The Tribune

With so many employees now working from home, corporate leaders are becoming concerned that some are not fully engaged in work assignments. As a result, many have resorted to micromanaging their staff by making excessive Zoom and telephone calls.

Micromanagers are everywhere, including across geographic and industry borders. Most do not even realise they are micromanagers. While no one likes to be micromanaged, some executives cannot seem to help themselves. They frustrate, demoralise and demotivate employees, resulting ultimately in company failure.

Here are some of the signs that you might be a micromanager:

• You are never quite satisfied with deliverables. No completed task is quite done to your satisfaction.

• You often feel frustrated because you would have gone about the task differently. You challenge the process that others take to arrive at a destination. You just need a chill pill. The methods that others use might be different or unconventional, but if they allow you to arrive at the same destination then that is just fine.

• You laser in on the details, and take great pride and/or pain in making corrections. You might call it being overly meticulous or just an eye for detail, but it just might be that you are a micromanager nitpicking at everything.

• You constantly want to know where all your team members are, and what they are working on. Having a tracking device on every company vehicle, in every company phone and monitoring every move your team members make, is quite unhealthy.

• You ask for numerous updates on where things stand. Any responsible manager should know what is going on in the grand scheme of things, but check-ins which become too frequent are unnecessary and counter-productive.

• You prefer to be carbon copied on everything. Just the thought that you do not know every detail of what, and how, your team members carried out a task frustrates you. You get all caught up in the weeds, oftentimes majoring in the minors.

• You get far too involved in the approval processes and become the bottleneck, resulting in unnecessary delays. Your obsession with the thought that no one below your level can see the big picture might be the sign that you are a neurotic micromanager.

Just as no one wants to be micromanaged, no one wants to be the much-abhorred micromanager. But with a commitment to focus on the big picture and on motivating your employees, you can redirect your efforts to be the most effective manager you can be.

NB: Ian R Ferguson is a talent management and organisational development consultant, having completed graduate studies with regional and international universities. He has served organsations, both locally and globally, providing relevant solutions to their business growth and development issues. He may be contacted at tcconsultants@coralwave.com.