How to Stop Micromanaging Your Team
Tips from our Teams at Work community & me on how to delegate and make sure your team can execute and hit the mark.
Hi there,
If you ever delegated a task, then you know the tingling feeling … “will this go well?”. As a founder, I often feel the margin for error on many tasks in a startup is small since time is always limited. However, enabling your team to make mistakes is crucial to your team’s success. For me, it’s still hard to delegate, so I asked in our community which frameworks people use and which tips they have.
My top picks:
👉 How to Stop Micromanaging Your Team - a piece our team helped pull together featuring a framework that enables you to delegate even to junior team members or engage people on your team that disengaged. Featured on The Startup, Medium.
Orrrr….if you prefer to 📽 watch it, here is the Youtube version of it:
Real advice, based on real-life experience:
🤓 Fernando Duarte, Director of Support at Ordway:
You first need to understand the difference between delegation and the assignment of tasks. Delegation requires empowering the person you are delegating to. A good mindset is to look at delegation as an opportunity to improve the skills of the recipient.
I believe at the beginning people delegate when forced to by workload, and start by delegating those tasks they see as menial. As they mature in the delegation mindset and see the results, they are keen to delegating more important/interesting tasks. At full maturity, they tend to delegate based on how the task will benefit the team overall and the individual.
I'd venture to say that an important part of delegating is empowering the person. You should make part of the process discussing how the task fits within their priorities and empower them to reprioritize what's on their plate.
🤓 Javier Gutierrez Boronat, M.Sc. FFM, Agile Coach and Business Designer
I came years ago across reading the classic "The seven habits of highly effective people", from Stephen Covey, to his 5 steps for an effective delegation:
Clear the wished results/expectations and develop a common understanding
If applicable: conditions, lesson learned, Do's & Don't (what's ok and what's not)
Clear available resources
Evaluation Criteria: What - when?
Explain the consequences of the evaluation (positives & negatives: if - then)
Number 1 is the most difficult, 2 and 3 is often forgotten, and 4 and 5 are often addressed too late.
Step 2 is more about giving context, and less about telling or giving limiting instructions.
And overall (very important! and as very well expressed by Fernando):
The delegation is intended to increase the overall production capacity (your own and the group's).
"Trust [signaled by delegation] is the best motivational tool. But it requires time and patience (to achieve the training/development of the delegate)."
Implemented well, delegation is an investment to increase your own productivity (effectiveness)!
I have used it again and again, and I think it works quite well!
Hope it helps!
🤓 Sascha Brossmann, Partner & CPO at acework
Here are some ideas to start with:
Get the monkey off the shoulder ( http://kylenitch.com/monkeymanagement/)
Move from project/task management to Kanban: establish the pull principle (https://www.mudamasters.com/en/lean-production-theory/pull-principe-production-office-life), make the work visible for everyone, stack rank priorities, and limit WIP.
Understand that delegation isn't about reducing your workload but about enabling someone to do it who is better suited than yourself. As an entrepreneur, you should work on the business, not in the business.
Hence, if they need to teach the team how to get new leads they've moved the responsibility to the wrong place => Hire someone who is better than you at it.
DON'T DELEGATE TASKS! Delegate OUTCOMES, manage expectations about results, quality, time etc. and then get out of the way. Ideally, don't delegate at all, just align on what needs to be done and in which order and then let people pull the work (see above).
Hire a virtual assistant for the busywork or bench/drop the busywork.
Tips from the Bunch AI coach:
Check out The Remote Briefing Template by Daglar Cizmeci, Multi-exit Entrepreneur, MIT Grad and Investor:
Have a great week,
Darja