None of us like to think of our management style as potentially frustrating our team members and squashing their productivity, creativity and empowerment!
At the same time, your management style has to get results and hold your team members accountable for their contributions to achieving them.
So, how can you strike a balance? How do you identify if you’re managing too closely or if more guidance and support is needed?
It’s a common dilemma! So, we’ve compiled these tips to support you and your team as you build the effective, collaborative relationships you’re striving for.
Great training
Often, micromanagement occurs when there’s a lack of confidence in a team member’s skills.
A good way to build their confidence, and yours, is to create and deliver a solid onboarding, induction and training program. You won’t necessarily be the one to cover all aspects. Ideally, you’ll outsource to other members of your team or external providers where possible. But, where team members report to you, you’ll feel far more confident about their skills when you know they’ve received the training they need to do their job well.
Onboarding and induction checklists will help, plus a training checklist closely linked to the specifics of their position description and role expectations.
And, as their role responsibilities increase or change over time, you can facilitate additional training and development as needed.
Establish clear and agreed outcomes and timelines
It can seem obvious, but establishing clear and agreed outcomes and timelines can get lost in the day-to-day (particularly when you’re busy!). If you’re not all on the same page about the results you’re going for, what’s focussed on and achieved is unlikely to hit the mark.
Plus, where timelines aren’t known, how your team members prioritise tasks may not align with your expectations – a sure path to micromanagement!
Tips to help you ensure clarity:
If the tasks are regular and predictable, checklists, flowcharts, and standard operating procedures can make a big difference. With these, everyone knows what’s needed and by when, and you can step back and let them get on with it.
Where tasks are more complex and have multiple steps, explanatory documents support your team to deliver consistent results. This includes the contents of your practice or admin manual, including policies and procedures.
For specific projects or less common tasks, capturing in writing what’s been discussed, plus agreed actions and timelines, helps a lot. And, it can help for whoever’s responsible for the actions to be the one writing these and the timelines down – then you can confirm your shared understanding of the tasks.
Build a supportive culture
For busy managers, it can be hard to make time for discussion and questions, but when you actively do, your team will be more likely to seek clarification where they’re unsure or to discuss what they’re working on. And it helps you to build an environment in which they’re confident to ask questions and where mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow.
Consider developing a coaching approach. As in a sporting team, you can build an atmosphere that focuses on development and progress rather than an expectation that they get it right the first time. This brings more opportunities to commend and is a great way to cultivate their skills (and your relationship with them) over time.
If the work produced isn’t on par with what’s needed, clearly articulating the gaps and getting your team member to redo it wherever possible – rather than you jumping in to fix it yourself – might challenge and confront them a bit initially (and you 😊), but will build their skills, accountability and self-confidence over time.
Acknowledge and celebrate the wins
If you actively seek out and acknowledge what they’re doing right and well, including progress towards the goals you’ve identified together. In this case, your team members will feel great and valued, plus have more resilience when performance gaps are identified.
Some last tips to head off micromanaging tendencies…
Ask your team how you can help them to take full responsibility for getting something done. What help/support do they need?
If you feel the desire to jump in or manage closely, identify where/what you’re uncertain about in the situation and develop strategies accordingly. For example, monitoring from afar (such as reviewing reports from your practice software) or ensuring you’re cc’d on project emails.
Agree on when you’ll get updates and what form these will take – email, chat, meeting, etc.
Where agreed outcomes aren’t achieved, have direct discussions and devise strategies together.
Team meetings to discuss and develop strategies to address projects/areas of need. With the discussion and input from all, the relevant people will be more capable of delivering a great outcome/result/product.
Regular 1:1 meetings with your team members to review:
How they’re going with standard role tasks & additional projects.
Ideas they have for improvements.
Additional tasks they might like to learn/take on.
In summary, ensuring shared understanding and clarity of what’s needed and when will build your confidence in your team members and make you far less likely to slip into micromanaging mode!
With these covered, further benefits you can expect will be happy, motivated and empowered team members and a lot more scope for you to delegate. Just imagine what you can do with the extra time…maybe even take holidays…?!
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in key areas such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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