Over-controlling managers may produce great short-term results by constantly getting involved in decision making that is way below their job title. However, this is to the ultimate detriment of their own professional development as well as that of their team’s. No one likes a boss who excessively questions their work. Their staff avoid them, they become a bottleneck because people are waiting for their approval, deadlines will slip because they can’t get past the details and good employees under them become frustrated and leave.
How do you know if you are a micromanager? Here are some clues:
- You will have more work than you can cope with because you can’t delegate effectively. This will make you feel stressed. You probably complain that you work harder than everyone else.
- You tell your team exactly how you want a job done. And if it’s not done the way you want it, you take it back off them – because if you want a job done properly you have to do it yourself.
- You always like to know where your direct reports are and what they are doing (and ideally your indirect reports too). You feel they don’t communicate enough with you.
When you allocate tasks, you tell people what they have to do, but not why they are doing it.
If this resonates with you, here are three questions you might want to ask yourself:
1. DO I WANT TO BE SEEN AS A STRATEGIC OR OPERATIONAL LEADER?
If you are appraised as a micromanager, you just won’t be taken seriously by senior management who will question your ability to operate at a strategic level. This is not career enhancing. You will remain at your current level until you burn out.
If it’s your business, then you can’t do everything yourself for ever. Perhaps your lack of confidence as a manager makes you want to keep doing the job, working in the business not on it. After all, this is the way you developed the customer relations and reputation you have now. However, the business will never grow if you hold on too tightly because good staff will feel stifled and leave. Do you really need to be the hero, involved in everything? Is that helping you achieve your goals or holding you back?
You need to get past the specifics and move on to the big picture. Learn to delegate and leverage your team more, and think about where best to spend your time and energy. Where can you add the greatest value? You may want to delegate the detail to a good Deputy, promoting them to monitor milestones and deliverables. Create metrics so the whole team knows if things are on track.
2. WHY DO I NEED TO GET DIRECTLY INVOLVED IN THIS?
Evaluate the capability in your team so you understand who you can delegate to and where you need to step in more. Who can be stretched to operate more autonomously? Who is not quite on track yet, but has the ability to grow and be developed with the right coaching and training? And who can’t or won’t step up and needs to be moved out?
Be clear on the level of authority you are giving to team members, what decisions you want them to take and at what stage you want them to bring problems back to you so nothing falls between the cracks. Explain your expectations of key check-in points or milestones during a project and the exact scope of their responsibility. You can be more prescriptive with less experienced people, with a view to loosening the reins once you are both more confident in their abilities.
3. WHAT AM I FRIGHTENED OF?
Moving from micromanaging to effective delegation can involve some intense soul-searching and behaviour change. There might be a number of thinking errors stopping you from stepping into a management role.
Staying in the weeds can be a sign of insecurity, a subconscious fear of being exposed as an average staff member who was just lucky to have been promoted. Allowing people to make changes might challenge your way of doing thing previously, but can result in significant improvements. It’s a paradigm shift for managers to move from being a high-performing employee (and maybe a selfish one) to someone thinking strategically for the greater good of the whole business.
Do you feel you have to be a perfect manager and how is that helpful to you? Are you reluctant to relinquish control because you feel no one can do the job as well as you can? Or because you are worried that they will do it better than you and your weaknesses will be exposed? Perhaps you can’t delegate because your business processes and metrics are inefficient? It may be that you haven’t learnt how to delegate from good enough leaders yourself in the past, so you need to find a mentor to help you learn those skills. Not having so much to do can make people feel vulnerable too. You need to work out what you should be doing with your time as a manager, rather than another operator.
AND IF YOU ARE BEING MICROMANAGED…
It is unlikely that they will be receptive to feedback from you, so you need to build their trust instead. Agree milestones at the beginning of each piece of work and try and get them to discuss the broader scope with you, not the minutiae. Ask them why are we doing this, who do we want to influence, what are we trying to achieve here, how will we be measured? Agree all the deliverables and how they want feedback from you along the way. Be assertive, not passive-aggressive, and they are more likely to respond back to you in the same way. And never, ever wait to the last minute to flag up a problem.
I hope that’s helpful – please feel free to share this amongst your network with people you feel might benefit.
Warm wishes.
Zena.