The Power of Empowerment

As a manager or business owner, you may consider yourself an excellent boss -- you double-check everything, and no mistake, however small, gets past you. At the same time, you may wonder why your staff seem unproductive and lacking in motivation, and why you have such a high staff turnover. This could be because your very thoroughness means you are failing to create a culture of empowerment.

Why People Micromanage

In fact, in double-checking everything, what you are actually doing is micromanaging, and there may be many reasons why you feel the need to do this. It may be a brand new business start-up, and everything is so precarious that you can't afford mistakes. Or you yourself may have an overpowering boss, demanding 100% efficiency from your department.

However, there are often more personal reasons why you may feel the need to micromanage. Some managers have a controlling tendency as part of their personality (aka control freaks). They simply don't entertain the possibility that anyone subordinate to them could possibly do things as well as they can.

Another possible reason for micromanaging is that you suffer from a sense of personal insecurity. Deep down, you lack confidence in your ability to succeed in your management role, and have this constant fear that others will find you out, unless you keep a careful check on everything. You may also worry that you will get blamed by your superiors for any shortcomings in your department. You may even be afraid that a subordinate may actually prove to be better at the job than you are, if given too much freedom to make decisions.

In many cases, it simply boils down to lack of trust. You feel you cannot trust employees or members of your team to do anything without your direct supervision. This often stems from a poor manager-employee relationship, meaning that you believe your employees will short-change you if they possibly can.

How to Recognize Micromanaging

So how do you know if you are guilty of micromanaging? Perhaps you insist that every letter and email must be personally checked by yourself before being sent out. Perhaps every task at every stage of a project has to be approved by you before moving on to the next stage. Perhaps you find yourself constantly hovering around your employees' desks, making sure they are actually at them and not wasting time. Perhaps you monitor their lunch hours and coffee breaks. If any of these is true, you may have to accept that you do indeed micromanage.

Delegating

You may of course believe that you are not guilty of micromanaging, because you delegate tasks. However, even then, it depends exactly how you delegate. Suppose you have a new shipment arriving the next day, and all the storage space is full, so you need to delegate the task of making room. You may conduct an employee out to the warehouse, and point out exactly what items need to be moved, and where they should be moved to. Alternatively, you may say, "We have no space for tomorrow's shipment. Can you sort out this problem for me?"

Culture of Empowerment

The difference between these two approaches is the difference between micromanaging on the one hand, and creating a culture of empowerment on the other. By using the second approach, you allow the employee to use his or her own initiative and creativity. You also give the employee a feeling of responsibility for ensuring the task is done well, through understanding why the task is important.

Empowering employees means allowing them to make decisions related to their areas of responsibility. It means ensuring that they are engaged with the company's strategy and goals, and fully understand how their own role fits in with them, so that they can see exactly why the task they are performing is necessary in this context. This is just as important, if not more so, for employees ranking lower down in the hierarchy. Empowerment also means letting employees make mistakes -- this is the only way they will learn and grow.

On the other hand, if you micromanage, this learning and growth cannot take place. Staff members won't feel any sense of responsibility for their actions or performance, if you are looking over their shoulders all the time. They certainly won't take the initiative to work that extra hour to get a task completed, as they won't have a personal interest in the task. Micromanaging often results in a slow-moving workforce that lacks motivation and is minimally productive.

Benefits of Empowerment

By contrast, research has consistently shown that the best employees are those who take ownership of their work -- that is, they have a stake in the outcome and are able to make decisions about how they carry out the work. This not only means that they are more productive, doing the work faster and more efficiently, but also means that the quality of the work they produce is better. While micromanaging stifles their creativity, empowerment gives their creativity free rein, meaning they can often figure out better ways of doing the job. This freedom of creativity can also lead to an increase in innovation for the company, which all businesses need in order to stay ahead.

Crucially, empowerment also leads to much greater employee satisfaction. This results in a much lower turnover and higher retention rate, and provides more and better options for succession planning in the organization. In addition, it has also been shown to result in a higher level of customer satisfaction, probably because the employees can see that their work makes a difference to the customer, and customer needs become more of a focus for them.

If you don't have a workforce that fits this description, it may be time to take an honest look at your management style. Creating a culture of empowerment can seem hard at first, as it involves letting go and relinquishing control, which could make you feel uneasy and insecure. However, as a reward, you are likely to see improvements in virtually every aspect of your company's performance.