doing is remarkably powerful because you'll be able to figure out pretty quickly who is doing well and who is a loser.

All that aside, be careful about working for a micro manager. They'll never really learn to trust you.

In my experience there is very little project management in the legal field. Everything is always on fire, especially in a litigation sense. My clients are all attorneys, and they very much appreciate status updates based on activity. That actually makes them more difficult to put together because the busier you are the more frequent they go out. However, the attorneys then use them to manage their team as well, so I find them extremely helpful.

For those of you that are against these, what types of projects are you managing and how long have you been doing it? I am interested to know how you update your superiors and in what cadence.

Keeper of The Spirits said:

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In my experience there is very little project management in the legal field. Everything is always on fire, especially in a litigation sense. My clients are all attorneys, and they very much appreciate status updates based on activity. That actually makes them more difficult to put together because the busier you are the more frequent they go out. However, the attorneys then use them to manage their team as well, so I find them extremely helpful.

For those of you that are against these, what types of projects are you managing and how long have you been doing it? I am interested to know how you update your superiors and in what cadence.

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It's not so much that people don't update their bosses. It's usually just redundant. Most places have regular staff meetings and financial reviews and project meetings and 1 on 1s. I actually see it often become a crutch where managers start to check out of meetings they should be in because they get a weekly summary.