Business Skills- To Micro Manage Or Not?

In a tough economic environment, managers, like every other employee is under pressure and scrutiny to ensure work gets done

. The situation many managers find themselves in is highly complex, for example some or all of the following:

- fewer people to manage with job losses and cut backs

- shorter deadlines with increased competition for business

- an excess of communications (email, phone calls, voice mail, conference calls, video conference calls, meetings, instant messages and text messages) blurring and confusing leadership and direction

- increased awareness and aspirations of the population in general not always with an associated work ethic

- mobility and home-working reducing the face to face contact between management and team members

- raised expectations of customers demanding better and quicker service and their ability to be "one-click away" from taking their business somewhere else

- legal and regulatory rules governing every aspect of workplace behaviour mushrooming in quantity and complexity with severe consequences for breaches

How can managers respond to this assault to their ability to operate effectively managing and leading their teams to achieve objectives? One approach is to micro-manage down to the last detail every single thing the team is doing but this is neither scalable nor efficient and results in the team feeling they are not trusted to do their jobs. So what to do then?

Management must evolve into a blend of leadership, training, coaching and detailed directional management with each behaviour dynamically adopted determined by the task at hand. We can best describe this with the following examples:

1. Leadership is needed to inspire people, set the high level direction, talk to the previous successes and team strengths, highlight the potential challenges ahead but reinforce the capability of the team to overcome them and set the context and importance of those objectives in a bigger picture. The team is therefore motivated, unified and inspired into the belief that objectives can be accomplished and why they are important

2. Coaching is needed as a one to one process in which the manager and each team member engage regularly to result in the team member themselves acknowledging and taking ownership for their own performance. For example the team member:

- is very clear about his or her own objectives

- acknowledges their own current capabilities and status

- explores different ways they can achieve their objectives

- chooses what to do, by when

3. Training, by contrast to coaching is needed to ensure that the team has the necessary knowledge, skills and exhibits the right behaviours to carry their job roles effectively and efficiently. The range of training methods has expanded from traditional face to face instruction to remote learning using online and other tools which provide more or less instant access to a vast amount of information. Managers need to carefully select the right training media, some of which may actually not involve training but can actually be a set of best practices, or checklists that summarise successful tried and tested approaches to certain tasks.

4. Directional management should be used in a limited form as this is closest to micro-management but it nevertheless serves as a check and balance on precise and detailed activities of a team. Managers, by showing a willingness to carry out some lower level detailed tasks themselves with their teams, are seen to be involved in the detail in a positive way. This also provides the vital "frontline" facts that managers would otherwise need from excessive reporting and detailed questioning of the kind that many team members find unattractive, demoralising and intrusive.

So the manager can operate effectively in this new challenging world by adopting this more dynamic and flexible approach combining the widest range of skills and behaviours.

by: Gen Wright

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