Being a manager or a leader, brings you many responsibilities. Empowering your employees to make them reach their full potentials, for achieving the organisational goals is one of them. However, while getting your employees to complete the designated tasks with precision, you might also feel a strong inner urge to watch over every step they take. If you do feel so, you are possibly a ‘Micromanager’.
Most entrepreneurs miss out the larger goals of the organisation as they end up wasting a lot of their time & energy on the small details, which can otherwise be delegated to their subordinates. Aiming for perfection, they tend to control the entire project solely, thus, not only neglecting their employees’ productivity & affecting their confidence, but, also impacting their organisation’s long term progress.
Therefore, here are a few ways that can help you in keeping a check on your habit of micro-management, in order to benefit your employees & in turn, your organisation:
- Hire the right people, who are not only dependable but also, accountable. Employees, who seek learning for their own professional growth with their focus on the team goals as well, are assets worth retaining. For achieving this, you should review and update your hiring & selection process regularly.
For instance, to take your business to newer heights by following effective marketing techniques, you would be hiring good marketing managers in your organisation, who would be updating you regularly about effectual marketing strategies for business boom.
- Create a productive work culture, where employees are accountable to each other. Employees are driven to work with a lot more efficiency when they receive genuine feedback about their performance from other departments, with whom they regularly interact & coordinate.
Suppose, there are two departments, Communication & Designing, which interact, work together and give positive feedback to each other. It would create a positive atmosphere, ultimately resulting in positive work environment for the organisation.
- Delegate tasks and responsibilities to your employees and learn to trust them with the job. Identify a few tasks you currently handle that can be easily delegated to someone you trust. Think about the time and skills needed for the job and then assign the task accordingly.
Consider taking up a new project. What would be your course of action? Think about the department which would be able to help best and utilise their talents accordingly. You should assign the duties to complete the project to your team members, as per their time & skills. Remember to divide the Big projects into smaller domains for effective functioning of the organisation.
- Let go off the small stuff and break the habit of making changes in your employees’ work for the sake of making changes. Sometimes you need to save yourself the time & efforts you spend on the trivial details to utilise it for the ‘bigger-picture’ organisational objectives that could have greater impact.
If there is an Event to be organised, make sure that you ignore the minor things as the cost and number of mementos or certificates to be given. Instead, focus on more managerial tasks, so as to make the event a mega success.
- Empower your employees to make their own decisions. Your employees will more willingly ‘own’ their work and enhance their productivity when they get to speak their minds and make amends according to their knowledge & skills. This will also help build their problem-solving and leadership skills.
Suppose, you are out of town due to some unavoidable circumstances and a crisis pops up at the office like, a delay in the delivery of products or a negative publicity campaign by a competitor or your dissatisfied stakeholder. If you employees are empowered by you to deal with such situations, they would have authority and confidence to take problem solving decisions. For this, it is a must to designate a crisis manager, who is entitled to take such decisions.
- State your expectations clearly such that you do not need to monitor your employees’ progress every other day. Also, communicate to them the goals that you want them to achieve through a certain task for themselves & the organisation. Evaluate their goals, progress & successes/failures, at reasonable intervals of time.
If, in case, you have assigned some task to your junior or your manager and have asked to submit the report at the end of the day, despite that urge to ask the person concerned after every two hours, make sure, you ask for it at the End of the Day only.
The art of creating the right balance between the empowerment & accountability of your workforce is the key to achieving success for the organisation as a whole. You must always remember that - “True leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders!”