How to not micromanage your team in 2024

And be way less stressed as a result

If you’re the kind of boss who gets caught up in the detail and asks to be cc’d on emails, or you said to yourself more than once last year ‘It’d be quicker if I just did it myself’, then—there’s no kind way to say this—you’re a micromanager.

I know that as a leader we want to support as best possible and make sure our team produces high-quality work that meets expectations and deadlines.

But often, support accidentally becomes control, impeding productivity and damaging morale.

The article is split into:

• What impact does micromanaging have?

• The 6 signs you might be a micromanager

• How to not micromanage your team

What impact does micromanaging have?

A survey revealed:

• 79% of employees had experienced micromanagement

• 71% said micromanagement interfered with their job performance

• 36% actually changed jobs

Jason Brown, founder and CEO of Approved Costs said, “Intentional or not, it produces an intimidating environment within the workplace causing employees to become incompetent.”

Whichever way you look at it, micromanaging doesn’t work.

You think you’re keeping the standard of work high, you think you’re helping everyone hit deadlines and keep things moving…

But really, we’re just:

• Becoming a bottleneck - Nothing can go out the door without your approval, so you’re holding up the pace.

• Stunting innovation - Your team daren’t experiment for fear of failure, keeping us stuck and building a team that only tick off tasks. No new ideas come to the table; the world innovates around us, and we’re eventually left behind.

• Creating huge workloads for ourselves - Micromanagers don’t delegate well, so you’re just giving yourself a bigger workload.

• Limiting growth in your career - It might be possible to closely supervise a team of 3–4 as a micromanager, but it’s not sustainable for a large team, so you’re stunting the possibilities of your own growth.

Let’s look at some of the signs, so you know whether you might be a culprit…

The 6 signs you might be a micromanager

Make a note of how many you do (And be really honest with yourself)

1. You often feel frustrated because you would’ve gone about a task differently

2. You’re being cc’d in lots of emails

3. You constantly want to know what your team are working on

4. You feel stressed and/or anxious when you don’t know what your team ‘have been doing all day’

5. You’re never quite satisfied with outputs

6. You laser in on the details and take great pride and /or pain in making corrections

I’d love to hear the most common situations where you feel like you need to micromanage, let’s work through them together in the comments…

How to not micromanage your team

This section is behind the paywall as it is extremely valuable, paid members keep scrolling

2 quick actions you can do TODAY:

• Turn off notifications - When you’re the person who responds in 10 seconds to every message, or jumps in to rescue at the smallest sign of inconvenience, you are unintentionally micromanaging. You can slow down your responses and train your team to be self-sufficient by turning off notifications.

• Write up your job description - You need to see a list written out of what you’re doing so you can see where you’re messing up (More on this a few bullet points down).

Mindset shift:

• We have to let go
  To shift away from micromanaging, we need to get in the mindset of letting go.
  In practice, this looks like:
  - Starting to release the small tasks.
  - When you feel yourself wanting to check in, don’t.
  - Allow and actually promote people to mess up a couple of times (use my failure KPIs to do this).
  - Even schedule some blackout time, 4hrs each day that you aren’t reachable to give your team space.

Once you start to let go, I guarantee people will amaze you with how brilliant they are.

Things to work on all year:

• Use your job description and DELEGATE - A manager’s day-to-day should only be about 10% ‘doing’, 40% ‘managing’, and 50% ‘building’ - But most spend about 90% in the ‘doing’ section.
  Once you have your (accurate) job description written up, the things you’re doing every day take up your time. Highlight in red all the ‘doing’ bits, the task work, the approvals, the cc’s, the meetings you’re in that you don’t need to be a part of.
  Now start the delegation process.
  You need to get rid of ALL the reds. Start from today and continue to do so all day.

• Set the vision and expectation, but not the how - When you’re handing over a task, explain your vision for the outcome clearly, set a clear deadline (and get agreement)… Then leave them to it.

If they start to regularly fall, we need to move into performance management (more on performance management in the next paid article in 2 weeks time)

Situation Examples and how to deal with them

I’ve broken down 2 key situations in the table below, but I’d love to hear any other situations you come across where you feel the need to keep a keen eye on your team. Let me know in the comments and I’ll break it down for you…

Last thoughts on micromanaging

I’ve only just scratched the surface here in how to stop micromanaging - There are so many behaviors that I’ve had to work hard over the years to overcome, and I want to share them ALL but don’t want to overwhelm you today.

So I’m going to run an action-packed webinar at the end of Jan going DEEP into HOW you can stop micromanaging, heart this post to let me know you’ll be there (more details coming soon).

Peace,

Heather