In my last few blog posts, I’ve talked about managing employees, employee turnover and company culture. When it comes to all three of those topics, micromanagement often comes up in discussions. While micromanagement often is talked about as a negative approach to management, sometimes it’s necessary. Here are a few examples of when micromanaging is a good thing.

1. New Employees: Even though your new hire has a ton of experience, they will need guidance and support while they learn how you and your company operate. When it comes to new employees, you should be training them on how to do their work, not doing it for them. If you don’t train them on how to do it, they’ll never be able to handle tasks on their own.
2. New Processes: Are you changing some processes for your team? Are you trying something new that hasn’t been done before? In that case, it’s “all-hands-on-deck.” Attention to detail and being extremely thorough will be a great benefit to making sure your new process is successful.
3. Lack of Progress: Did you delegate a project to one of your team members/employees and the project still isn’t complete? It’s important to ask what’s going on. If the project seems to be lingering, you need to find out the status and why results aren’t happening. Nagging employees until they are miserable is bad, but so is thinking too much about strategy and not enough about implementation.
4. Poor Results: Your project didn’t go as planned. The reason could’ve been poor planning, poor training or a number of countless reasons. Regardless, you need to turn things around! Carefully investigate the reason behind the mistakes, work to resolve them and implement strategies to make sure they don’t happen again. You don’t want to nag or belittle your employees, but you do want to take an active role in trying to investigate and resolve the problem.

Now that you know when micromanaging is necessary, you need to learn how to make sure this management style is temporary. In my next blog, I’ll discuss tips on how to better delegate to your employees.