The days of long-term strategies and annual budgets and Balanced Scorecards being the Objectives and KPIs we give teams are coming to an end. Companies and their employees are having to realign their expectations of each other, learn new skills and new ways of working. 

The latest performance management mantras contain words like goal clarity, trust, empowerment, autonomy, and agility. On the face of it these are all obviously good things to have given the pace of change and the need for competitiveness. But they do come with a transformational and monitoring overhead.

To transform, managers need to learn new and better ways of managing and up-skills in areas like creating and tracking goals. For example, by adopting the increasingly popular Objectives and Key Results framework that has goal clarity, ambition, transparency and agility as its cornerstones. 

If you’re offering more trust and autonomy, and wanting more agility, you need to be able to step back. You can’t be a micromanager, you can’t be the dominant voice in the room, even if you know all of the answers. You need to hone your listening, questioning and coaching skills. You need to not only encourage ambition, but make it safe to fail. An alien concept for some, but there are good reasons as to why you need this to be part of your managers toolkit. 

A study from MIT and followed up by Google found that the top predictor of hyper-performing teams was Psychological Safety. In fact teams that have it, completely outperformed those that didn’t. And when combined with goal, role and execution plan clarity you had performance rocketfuel.

So what are the practicalities of empowerment? Perhaps the first thing to understand is that it’s not leaving the people you manage alone to make decisions. It means being in the middle of the action to catch them if they fall, coach and inspire. 

McKinsey research found that organizations, where leaders empower others through coaching, were four times more likely to make fast, good decisions and outperform their industry peers.

A Gallop article outlined 9 signs of micromanaging in teams and organizations:

1. Boss-obsessed rather than customer-obsessed
2. Acceptance of less-than-best work to pander to leadership
3. Every conversation with the boss feels like a performance review
4. Every decision must be approved by the manager
5. Constant project bottlenecks due to excessive meetings, gatekeeping and stakeholders
6. Employees are afraid to share their opinions
7. A lack of new leaders coming up through the ranks
8. Quick turnover of talented experts
9. Stifled creativity, innovation and agility

There are a lot of obviously undesirable behaviors in the list. The cost of micromanagement vs a more empowered approach to management can not be understated. The cost of losing an employee is estimated at between $30,000 and $45,000 alone, not to mention the cost of lower levels of productivity and achievement.

We need a plan that helps managers be more empowering 

If you are or know a micromanager, it will be obvious to you that demanding frequent updates, keeping track of all of the details, as well as getting involved and not delegating, not sharing authority, as well as being secretive, is exhausting and really stressful. That stress is also then shared amongst the team – a driver of reduced levels of effort and poor staff retention.

So here is an 8 step action plan that reduces and eliminates micromanagement and empowers employees to achieve great things, without ever losing control. 

• Make empowerment cultural, which means it’s how everyone behaves and acts without thinking about it, it’s just how the company works, which means defining what behaviors you want, getting a baseline and then planning improvements.
  
• Give managers clear guidance, support, tools and technology they need to do their jobs well. Don’t assume that everyone can manage in the ways you want. Not everyone is born a great manager.
  
• Move from long top-down planning cycles to shorter quarterly planning cycles that involve your teams in deciding and achieving goals.
  
• Educate managers and their teams on how to set and manage goals using frameworks like OKR. This includes creating goals with clear measurable outcomes and in doing so connect desired results with hard work.
  
• Help managers define clear roles and responsibilities and provide guidance on who can make decisions and how they can be made – use the jobs-to-be-done and RACI matrix as tools for working who is accountable for what and who is a collaborator.
  
• Coach managers to be better coaches by developing skills like Active Listening and how to have difficult conversations and feel safe in doing so.
  
• Set the cadence from the top that ensures everyone communicates well and often – empowered agile ways of working rely on regular communications with 1-on-1’s and weekly team meetings being scheduled to share plan, progress and resolve problems.
  
• Reward managers for developing the behaviors you’re looking for like ‘psychological safety’, ambition, autonomy. Making their own performance less about them and more about how their team is behaving and performing.

If you are a manager

Don’t worry, we’re all on a journey of improvement so make being a great manager one of your objectives. Some general tips if you want to become better at coaching would include:

• Be positive and the value the work being done and accomplishments
• Make sure everyone is heard and not ignored by making time for 1-on-1s
• Lead by example, work hard, share your challenges and collaborate on solutions
• Don’t punish failure, look for the learnings, reset and go again
• If things get heated, be the calming force, find resolution
• Develop Active Listening skills by talking less, make eye contact, mirror body language, confirm what you heard was correct
• Find a mentor you know is a great manager

Managed by a micromanager? You can help them as well!

Another approach is for an employee to help their bosses let go. Liz Wiseman calls people who control, dictate and micromanage – ‘Diminishers’ in her book Multipliers. The managers that amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. If you’ve not read Multipliers, it’s a great read. On her website, you’ll find some good advice including tips for people with a controlling manager.

Committing to change

Pretty much everything I’ve shared involves change, and some of us are much more accepting of new ideas and ways of doing things than others. Here are 5 really good tips for anyone wanting to commit to evolving how your company is managed. Starting with preparing well and expecting resistance. 

There is obviously a lot to learn, discuss and do. What has been shared here is about creating long-term sustainable advantage, a great culture that can adapt and excel, and a happy, adaptive and productive workforce that would not hesitate to recommend you to their friends and family. In an increasingly competitive world where everyone wants to hire the best talent, and employees want to research the best employers via places like ‘glassdoor’, this is more necessary than ever.

About the Author: Matt Roberts is the founder of the OKR and Performance Management software company ZOKRI. They have a mission to help companies, leaders, managers and employees thrive.