5 Reasons Why You Should NEVER Micromanage Your Team

Almost 70% of professionals consider changing jobs if they experience micromanaging. About half of them quit if micromanaged. Among those who decide to stick around, 68% report an influence on their morale, and 55% say their productivity decreases.

Micromanagement may seem like an efficient approach to team management. It creates an illusion that a manager knows what every teammate is doing every second of every day. It may seem that control over every minute detail increases a team’s productivity.

In reality, micromanagers often come in contact with the opposite.

As a former micromanager, here are five reasons why I switched to another leadership style and how it helped my team grow and become more productive.

First off — what is micromanagement?

As defined by Gartner, “Micromanagement is a pattern of manager behavior marked by excessive supervision and control of employees’ work and processes, as well as the limited delegation of tasks or decisions to staff”.

Why is micromanagement harmful?

It makes teams feel they are not trusted

Micromanagement often becomes predominant in managers who do not trust their teams. If there is a shred of doubt about a team’s productivity, it seems natural for a leader to start paying more attention to what their teammates are busy with. However, there should be a limit to what a manager can and cannot do to monitor their team’s performance.

DO:

1. Start talking to your team more to ensure everyone is on the same page and collaborates freely.

2. Centralize the task management process. Every task and its progress should be gathered in one place and not spread across various apps, tables, and Kanban-style task boards.

3. Optimize your team’s work processes and make sure their attention is paid to what really matters.

   
   

DO NOT:

1. Make yourself unreachable and unattainable. One-sided communication where your team cannot reach you will only disconnect the team and can result in a toxic relationship.

2. Try to seem as if you know everything about everything. Accept the fact that your teammates are better at what they do than you may be, and allow them the freedom to perform their duties freely.

3. Treat your team as kindergartners. Recognize their professionalism and accept the fact that they will not do anything to harm you and the company you work at.

   
   

To be as productive as possible, teams should be given a certain amount of freedom to work and be creative. It is only possible if a manager trusts them and doesn't try to micromanage them.

It affects team morale

When a team doesn’t feel they are trusted, when their manager micromanages them and doesn’t want to connect with them on a personal level, it undoubtedly affects morale.

Micromanagers may not understand, but their approach to leadership has a deterrent effect on their teammates’ professional self-esteem. As a result, they become disengaged from their workflow and their team, which reflects on their morale and will lead to fast burnouts.

Not an effect any leader wants to achieve.

It makes teams lose motivation

A micromanager who is trying to monitor every process and is more focused on their team’s minor tasks instead of a final result takes away all the motivation.

Look at it this way — they set an example of behavior and process management. Their teams can simply pick it up and start doing the same. The result — they lose all motivation to work and instead focus on unnecessary actions, like filling out countless reports and ensuring everything is in order. And yes, seeing that reports are more important to their manager than their results, they can easily start paying more attention to them instead of performing their work duties, which is more important.

In short — they lose motivation to do actual work and start focusing on every little task their manager deems important, even if it is not.

It makes teams lose the bigger picture

This is the nature of micromanagement — it is all about the present moment. It blurs the vision of the future. For a team, it is hard to see what they need to achieve to be successful if they are forced to focus on the here-and-now side of things.

Look at it this way: if you focus on each particular grain of sand on a beach, you can’t see a beautiful horizon where the sky kisses the sea.

Letting go of micromanagement will open up a lot of space for a team to see the big picture and do what they need to achieve their short- and long-term goals.

It increases turnover

There is no surprise that the lack of motivation and connection, low team morale, and the absence of a clear vision of the future results in a high team turnover. Professionals prefer to leave micromanagers behind and seek a trustful leader elsewhere.

To stop being a micromanager, a leader should:

• Trust and know their team

• Focus on big results and not on everyday minute details

• Centralize their processes and tasks

• Not be afraid to delegate

  
  

Micromanagement may seem effective, but it harms team productivity and long-term goals. It is better to focus on long-term planning and create an atmosphere that will help each team member succeed.