How to avoid becoming a micro-manager

Holding your employees accountable without micro-managing can prove difficult for any business owner or manager.

We have all been in a situation where we know we can do something better ourselves. We find it difficult to watch someone make mistakes but if we interfere we can end up falling into the trap of micro-managing our employees. And our business become an ‘Elton’ (more on that here – we talk about Ronalds and Elton’s a lot)

Micromanagement involves trying to manage and personally control, monitor and approve every decision, every team member or every situation. From an employee’s perspective it is demoralising as they feel that they aren’t trusted and that their manager is always checking up on them. And for you, you’re spending more time in your business when you should be working on it and focusing on directing strategy, dealing with marketing and developing systems.

If you struggle with delegation, you are more likely to become a micro-manager. Delegation isn’t easy. To begin with, you need to be comfortable with the fact that you can’t do everything yourself. You then need to identify the tasks that you are happy to delegate to others and ensure you write systems for these.

Over time, your team members will learn to follow the system so things are less likely to go wrong. But in business, nothing is perfect or smooth running. So there may little things that go wrong, which you need to make sure your team members can identify and update the systems accordingly. Meaning those mistakes, will be less.

Finally, you need to empower your team members to make decisions. Arrange regular update meetings regarding progress, make yourself available in case they have any questions that they want to run by you, but give them ownership of their objectives and make them accountable for delivery of their responsibilities.