Are You Micromanaging Your Employees?

The Mark of a Micro-manager
You find relationships with your best employees deteriorating every day, and sometimes to the point of no return. Blaming it on the recession, your employee, or your car is not going to solve the situation. The first thing you need to do is to take a step back and carefully assess whether you have fallen into the habit of micromanaging. Micro-managers commonly have the following traits:

• They spend most of their time overseeing projects of their employees
• They spend unnecessary time on a regular basis directing employees and teaching them how to do a job properly
• They get angry when employees take independent decisions
• They do not believe in empowering employees but believe in directing them
• They believe in fixing time-schedules of their employees to hours and minutes
• They believe in asking employees to account for their time rather than for their work
• They spend more time on operations than on policy and growth
• They detest the load of responsibilities on them and wish to be back in low-level jobs

If your actions are described by more than one of the mentioned traits, then chances are you are micro managing your employees and hurting your company more than helping it.

What do Best Employees Want Most?

To sustain and improve employee – employer relationships and get the best out of your employees, it is necessary to understand certain common traits of good performers in any workplace. The best performing employees usually want from their managers:

• Clear and quantifiable targets and deadlines
• Clear specifications of responsibilities and their boundaries
• Fair evaluation of work-performance
• Autonomy and flexibility in time-management within deadlines
• Defense of self-esteem

The best performers always want these regardless of employment security or benefits. If they find you infringing on what they see as their rights, they are just going to up and leave without worrying about the consequences. They don’t lose, they’ll survive and get new jobs. The company does lose, but usually not to a great extent – it will find new employees. The one who loses is you, as the manager. You lose experienced and good performers and have to make do with new recruits to tackle jobs, which already have you stressed.

Thorough and repeated research has proved beyond doubt that micromanagement destroys communication, productivity, trust, interest, and problem-solving. It suffocates company growth and keeps the company from achieving targets, all at the cost of incompetent middle managers. Micromanagement needs to be identified and rooted out from practice, if a company wishes to survive and succeed.