Micromanaging can trap any professional, but project managers are particularly susceptible due to the nature of their work. While making sure details are buttoned down, project managers must be careful not to do so in a way that exasperates the staff. Ironically, micromanagement usually produces less precision, because team members become conditioned to distrust their own judgment and wait for someone else to make decisions. Here, then, are a few ways to loosen the reins and manage more effectively.
Communicate the Big Picture
Team members work confidently and accurately when they have context. Knowing what to do is much easier when someone has a grasp of the project's purpose and objectives. Without such a grasp, tactical, day-to-day decisions force team members either to risk looking foolish by asking an inordinate number of questions, or to take the initiative and base decisions on their own experience and judgment, which may or may not be consistent with project strategy.
Connect the Dots
An effective project kickoff communicates the big picture to every participant, but equally important is explaining how each team member's work contributes to the project's success and affects the ability of other team members to get their jobs done properly. Besides the obvious morale benefit, connecting the dots provides the staff with more context-context that enables them to know what to do and how to do it.
To improve the communication between your team members and provide detailed explanation of each project activities, presented in a visually powerful Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), new best practice of most project managers is using Mind Mapping software like iMindQ.
Micro Focus
Great mangers are always looking for ways to be even better. They ask team members questions such as:
- Do you have everything you need from me to get your work done?
- Do you have questions about any aspect of the project?
- Am I going into too much detail? Not enough detail?
- Where are you hung up? What isn't going smoothly?
Interaction built around these questions brings the focus where it belongs-on bottlenecks and other inefficiencies. Micromanagement attacks all details indiscriminately, which wastes time and energy. Micro-focused management ignores the 80% that is working properly in order to free up time to concentrate fully on the 20% that requires adjustment or a complete overhaul.
Spot Check
While soliciting input as outlined above is very helpful, relying totally on team member input to manage a project is risky, because team members may not be aware of mistakes they are making or when they are veering off track. For these reasons, systematic spot-checking, based on the project manager's sense of where possible problems are likely to crop up, is an excellent alternative to micromanaging every potential problem.
Pick Your Battles
Not every project element needs to be executed to perfection for the project to succeed. If that were so, no project would ever succeed; people being people, mistakes are inevitable. The real challenge for project managers is to discern which problems need fixing and which don't. Doing this effectively requires experience, judgment, common sense and observation.
The last point, observation, is worth elaboration. Micromanagers often have an almost compulsive need to fix things immediately. But often, a wiser course is to let things play out a little bit. A person may not be executing a task the way the PM would do it, but perhaps that way works. Perhaps it works better! Continuous process improvement demands a degree of experimentation; otherwise, processes become rigid and unable to adapt to the changing environments that are inevitable in any business.
The bottom line for avoiding the pitfalls of micromanagement: Be flexible, focused, forgiving, inquisitive and patient. That's a fairly long list, but adding these tools to your skill set will produce better results and stronger, more adaptable teams.