Trust Your Employees? Learn How To Get Out Of Their Way

Have you ever worked a job where you’ve been endlessly micromanaged? It’s never a nice feeling, because even the work you’re proud of comes under repeated questioning, and before long, you begin to worry about your best work. It’s not a good way to flourish, especially when you know you are good at what you do.

Of course, there is some responsibility on the part of the employee to advocate for themselves and their ideas. Sometimes, the micromanagement isn’t even vicious or harsh; it’s just how the business is run. For this reason, as a business owner, it’s wise to trust your employees as much as you can, not just on a personal level, but also as a focused and attentive element of how you systemize people management.

In This Article:

How to Empower Your Employees to Do Their Jobs

A key element of leading is giving your employees the resources they need to effectively do their jobs. Here are a few things you can do to empower your employees, then get out of their way.

Equip Them with the Right Tools

Micromanagement has a funny way of creeping in when people don’t have what they need to do the job, because if the process is messy, the tools are out of date, or the workflow only makes sense to the person who designed it five years ago and then left, it doesn’t take long before someone steps in to manage every little step. That’s a bad treatment for an issue that didn’t have to exist, though.

The better option is to take a step back and actually look at the setup. Make sure the software being used actually fits the job. Team members aren’t spending more time trying to figure out how to submit something than actually creating it. For instance, if your operation involves creative or production-heavy work, finding ways to automate design operations can help your designers design with minimal administrative effort. 

Ensure Sustainable Feedback Measures

It’s very easy to pay lip service to feedback but to never really engage with its virtues. The goal isn’t to remove feedback entirely, obviously. It just has to come from the right place, and more importantly, it needs to have somewhere to go. That might be best expressed through scheduled review cycles that people can prepare for, or more focused team-wide catchups that invite discussion instead of assigning blame if something’s gone wrong. What matters is that you make space for feedback without making it the only voice in the room, keep it regular, and yes, make those “action items” to actually benefit as a result.

Set Up Open, Flexible Structures Within Deadlines

The last thing anyone wants is a bottleneck caused by someone waiting for a sign-off that was never actually needed, or worse, chasing down approval just to make a small tweak that could have been handled on the fly. We tend to understand bureaucracy like this in government but it can happen in corporations easily too.

Give your staff the freedom to work on what they need to if they have any creative capacity in their role. Deadlines should be real, not arbitrary, but you can still provide them the room to work with flexibility within that. It’s the kind of setup that lets people move with intention and take initiative, because they know where the boundaries are, and more importantly, they trust that they have the room to work within them.

In short–give your people the right tools, feedback, and structure, and then step aside so they can get to work.