12 Signs That Strongly Suggest You’re a Micromanager

Micromanagement takes place whenever a manager intends to exercise excessive control over the working process. Typical micromanagers delegate work and yet want to be closely involved with every minute aspect of the work done. This often leads to frustration and delays in work across the team. If there is a general opinion amongst your employees that you are micromanaging, it is a given that your leadership is trouble and the work product is going to be negatively impacted. To stay away from micromanaging, it is important that you select the right team members whom you can delegate tasks effectively so that you can ease your control over your business process.

Signs That Indicate You May be Micromanaging

Many times people become micromanagers without even having an awareness about it. The reason for this is that there is actually a very thin line that exists between a manager who wishes his or her team to produce the best possible outcome and eventually succumbing to micromanagement.

Here are some signals that you can look out for to identify when you may unknowingly cross the line of micromanagement:

1. You have an unreasonable high turnover in your team.
2. Your team avoids getting into one-on-one conversations with you or avoids you in general.
3. You have more work on your plate than you can manage because you are unable to delegate work effectively.
4. You have the habit of assigning work and then taking it back because you feel the work is not being done the way you would want it to be done.
5. You instruct your team exactly how you wish things to be done and do not leave any scope for others to take the initiative.
6. You have the habit of taking on a managerial role even when the project already has a project manager.
7. You are unable to meet project deadlines as you get too much involved in the details.
8. You have this habit of wanting to know what everyone else is doing all the time.
9. You don’t allow your team members to share their ideas, speak to one another, or even to communicate with clients.
10. You act as the bottleneck all the time since everyone in the team always waits for your approval on any and everything.
11. You have the habit of questioning everything under the sky right from the processes followed to accomplish the work, the work that has been completed, and the proposed next steps in every status meeting.
12. You have a strong belief that if you wish something to be done properly, you have to do it yourself.

If you feel that most of the sign resonate with you, then you are probably a micromanager. If you ask if it matters, then the answer is very much a ‘yes.’

Impact of Micromanagement on Your Business

If you are unable to gauge the damage caused by micromanagement, here are a couple of points to raise your awareness:

• Micromanagement indicates that you do not trust your team or even respect their work.
• Micromanagement takes away the sense of ownership from your team members in their work.
• Micromanagement slows you down as you will never have sufficient time to plan and look ahead and hence the growth of your business is bound to suffer.
• Micromanagement leads to re-work which wastes time and makes your team members lose their self-confidence and their ability to do the job well.
• Micromanagement frustrates your team and makes them resentful.
• Micromanagement often leads to procrastination and as a result causes time management disasters.
• Micromanagement prevents your team members from nurturing and developing new skills and knowledge as they are bound to work autonomously.

If you are someone who can delegate work effectively, then you are on the right track. However, once any of the above micromanagement tendencies creep in, you may just need to stop and check yourself; else you go back to your old state of doing every single thing on your own which isn’t an option.

The positive news is that you can break the micromanagement habit and become a better leader. But you need to be mentally prepared to break this mindset of micromanaging before you cause irreparable damage to your business and self.