One common issue that afflicts many entrepreneurs, especially in the early days of their business ventures, is the drive to try and constantly micromanage every aspect of the operations of their business.
On the one hand, this is a pretty understandable impulse. If you have invested your blood, sweat, tears, and your money as well into getting your business off the ground, it’s natural that you will want to do everything in your power to ensure that it thrives, and that it follows a direction that you believe in.
All the same, however, there are a large number of ways in which trying to micromanage every element of your business can actually significantly undermine your chances of professional success, while causing various problems along the way.
Here are some reasons why you should avoid micromanaging, and why you should also utilise tools such as inspectpoint.com software that help you to get less “caught in the weeds” on an individual basis.
Because honing in too much on the details can undermine your ability to see the big picture
In his highly acclaimed book, “The Master and His Emissary,” psychologist Iain Gilchrist looks at some compelling evidence that The two hemispheres of the brain are responsible for perceiving the world in radically different ways – although not exactly the ways in which it is normally believed.
One argument that Gilchrist makes is that when we get to involved in trying to view everything in minute detail, we rapidly impair our ability to see the bigger picture, and to deal with things in a way that is healthy, effective, and that accounts for nuance and uncertainty.
Almost by definition, micromanaging is the art of getting “caught in the weeds” as much as possible. The consequence of this is that micromanaging may make you less and less capable of doing the kind of smart management that is actually required from the leader of any company.
Because micromanaging can undermine trust among your team members
Assuming you have employees, or even just work with freelancers and contractors, it will be essential for you to nurture fruitful and mutually supportive working relationships with your team members if you want to give your business the best possible chance of thriving, well avoiding unnecessary drama, as well.
Micromanaging is frequently one of the things that any employee resents the most from their higher-ups within the company, for a variety of different reasons.
For one thing, micromanaging conveys a degree of mistrust and a lack of faith in the abilities of the team member in question to effectively execute the duties. For another thing, and strips away a lot of the creative initiative from the individual being micromanaged.
Step micromanaging, work to nurture the kind of professional environment where you can trust those employed to do the job to a good standard. Of course, review their work from time to time, but don’t constantly hover over them..
Because micromanaging leads to inefficient use of time
One point has to be made about micromanaging, is that it simply tends to lead to an inefficient use of time in the overwhelming majority of cases.
One of the great things about having multiple people working on a particular project, or to achieve the goals of a particular company, is the simple fact that the workload can be divided, and you can get significantly more than 24 “work hours” out of an actual 24-hour period of time.
Of course, however, this pretty much goes right out the window if you’re interrupting everyone’s ability to work autonomously by making yourself an essential part of the workflow and decision-making process on every minor task and detail.
In order to make your business as effective as possible, you should focus on ways to streamline things more and more. In this process is essentially the opposite of micromanaging.
Because micromanaging can prevent external insights from getting in
If you take active steps to ensure that nothing in your business ever gets done without your direct oversight and say so, and there’s a very real risk that you might stifle creativity in all sorts of detrimental ways.
No matter how insightful and sophisticated you may be on a personal basis, no one sees everything, and it’s essential to continually get insight from external sources in order to keep your business endeavours fresh and dynamic.
By allowing other people to exercise some creative freedom, many more external insights will tend to get in.