Letting Go of Control: How Micromanaging is Negatively Impacting Your Team

When overseeing projects, it can be difficult to resist jumping in and restructuring something the way that you would have completed it yourself. Managers encounter the need to let go of control over certain tasks in order to reallocate their time and avoid micromanaging. A manager’s role is important in promoting the continuous development of the team, and handling the tasks that someone else could not as easily take on. Inability to let go of control over these smaller tasks inhibits employee morale, productivity and self-improvement.

 

Employee Morale

Micromanaging impacts the culture and environment of your office, primarily because your employees resent being denied the responsibility of completing their own tasks. It’s important to let your team exercise their skills and handle their workload in the way that they see fit. In addition, micromanaging will cause your team to start to pull back. You will get less out of your team on a daily basis, because as you do more of their work, they will do less. Show that you value your team by encouraging them and allowing them the space to complete their assignments.

 

Productivity

When you are micromanaging, you are not training and developing your staff, or allowing other employees to take on more. Rather than multiplying yourself to increase productivity, you are accumulating extra tasks and spreading yourself thinner, which destroys productivity. Sometimes it takes more time upfront to train someone to complete a task rather than just doing it yourself, but in the long run it multiplies your productivity as you are able to rely on that person to take the lead on those tasks in the future. A separate productivity issue that will arise is a higher turnover as employee morale suffers. The need for extra onboarding and training takes away from resources.

 

Self-Improvement

You aren’t improving your own skill set when you are working on your team members’ tasks, because you need to grow in order to increase the productivity of the unit. Have more of an impact on your team by acting as a leader, as opposed to a manager. When you allow your employees to flourish and handle their own tasks, you can move forward to focus on the bigger picture.

 

Still confused about how you can give up some control while effectively holding your team accountable? Follow up with this blog that outlines the steps to achieving accountability.