How Micromanaging Your Team Destroys Your Efficiency

As a manager who handles several people or even an entire department, you would want everything to be perfectly executed. Sometimes, if not most, this need for perfection and efficiency can lead us to micromanage our people, which for the most part can actually be detrimental to our team’s overall progress and growth. Micromanaging can be useful when it comes to small-scale projects, but this very act can keep managers from actually focusing on the larger picture and instead spend all of your time picking apart someone’s work and constantly pointing out mistakes without letting them realize their error at their own pace and time.​An article I have come across recently talks about how micromanagement can affect a team both for good and bad --well, mostly bad.​Here is a summary of that article:​ProsGives way to greater control when it comes to the several moving parts of your team. This means you get to receive every single update concerning your project or task. Updates are very important to gauge the progress, an advantage when it comes to managing smaller teams.​Helps measure and provide accurate reports and data when it comes to your metrics. Because of the fact that you get frequent reports concerning your team’s movement you are able to accurately study what methods work and what aspect you are lagging if there are any.​Reliable application of customized and complex processes that involve a lot of details and several instructions.​ConsMakes employees uncomfortable to the point of annoyance. Having to give constant and needless reports all the time can grate everybody’s nerves, except maybe for the one requesting it. Top it off with a penchant for knit-picking mistake after mistake with every update that was made. You become more of a toxic manager rather than an effective one.​Destroys individual self-decision and self-esteem. How do you expect an employee to think on his own and decide on minor decisions if everything he or she does is scrutinized and rejected or corrected at every turn? Constant micromanaging breeds dependence.​Makes it harder for you as a manager to scale a growing team. When you eventually add more people and you have the habit of micromanaging there is a bigger chance that you will lose of the big picture because you tend to spend time on the fine details of your project and that means you focus every little thing your team does to a point that you forget to execute your other responsibilities efficiently.​How to avoid the micromanaging your team by using OKR or Objective Key Result method:​Set not more than five major goals you want to accomplish with your project. Make sure that those goals are actionable, measurable, have a definite time, and a little ambitious.​Create workflows concerning your goals and have all of them documented. This way, your team has a definitive guide or template on how to perform or execute a particular task and you do not have to remind them every time to include what step. This also goes the same for your teams when they don’t have to run to your every single time they forgot a step and would just refer to the set of instructions handed to them.​Use the right tool when it comes to your OKR. There are several management tools out there but not every single one of them will work for you. You have to know the needs of your team first and the projects and tasks that you usually perform in order to find the right fit. via /r/business https://ift.tt/2LIVge8