Are You a Micromanager?

As a business owner, sometimes its difficult to let go of what we think we are good at. Difficult to delegate those tasks that helped us grow our businesses. Who can do it better than we can, right? Although most of us have learned to delegate, we can still fall into the trap of micromanging our employees. This can be dangerous in many ways as we’ll explore in this post.

Signs You Might be a Micromanager

You may not realize your doing it, because you’ve grown accustomed to it as a business owner but it’s easy to fall into the trap. Here are some warning signs:

• You ask your employee for daily updates or progress reports, even on non-urgent projects.
• When employees bring you ideas or completed tasks, you always make suggestions or changes to what they’ve done.
• You constantly feel as though your employees are not doing things the right way, and that it could be done better if you did it yourself.
• Instead of teaching your employees or showing them errors that they have made, you complete the task yourself or make changes without telling them.
• Instead of teaching employees how to take over low-value tasks, you do them yourself.

The Dangers of Micromanaging Your Employees

Micromanaging might not seem like it’s a big deal. Unfortunately, micromanaging can have serious downsides for you and your business. Here are a few:

• You can’t be everywhere at once. Your value to the business is your knowledge and expertise, and ability to step back and work on the big issues. Being tied down to details dilutes your value.
• You will squash the motivation and creativity of your employees. They will stop offering suggestions and input of making the extra effort if they know you will question or modify everything they do anyway.
• Your employees will become unhappy and this may result in lower productivity and higher turnover.

How to Make Meaningful Changes:

Ok, so you realize that maybe you have a problem and that you can do better. Great, that’s the first step! Next thing is to actually make impactful changes. It’s likely your employees already know this about you as well, so the first step might be to meet with your employees and acknowledge your awareness of your micromanager tendencies and solicit some feedback. Let them know you’d like to make some changes and ask them for their suggestions. Don’t take it personal! We all need to be able to take criticism, especially from our employees.

Here are some immediate steps you take to change your micromanager habits:

• Begin to identify low-value tasks you can delegate without feeling the need to oversee it. Start small if you have to but be willing to let go.
• Provide employees with more generalized instructions and focus more on the end result and expectation rather than the method of accomplishing the task.
• Let employees make decisions without getting your approval. This may require some definition upfront but don’t hesitate to identify those areas where they have autonomous authority.
• Ask not to be copied on emails related to issues that you are not necessarily involved in.

If you are a certified micromanager, this may take some time. Just remember, your value is not as a taskmaster or as a detail manager, your job is to run oversee the vision and plan you set in motion. The result will be more satisfied employees, a more successful business and maybe a reduction in your stress levels.

Infinium HR can help provide you with some suggestions or even recommend excellent business coaches that can help you make the necessary changes. Just give us a shout out at info@infiniumhr.com.