Leadership and Micromanagement….

Andy McComments off.

One of the greatest misunderstandings in leadership and coaching is the term micromanaging. Most leaders never want to be thought of as a micromanager. In fact, it could be considered an insult or weakness of any manager.

When micromanaging is used as a coaching or leadership style, it will most likely deliver bad results, stifle creativity, limit employees’ self-worth, and limit productivity. On the other hand, when a coach or leader must deal with a bad performer, it is imperative to help the employee either become a better performer or help them find a job that is a better fit. Leaders should strive to be coaches who, when necessary, use micromanaging activities to improve specific areas, but use coaching skills when getting the team ready to win.

Micromanagement is essentially watching, or making employees feel that their every move is being watched. Excessive attention to detail, planning tasks to minutiae, and obsessively tracking the time employees spend at their desks, on their breaks, etc. are some of the more extreme activities associated with micromanagement. While this may seem to some like the work managers should be doing, these behaviors are, in fact, detrimental and take managers’ focus away from the bigger picture.

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Micromanagement has been proven to be a stressful management style that achieves results only in the short term, and can be extremely taxing on both team members and management. While there are much better ways to lead teams and achieve long-term results, there are situations where micromanagement becomes essential. With this knowledge, and an understanding of how much pressure the team can handle, micromanagement can be used as a short-term tool to achieve results when a project is slipping and all other methods have failed.

Empowerment can be defined as the process of enabling (or authorising) an individual to think, behave, act, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. It is not an implementation, and is only partly a strategy. Rather, it is a philosophy; it is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one’s own future and foster a culture wherein this state can thrive.

It is important that employees feel connected to the company strategy, their role, their leaders, and their team in order to secure their willingness to give discretionary effort and commitment to stay with the company.

Empowered employees are engaged employees. They have all the tools they need to learn and grow, connect with colleagues and others throughout the company, make their own decisions, be leaders, and contribute to the success of the business. Put another way, empowerment is a key driver of engagement.

Why Are Micromanaging and Coaching Often Confused?
Micromanaging and coaching are often confused because, from the surface, the activities and the leader’s involvement look very similar. The key difference is the leader’s intent and the desired goals of their actions. Both require the involvement of the coach/leader—setting clear expectations, having a well-defined activity management, accountability, and a huge time commitment from the leader as well as the employees. The key difference lies in the purpose of these activities. For example:

Coaches/leaders set expectations to ensure there is complete understanding of what is expected from each employee in order to maximise productivity and limit confusion, whereas a micromanager does this with the intent to set boundaries and rules.
Coaches/leaders show commitment to the team by holding everyone accountable; on the other hand, micromanagers use accountability to ensure employees are earning their paychecks (oftentimes, focusing on a single employee versus the team).
Coaches/leaders manage activities to ensure employees are on the right track and that they are in the best position to succeed, and a micromanager uses the activities to justify effort or discipline.
Overall, the intent of coaching is to develop and prepare employees to succeed using the leader’s knowledge and experience to guide them, not to justify actions.

 

When to Micromanage, and for How Long?
Let’s say there is an employee who appears to be unhappy, and their activities and results are not meeting expectations. The leader should get involved early to determine if the shortcoming is a lack of desire or ability, or both. To help determine the issue, the leader should implement more disciplined expectations and activities and explain to the employee why this action is being taken, as well as the desired outcome. The desired outcome should be to either help the employee reach the expected activities, attitude, and results or help them find a role that is a better fit. These micromanaging activities should be short-term activities.

The leader needs to make assessments quickly and take on the continued shortcomings, which results in moving the employee out of the position. In turn, leaders should also take quick action to recognise great efforts and achievements as warranted. A leader should not have to implement a micromanaging activity for an employee for more than 90 days, and it can be stopped in as little as 30 days depending on the level of involvement, improvement, and accountability, as well as the overall attitude and commitment of the employee.

Trust and Independence for the Team
The complaint that most people have about their current job has to do with their perceived level of autonomy and independence in their current role. And what does that boil down to? Studies indicate that more often than not, it can be attributed, in part, to how closely their immediate supervisor or manager dictates the nuances and production details of the work created by their employees.

There are plenty of examples of managers who strike that balance where they are high-touch, but are not encroaching on the autonomy of their employees in their pursuit to produce good work. These employers typically get the most out of their teams—not only in terms of work quality, but morale as well.

Here are a few ways that they successfully manage employees closely—without micromanaging.

1. Keep casual, open lines of communication with your team. Micromanagement often boils down to the frequency with which a manager communicates with their team. If the only thing you communicate with the team about is how they can be doing their work differently or better, that is a problem.

Employees need to understand how highly they’re valued; if you’re constantly picking apart the work that an employee produces because it isn’t up to your standards—and that is the extent to which you communicate—how responsive do you think they’re going to be to your feedback after a while? Short answer: not very.

One tip that can help keep lines of communication open is to take your team out to lunch or to the local bar when not on the clock. Show them that your relationship doesn’t have to simply be a working one, but that it can be a social one too.

2. Set expectations early. Another contributor to micromanagement is when there is a fundamental misunderstanding or miscommunication between the manager and team members. If this breakdown in expectation-setting occurs, it becomes hard for employees to produce work that the manager wants to see, which, in turn, opens the door for—you guessed it—micromanagement.

So, if you’re able to set clear-cut expectations early on, you are more likely to see work that aligns with those expectations. It gives your team enough time to assess how they can go about achieving the quality of work you want to see, and eliminates any guesswork on the part of the team that may lead to ill-advised strategy or production.

A great way to accomplish this is to hold an internal kick-off meeting before embarking on a new project or task. This is where you meet with your team and tell them how you envision the final product to look, go over any key performance indicators (KPIs) that need to be addressed, and address any immediate sources of confusion or concerns that your team has. This way, you can create a clear and concise game plan and forge ahead with the project.

3. Check in regularly. Having a regular time to touch base with each of your staff members about their work will keep you focused on their results and will create a place for you to check on how projects are coming along, give feedback, and agree on prioritisation—and will set you both up well to let them go forth and pursue their goals with an appropriate amount of autonomy the rest of the time.

4. Take on concerns. When work isn’t progressing as you’d like, or a staff member isn’t approaching the job in the way you’d expect, talk about it; whether that means giving simple feedback, working to develop a staff member’s skills, or tackling a serious performance issue or a fundamental problem with fitting the role.

5. Trust those to whom you delegate. It always starts with trust. Along with trust, you also have to give the people to whom you delegate the chance to do a job their way. Of course, the work must be done well, but your way or the highway is not the right way. Effective leaders offer and inspire the kind of trust that encourages empowerment and productivity. If your group has suffered from lagging performance lately, don’t blame it all on your workers. You may have kept them on too short a leash, not allowing them enough operational freedom to do their jobs, or you may have failed to provide the training and tools they need. Worse, you may have been wasting time redoing their work rather than helping them do their jobs better.

6. Delegate responsibility and authority, not just the task. Managers who fail to delegate responsibility in addition to specific tasks eventually find themselves reporting to their subordinates and doing some of the work, rather than vice versa.

And, finally, there is the most important and easiest task, but something that many leaders fail to do: Effectively sharing your authority requires an open, honest attitude, combined with the following characteristics:

Positive motivation: Use perks, time off, promotions, public recognition, handwritten cards, team morale boosters, and monetary rewards to inspire exceptional performance.  Leadership role modeling: Demonstrate the behaviors you want to see in others through your actions. Nothing kills morale faster than a manager who demands people stay late and then leaves at 4:30 to make an early tee-off time, or one who insists you keep your inbox empty, but his or hers is a black hole.

The proper tools: Employees may need up-to-date training, upgraded technology, or the right office supplies. Not being able to do your work efficiently—such as if you’re not in “a job level that qualifies for a smartphone or your own printer”—is frustrating and wastes time.

7. Give public and written credit. This is the simplest step, but one of the hardest for many people to learn. It will inspire loyalty, provide real satisfaction for work done, and become the basis for mentoring and performance reviews.

8. Partner for empowerment. The final stage of leadership and management utopia is transforming an empowered employee into a partner. Tom Peters, the guru of management gurus, once said: “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”

The leader should be more concerned about retention and reward for the “employee partner” and not with the product quality. An employee you can trust as a partner allows you to move to other endeavors while simultaneously not worrying about the company that you have built thus far.

Micromanagement has its place; partnering has its place. The key is to understand when each is needed. That’s the role of the leader.

Conclusion
Giving up control and empowering your team can be a terrifying experience for many leaders. You might feel compelled to watch their every move and peek over their shoulders. But by monitoring someone’s every move, you’re actually impeding their ability to grow. Give your team some space, trust them, and you might be impressed by what they’re able to achieve. I personally think that the future of work lies in self-managing teams and individuals, where managers act like coaches to support their team members. If your team members truly feel that their contributions and ideas are being heard (that they’re empowered instead of micromanaged), they begin to feel an increased sense of ownership and engagement.

Original Post 05/01/2018 – Updated 9/2/2019

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Posted in: Leadership