The impact of micromanagement on your team

When leaders don’t place trust in their team, they will always try to control the work. This constant need to monitor every step of a project inevitably leads to a big dip in team performance, and a lack of confidence in the leader.

Many leaders think that micromanagement hikes up the team performance. Here’s an example to see how the success of the team has an impact due to this.

Meet Albert.

Albert has maintained an excellent record as a leader and has a strong leadership following. However, with recent transformation initiatives in the organization, his team’s performance suffered. Albert received a warning from the CEO because of this.

This crushed Albert. He was the star leader. This incident shook him and he wanted to prove it himself.

Albert developed a short-term plan to become more actively involved with his team.

He put into place a check-in meeting twice-a-day for each team member. He would review their work and then tell them exactly what to focus on and how to do it until the next meeting. He even criticized some of his team members publicly and made statements such as “Just do what I ask you to do.”

As this continued, his team stopped seeking solutions themselves. They were no longer self-sufficient. They waited and depended on him for everything.

Albert was no longer teaching and leading them, which in turn helps build team growth. He was ordering them. His team was no longer learning or evolving in this process.

He was over allocating his critical time, energy, talent, and patience in tasks which required less of his intervention. Because the team was dependent on him, they were terrified of making mistakes. This was leading to more absences, tardiness, attrition, decreased engagement, and low employee satisfaction.

The morale and positive culture that Albert’s team previously had, started to plummet. The decreased morale levels further reduced the team performance.

Albert never understood how his micromanagement style was affecting the team to stop it. As the decline in team performance continued, he lost trust in his team, and they lost trust in Albert less as their leader.

Are you following a leadership trait like Albert? Micromanaging your team is never an answer to increase your team’s performance. Give each person in your team room to experiment, make mistakes, learn from them, and grow. This will equip them with more confidence, more self-sufficient at work, and contribute more to the team.