Are you guilty of micromanaging?
As a small business owner, there comes a time when you need to start building your team. You simply can’t do all the work yourself. After searching for the right people and onboarding them, it now comes time to manage them. How do you create a supportive environment that gets the most out of your investment?
If you are set on growing and scaling your business, you need to be able to step away from the day-to-day and let your team do what you have hired them to do, trusting that they’ve got it covered.
However, as a new leader, you might be tempted to hover closely and micromanage them. It’s understandable how this happens; you want to ensure your team is doing the right tasks to the standard that you have set. The problem with this type of micromanaging is that before long, your team members will feel you do not trust them. They may lose motivation, and for sure, they will not be producing their best work.
So what exactly is micromanaging?
Micromanaging is working very closely with team members through every step of the process, carefully monitoring them to ensure everything is done to your exact specifications, rather than allowing them space to work in their own zone of genius using their innate skill set.
While micromanaging your team might seem like the easiest way to produce the quality work you desire, there are a couple of huge downsides to this type of leadership. First off, your team members are human beings, not robots, and they want to be treated as independent workers. They need the creative space to produce their best work within the expectations set for them. Secondly, overseeing this level of detail means you won’t have time to do your own work. There are only so many hours in a day, and if you are micromanaging your team day in and day out, visionary work — the big-picture strategy and decisions that only you as the leader can make — will likely be neglected.
So now that we are clear on what micromanaging is, how do you discover if you are guilty of this with your current team?
There are four main signs of micromanagement and when these are present, both you and your team members can feel the effects. As a leader, knowing these signs is the most important first step to stop micromanaging. With this awareness, you can shift your management style to be more productive and bring out the best in your people.
1. Team Members Feel Overwhelmed
Take a few minutes and ask yourself:
Do you have clear tasks laid out in a place where team members can easily see what is their responsibility and when it is expected to be done?
Do you have clear expectations on what success looks like for each of those tasks you have delegated?
Do you have clear instructions on how to complete the tasks for your team members?
When employees are uncertain of what is expected of them, the quality of their work can be significantly impacted. They may feel overwhelmed by second guessing themselves at every turn and under-appreciated.
2. Team Members Feel Untrusted
Have you ever redone tasks or taken over entire projects you originally delegated to a team member because the work was not done correctly? This decreases your team members’ motivation, making them feel that you don’t trust them or you think they are not capable of doing the tasks. Remember that even if the project isn’t handled exactly as you like, a completed project is better for your company than redoing it for your own sense of control. Done is better than perfect in many cases!
3. Everyday Tasks Require Your Approval
If each task along the way requires your approval, team members have to stop their workflow and wait until you have reviewed their work and given them permission to continue. This creates a bottleneck, dramatically reducing your team’s productivity as well as yours. This can easily cause missed deadlines as extra time needs to be assigned to each task for it to be reviewed.
4. Little Room for Growth
I am sure you have all heard sayings about how there is more than one way to get something done. This applies to your business projects as well. If you are micromanaging your team, you leave little room for them to be creative and flexible and perhaps come up with a better way of doing things. When you allow your team members to do their own thinking and creative problem solving, you allow for the best of them to shine through.
How to stop micromanaging
Now that you know what micromanaging is and the 3 main signs of it, I’d like to leave you with 3 ideas for how to stop this detrimental behavior. Here are some proven methods for you to ensure you are not micromanaging your team:
Trust
If you took the time to hire the right people, take the time to build trust in them. Of course trust is not established on day 1, but make an effort to delegate something to them and allow them to work on it uninterrupted without being on top of each little piece of it. As you demonstrate your trust in team members by allowing them to complete a project uninterrupted, you help them build confidence in themselves and create trust in you as well. It’s a win-win on both sides!
Clear Expectations
Team members who have a real understanding of what is expected right from the get-go can execute the work with greater confidence. They won’t be slowed down by wondering what they need to do. Instead, they simply focus on the tasks at hand and complete them to the best of their ability.
Remember, taking some time to plan out a workflow will help increase productivity of your team members. Assigning projects as you think of them with no real plan is disruptive to your team and reduces productivity.
Remove Perfectionism
Perfectionism can get in the way and can really limit your team’s productivity. It is not that you have to lower your standards, but rather recognize that your way is not the only way. Those awesome team members you hired have their own good ideas on how to complete a project which can sometimes be even better than what you expected. Give your team members the freedom and creativity to build trust with you and put their best foot forward!
