Are You Micromanaging Your Employees? Here’s How You Can Tell
Growing into a leadership position takes time, especially if you’re new to it. But even people with decades of experience can still fall into a problematic pattern with employees whose personality styles don’t work well together. Although you definitely need to supervise your workers to ensure that they are safe and doing their work correctly, micromanaging them can create more problems than it solves. Here’s how you can tell that your leadership style is too heavy-handed, with some tips to help you ease up.
- Communication Is Too One-Sided
Depending on your project and the type of work you do, you’ll probably need to communicate with employees at least once a day. When you have a conversation, it’s important to remember that it should be a conversation. If you find that you’re doing almost all of the talking and your workers are only answering your questions, it’s time to rethink. When you need status updates, encourage employees to come to you when they are done. This will help to avoid interrupting them and also reduce the feeling that you’re checking up on them.
- Everything Feels Like a Crisis
Have you ever been criticized for loading someone else’s dishwasher in the wrong way? If so, you know what it means to be on the receiving end of someone who can’t set effective priorities. When your business is new or on shaky footing, it’s tempting to control every little piece of the puzzle. The problem with treating everything like a potential crisis is that it dulls your senses to actual crises. In this situation, your employees are less likely to respond to your concern because they don’t know where to focus their efforts. Pick a few big things to emphasize, like safety, and ease up on the rest.
- You Spend Most of Your Time Supervising
When you’re self-employed or the owner of a small business, you probably don’t have time to stand and watch other people work. There are bills to pay, potential clients to talk to and your own project tasks to complete. You know that you’re too invested in your employees’ time when you spend more time looking for mistakes than you do making progress. Instead, you can put that time into hiring people who know what they’re doing and have the motivation to do it without a lot of direction.
- You Criticize More Than Praise
People rely on feedback from their bosses, and this can shape their entire approach to work. Management experts say that you get from your employees what you put in. This means that if you’re constantly criticizing them for mistakes of all sizes, they will eventually give up trying to meet your expectations. If you see a serious problem rising, encourage your employee to stop work and ask them for more information. Most of the time, they already know how to correct it. By keeping your tone collaborative instead of accusatory, they’ll be more likely to fix the issue without getting frustrated with you.
- You’re Afraid to Let Your Employees Fail
Failing in your job is bound to happen on occasion. That’s how most people learn, by making mistakes and discovering what not to do as well as what they should be doing. While you shouldn’t let workers make serious errors that could injure others or destroy what you’ve built, trying to make sure that they do everything perfectly every time isn’t a realistic alternative. A good manager provides clear guidance that employees can understand and follow without you having to stand over them and repeat it. If you’re sincerely worried that a worker doesn’t know how to execute a job properly, arrange for extra training or pair them up with an employee with more experience.
Starting a contracting business means learning how to lead others in a way that gets more work done. The right foundations can help. To learn more about our courses, contact CSLS today!
