RM Online - Micromanagement

As a business owner, do you find yourself hanging out at the front counter, checking up on your employees, when you should be building a business plan? Hovering around the workbench instead of reading up on the latest new products? Listening to employees' telephone conversations instead of keeping tabs on your competitors? Does your reluctance to delegate the small details of your operations result in frustrated employees and a worn-out owner? If so, you may be a micromanager.

It's natural for business owners to want to keep a hand in every part of the daily operations - but doing so jeopardizes their employees' job satisfaction, their own sanity and, ultimately, the future of the company.

You need to delegate day-to-day operations to make time to keep up on industry news, go to conventions and plan for the future. The most immediate danger is not some slipup an employee might make - it's neglecting these critical management functions. "People who micromanage are not doing strategic planning. They miss the big picture," says Aldonna Ambler, president and CEO of Ambler Growth Strategy Consultants in Cherry Hill, N.J. "They're so busy doing the small things they don't notice that the result isn't what they want."

Richard Louis, president of AlbanyNet, an Internet service provider in Albany, N.Y., and recipient of the Small Business Association's regional Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1996, spent so much time trying to manage all aspects of his business that he began to lose sight of what was going on in the industry.

"I was still doing the things I hired other people to do," he says. "I wanted to have my hands in everything."

Louis tells how an unlikely mentor helped him give up micromanaging: "A certain competitor would call me to tell me news in the industry. That's when I realized I was getting out of touch. Now I teach my employees how to do something and let them do it themselves the next time. They learn to do it and I can concentrate on running the business."

Burnout is another risk for the micromanager. Carla Itzkowich, self-professed "recovering micromanager" and president of International Contact, a multi-language communications agency in Oakland, Calif., is intimately familiar with this problem. Before dashing out of her office to deal with one of her several hundred outside vendors, she confesses, "Every day I get upset and stressed out. My goal is to find alternatives with technology to take away some of the stress, but it takes a lot of energy to put it together."

Employees are the front-line victims of micromanagement. There's no room for advancement because the owner won't relinquish responsibilities, and the resentment employees feel when they are not given free rein to do their own jobs results in high turnover. Says Carla Itzkowich, "At any one time I always have job openings. The end result of poor delegation is that you're continually looking to reorganize."

Owners micromanage because they're afraid that something will go wrong - but what the client sees is that the owner doesn't consider his employees competent.

"What's the message to the clients if the owner has to go over all his contracts with a fine-tooth comb?" asks Karl Weidner, owner of Small Business Growth Consultants in Cincinnati. "The whole food chain is endangered because you haven't delegated, trained employees and let them go."

Fred Chittenden, DDS, owner of Lake Stevens Dental Clinic in Lake Stevens, Wash., sums it up perfectly: "A business is a lot like a garden. Individual plants can't grow to their full potential if they are shaded from the sun by the ever-present shadow of the gardener."

A new business owner may lack an understanding of what kind of employee the company needs. "There's a lot of micromanagement in small companies because that's how they started," says Karl Weidner. "When you start a business you have to know something about everything. Micromanagement is good for the first part of the learning curve, but it shouldn't continue after the first six months."

Julie Koch is the owner of Elegant Additions, a showroom for decorative plumbing, hardware and accessories in Houston. "In the beginning I didn't know what kind of workers I needed," she recalls. "I ended up taking jobs back and doing them myself because some employees didn't understand the mission."

Now, more than 10 years later and in the first stages of taking the business national, Koch is well beyond the micromanagement that comes with the learning curve. "As I matured with the business it became clear what kind of employees I needed," she says. "Now I hire based on whether people have the skills my business requires."

Some lucky owners have businesses that expand so fast they don't have a chance to make plans to accommodate their growth. So they quickly hire low-cost, inexperienced workers to deal with the increase in business - and micromanage them. This is uneconomical in terms of both time and money, and takes the owner away from running the business.

"I know about the principles of management that say empower the people, and I know the effects of not doing that are detrimental," says Itzkowich. "But it's a Catch-22, because the people I can afford right now don't have the skill set to produce the results that I need. For example, right now we're looking for a network administrator. I can't possibly afford that, so I'll have to get someone at a lower level and micromanage him."

On the contrary, according to Ambler, this approach can actually lose money. "Hiring someone with aptitude costs a bit more, but can make your company much more money," she says. "Hire the best people you can find - they'll drive the business larger." Another bonus to hiring skilled employees is that the owner can benefit from the ideas and knowledge they bring to the job.

When it comes to dealing with micromanagement,

Anita Brattina's experience is the proverbial "rags to riches" story. Brattina is the founder and president of Direct Response Marketing in Pittsburgh and author of Diary of a Small Business Owner (AMACOM, $21.95). When she founded Direct Response Marketing, Brattina lacked confidence in her ability to attract experienced employees and became mired in a swamp of micromanagement.

"A lack of confidence makes you want to check and recheck and explain things," she says.

Since then Brattina has built Direct Response Marketing into a successful 70-employee business and has fully stepped into the CEO position, delegating day-to-day tasks to well-trained employees. How did she do it?

"It's vision that gets you out of the prison of micromanagement," she says. "You need to have a clear picture of what the company will look like so many years from now, how many employees, how many customers, what kind of equipment and space, and what are you doing in that space? This makes it easier to delegate."

Getting the big picture can help entrepreneurs hire the right employees so that they're not forced to micromanage. "Once I had a picture of where I wanted to be, Page 56 From Page 54 it was easier to hire the right people," says Brattina. "And it's easier to attract people because you can tell them where your company is going."

H. Cratin III is president and CEO of Media Source, a communications consulting firm in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. Cratin has the perspective of someone who's operated a small business as well as run a communications consulting firm - and as such he's both struggled with micromanagement himself and helped other companies overcome the same problem. "When I had my video production company, I wrote a policy manual. It helped me let go because it was a guide on how to handle the small things. This will save you months of growth because you can spend less time micromanaging these issues." Now he tells his clients the importance of systems of measurement in overcoming micromanagement.

"You keep checking everything - but how do you know what's right or wrong if you have no measurements or policies to go by? Plans and measurements give you guidelines and boundaries so you don't let yourself be spread too thin."

That inevitable encounter with micromanagement can be turned to the owner's advantage, if he/she gleans out its positives and rejects its negatives. CityStaff, an employee service in Washington, D.C., which began operation in May 1997 under the ownership of Judy Chudars, is a case in point. Chudars translates micromanagement into a hands-on approach to develop client trust and to avoid turning her position into an "ivory tower" as more employees are brought on. "I'll train my employees to be the ones clients trust," she says. "but I'll never not be a presence to clients."

There is no quick fix for micromanagement. The individual owner has to decide how micromanagement is affecting the company, where he/she wants the company to go and what to do about it. "Look at the real problem instead of obsessing about the symptoms," advises Brattina.

The bottom line is that the owner cannot afford to be distracted from the running of the business to micromanage employees who should be able to do what they are paid to do. The time wasted on this hand-holding could be used to study the competition or research financing.

And your employees will appreciate the chance to help their company grow.