5 Ways for Entrepreneurs to Stop Pulling Out Micromanagement as a Jackknife

By Vartika Kashyap

“I feel I am a control freak boss who is micromanaging her team. I am afraid I will lose the superstars I have hired.”

Priya is not the only smart leader to suffer from micromanagement. There is a little micromanager in all of us. Steve Jobs is a perfect example of a reformed micromanager too. He found amazing success as he learned through his failures though.

In my experience of collaborating with various organizations, I frequently hear talented employees complain about their boss being a control freak. It simply brings you down in the bumps to unconsciously sabotage your own success, however.

You have hired superstars! High time you stop micromanaging them.

“Why?” you ask.

1. To never fully give your talented team members the authority to make the important decisions that came up with their positions and being overly involved in all the processes slow down the organizational decision-making.
2. When employees are not given the opportunity to think for themselves, it severely affects their confidence. Why would the best players choose to thrive in an environment that does not let them grow? They will eventually jump ship.
3. Innovation demands room for mistakes and gets stifled otherwise.
4. When a leader is busy doing everyone else’s job, they fail at doing their own as good as it could be done.

Do you recognize yourself anywhere here? Luckily there are ways to stop pulling out micromanagement as a jackknife.

Here we go:

1. Baby steps for the win

It is not that a micromanager would stop being a control freak overnight. Good things take time.

The best approach is to go slow. Aiming to change in the blink of an eye, however, may also deter you from continuing to change the behavior in the first place.

Further, even if you are trying to make things better, your teammates may not understand it at once. They will need and take some time to warm up their critical thinking skills and then eventually evaluate the flexibility you have been trying to give them.

2. Brushed up delegation skills matter

There are online project management software that can help you loosen your grip on employees and still manage on meeting deadlines. Some of them have Kanban boards that help you assign work on boards and define workflow stages. The teammates can see work moving through stages and get empowered to self-manage with a better understanding of workflows. Everyone knows who is supposed to do what and when they are supposed to do it, making a clear distribution of work.

Further, there are other tools like Gantt charts that make delegation easier. You can set dependencies between various tasks and make sure employees get notified whenever deadlines shift and work changes. This way they will feel independent enough to tackle unforeseen changes in scheduled plans. You just have to select one central place that meets your organizational needs the right way.

3. Healthy dialogues are encouraging

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