Some managers mistake control for leadership.

So when a senior graphic designer spent four years drowning under a micromanaging VP who demanded to be copied on every single update, she finally gave him what he asked for.

But after being buried in notification after notification, the boss realized complete control required a lot more work than he anticipated.

You’ll want to keep reading for this one.

You want these ads done 3 months in advance? No problem, boss.

I work as a senior graphic designer for a company for 5 years now.

Originally it was only a team of 3: a marketing manager, a marketing executive, and myself. The former two have since quit, and you’ll find out later why.

A huge part of my job is to handle a huge advertising schedule in a project management system (PMS) for which I design print and digital ads for.

Enter my difficult, micromanaging manager.

She describes this manager as quite the force to be reckoned with.

He’s the VP of Sales and Marketing who’s been with the company for 30+ years.

His way of quality control is to force all our marketing materials to go through an “approval process” in our PMS in which everyone else has to give their feedback, and only then will my manager give the final sign off once it reaches him.

His need for control knows no bounds.

On top of that, he insists on being copied on every notification for every single step of the way.

So every single ad I produced had to be sent through our PMS while tagging the product managers and proofreaders.

Those individuals would then comment feedback for changes needed, or if the ad was approved, they’d mark it complete and then send it along to the next person.

It would end with this micromanaging manager, who’d have the final say on whether it’s good to be sent out or not.

The boss often created unnecessary bottlenecks.

Sometimes the process would be flawless as everyone would approve it the first time with no changes needed.

But when it got to my manager, he’d reject it and I’d have to do it over pending his remarks.

The thing with our PMS is that you can see timestamps of when people viewed updates.

His way of working seemed to make things harder for everyone.

He’s on our project board so he gets all the updates, and he could’ve easily interceded earlier and let me know if changes were needed to pass his check so I wouldn’t waste my time.

But because of the way he is, he only wants to see the final drafts after everyone else sees them.

Everyone else always seems to move things along in a timely fashion, but when it finally gets to my manager he’d just let it sit and then you’d have to constantly check to see if he marked it off.

So when she finally confronted him about it, he made it all her fault for not getting it to him sooner.

When I pushed back and stated how arduous this all is, his tone-deaf reply was to “have it done 3 months in advance.”

He also insisted that the ads I produced have to look different each time for each publication’s insertion order.

So after 4 years of handling all this by myself, I was barely meeting deadlines, and the quality of my work started slipping as I was making really stupid mistakes.

The matter of short staffing came into question once again.

Every few months I would ask my manager if we’re going to hire an additional designer for our department since we’re doing more marketing, and every year I’d hear, “It’s not in our budget right now.”

Things came to a head during one of my biannual reviews, where I told my manager bluntly, in front of HR, that we desperately needed to hire an additional designer, as there was no way for me to hit the “3 months ahead” goal that he keeps parroting.

He actually asked me, and I quote, “Is it typical for companies to have more than one graphic designer?” I’m dead serious.

This started leading to some serious burnout.

I showed how I handled everything by myself as best as I could at that point, and I was getting burnt out.

For those that may ask why I stay — they compensate me very well without having to commute into a major metropolitan city. A golden handcuffs situation, if you will.

So once they finally hired another designer, the boss made his unrealistic expectations clear once again.

By the end of the meeting, my manager finally caved and gave me permission to hire an additional designer who started with us this past January.

While showing him the ropes on our design systems, he told me the manager said something snarky to him along the lines of, “I never imagined having to hire two designers. You guys should have no problem being 3 months ahead on ads now.”

Are you kidding me?

The double standard was glaring.

Over the years, I watched my manager as he hired a plethora of account executives and replacements for our department, most of whom quit within months under his watch, but he’s going to give me crap for needing one designer after I made things work for 4 years by myself?

I was so infuriated by his comments that I decided: he wants ads done 3 months in advance? Okay, bet.

The designer made sure this boss would finally feel the discomfort the delivery team had been feeling all along.

I trained the new designer on our approach to the advertising schedule in the PMS and the ins and outs of the approval process, and we went to work.

We both proceeded to bury my manager in notifications as we churned out ad after ad after ad, pushing items through the pipeline with my manager receiving notifications on every. single. update.

When the tasks ended at him and we got no response, we set up automations to ping him every hour calling for his approval.

We also would send detailed weekly reports stating our progress and also made it inherently clear to mention our goal was “to be 3 months ahead of deadlines.”

Finally, the manager crumbled under the pressure.

By this past May, in time for one of my biannual reviews, my manager made an announcement.

He announced my coworker, the marketing assistant, would be promoted to the vacant marketing manager position. Furthermore, they would now be handling the advertising schedule and be the final point person going forward.

My manager also asked to have all notifications for him be removed, as “he didn’t have the bandwidth anymore” to monitor it and is taking a step back from overseeing us.

Luckily, the job got a lot better after that.

We collectively broke my manager after only 5 months of doing exactly what he asked, and I’ve got to say things have improved greatly so far.

Our new marketing manager is very laid back, as we’re still getting things done ahead of schedule and he is really good at what he does.

We’ve also since hired 2 more additional employees for our department, and we’ve been steadily growing.

My newly promoted co-worker recently joked with me and the junior designer about how he wanted to go over the advertising schedule for next year with our manager, but he elected to not see anything and fully trusted my co-worker to handle it completely on his own.

Funny how that works.

Nothing makes a job worse than a horrible manager like this one.

What did Reddit think?

This designer finally found a way to get through to her terrible boss.

It’s clear to this commenter that the manager doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.

This commenter learned a helpful new term.

Micromanaging wasn’t quite as easy as he thought.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.