If you’re currently watching over your employees like a hawk, monitoring their every move—STOP! While you may feel like you’re being a great manager, you’re not doing your job. Your job is to coach, develop, and mentor your team, not to micromanage them. Micromanaging your employees prohibits success in the workplace and can have some very damaging effects on office morale.
The 4 Negative Impacts of Micromanagement in the Workplace
Creates Resentment
Micromanaging your employees makes them feel as though they are not trusted. A feeling of not being trusted, more often than not, causes resentment. You hired an individual for their role because their level of experience and skill set met the job qualifications. Therefore, being micromanaged is insulting to them because it undermines their abilities. Trust your employees to do the job you hired them for.
Inhibits Employee Development
Micromanaging your employees also inhibits growth opportunities by not giving them challenging opportunities to learn from. When you don’t delegate meaningful work and you punish employees for being proactive, trying new things, and making mistakes; they will avoid taking any risks at all. You’ll end up turning all of your employees into “yes men”.
Slows Workflow
Micromanagement is inefficiency’s right hand. Since it requires all decisions and approvals to go through a controlling manager, it greatly reduces the speed of workflow. Employees learn that there’s no point in moving forward with a project if their micromanaging boss has not signed off on it. Delegation is an essential element to the workflow and is an important management skill. If you can’t delegate you’re not only hurting you and your team, but the profitability of the company as well.
Lowers Accountability
When you’re ingrained in every little aspect of a project, it makes you partially responsible when a deadline gets missed or a project goes over budget. Your employees recognize this fact and it lowers their accountability. Part of being a manager is delegating tasks to employees and holding them accountable for getting those duties accomplished. When you’re too involved in the day to day work of your employees, you can’t really hold them accountable.
The bottom line is that your need to give your employees space to be creative problem solvers and exercise their abilities to the fullest potential. Only then will your workforce truly be optimized.
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