Attention Managers! Are You Losing Control of Your Teams?

As a founding executive/senior manager for a startup or expansion stage company, it’s impossible not to worry about the day-to-day operations of the business and the performance of your team.

But it can also be a fine line to walk.

If you become a micromanager, you run the risk of losing control of your team altogether.  Does this sound counterintuitive? It is.

The key is to lead your employees, and to manage processes, but not people.

But the opposite approach seems to be an increasing problem among startup and expansion stage businesses, says management consultant Cliff Hurst in a guest post for Customer Think. All too often, employees are over-managed and under-led.

Hurst believes that true leaders establish a vision and mission for their company and then blaze the path that they want their team to follow. That sort of leadership will inspire good employees, who will then be self-motivated to excel. And, ultimately, that’s the kind of approach that creates a culture of innovation and turns good companies into great ones.

So, what kind of manager are you?

The HR Specialist published a simple questionnaire that you can take to confirm where you fall on its micromanagement scale. If you’re guilty of over-managing and under-leading, it’s critical that you address the problem before it devastates your employee retention.

Going back to Hurst’s post, the micromanagement issue stems from two generations of leaders who whole-heartedly adopted the adage, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Of course, there are some things that senior leaders should be measuring and managing. Those “things” are processes, not people.

At expansion stage companies, every role is critical to the business’s success. So, it’s understandable that managers may feel increased pressure to make sure that each person they oversee is productive. But companies can experience major issues if managers – who have their own responsibilities and expectations – are attempting to measure and control their employees.

The high cost of over-managing

In a guest article for BNET, Steve Tobak writes that micromanagers and control-happy executives can actually hold a company back from its ability to scale.

Their lack of trust, poor perspective, and obsession with minutiae can result in an organization that spends far too much time on small stuff. That, of course, takes away from time that senior management could use to design business growth strategies that propel the company forward.

Then, there’s the impact of employee disengagement, lost productivity, and high staff turnover.

That last one can be particularly damaging. According to PayScale’s Compensation Today blog, various studies have shown that it can cost a company anywhere from 25 percent (entry-level staff member) to 250 percent (senior executive or sales positions) of a departing employee’s salary to replace them.

PayScale suggests that there are six primary tangible costs to count on:

• Separation processing costs
• Replacement hiring costs
• Costs to train new hires
• Costs of lost productivity

Then there are the intangible costs, which can include low morale, the influence of the disgruntled employee on their coworkers, and any blow to the company’s reputation among potential future employees.

Any way you look at it (regardless of what your actual cost ends up being), employee turnover can be crippling.

Liberate your employees

In order for a business to grow, its employees need to feel free from the constraints that keep them from doing the best job possible. They need to be liberated from the burdensome controls and bureaucratic red tape that drain the energy out of their work.

True leaders empower their employees. That culture will foster an environment that encourages them to take pride in their work and put their best foot forward every day. As simple as it seems, leaders need to encourage and allow their employees to manage themselves if they hope to retain them.

We all want to help our companies succeed. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, freeing your employees from your grasp will likely help them – and the business – prosper.

Have you dealt with this issue in the past? If you have tips on how to overcome this growing issue, please feel free to share them.