Balancing Micromanagement and Empowerment As a Manager
Successful management requires striking a balance between overseeing team efforts and encouraging employees to achieve success, but many leaders struggle with micromanaging their teams.
Micromanagement often stems from an individual’s need to exert control and inability to delegate tasks effectively. If this behavior is common among senior leaders in your company, engage them in an informal but diplomatic discussion on how their leadership style affects morale and productivity.
1. Set Goals
Reducing micromanagement while increasing empowerment can be a tricky balancing act for managers of all experience levels. Finding ways to move away from micromanaging toward more empowering leadership strategies doesn’t happen overnight, but with regular self-reflection and dedication it can be accomplished.
Micromanagement symptoms include an obsession with detail, inability to delegate tasks to others, trust issues between team members, frequent meetings and demands for updates on projects, as well as critical reactions when mistakes or inaccuracies occur. Micromanagement stifles creativity while stripping teams of their autonomy. By taking steps against micromanagement managers can decrease stress while being freed up for higher level work and strategic planning.
2. Communicate Expectations
Micromanagement can lead to a breakdown in communication and decrease team cohesion, as well as hamper innovation as employees may fear sharing ideas for fear of scrutiny or criticism. Furthermore, this type of management may even diminish employee job satisfaction.
Micromanagers often suffer from feelings of superiority over their employees or an intense desire to maintain control over projects they oversee, which can quickly lead to burnout within themselves and the company as a whole.
Managers can mitigate this situation by sharing expectations and milestones with their teams proactively, seeking clarification when given vague instructions, and monitoring more-effectively than before. Doing this may reduce the need for excessive oversight.
3. Give Feedback
Micromanaging can put both managers and those they manage under immense strain, leading to burnout which has serious repercussions for career success and personal wellbeing. Therefore, leaders must recognize this need for change by adopting leadership styles which promote empowerment, autonomy and open communication among their teams.
An excessive micromanager might exhibit these behaviors by regularly asking employees for updates and task instructions, physically monitoring employees without valid reason, and physically overseeing employees without legitimate cause. Therefore, engaging the person exhibiting these behavior for discussion would be the ideal first step.
Explain how micromanagement is negatively affecting your performance and request open dialogue going forward. This can help address their concerns while showing your dedication to building a team-oriented culture. Furthermore, implement Feedback Wrap and Improvement Dialogue for effective-communication.
4. Allow Employees to Make Mistakes
Micromanagement environments often discourage employees from sharing innovative ideas for fear of reprisal; this inhibits creativity and can have lasting repercussions on employee morale.
Micromanaging managers tends to focus on details that don’t contribute significantly to the success of the project as a whole, preventing them from delegating effectively, which in turn leads to stress and burnout for them as managers.
If you’re working with a micromanager, try creating more of an empowerment environment by showing them your capabilities and confidence in your work. Proactive communication of milestones and achievements as well as seeking clarification when receiving detailed instructions can all help create this positive atmosphere.
5. Encourage Creativity
Managers who restrict team member decisions without prior approval from them can cause major disruptions. It sends the message that their boss does not trust them to perform their roles efficiently and decreases productivity, costing time and resources.
Micromanagement can have devastating repercussions for any company culture, including decreased collaboration and camaraderie between employees, job satisfaction decrease, lack of innovation and stopping employees from taking risks that would potentially enhance business processes.
If you believe your boss is being micromanaging, try having an open and respectful discussion about this with them. By showing that you can perform your duties-effectively they may be more inclined to give you greater autonomy within your work-environment.
