Benefits Of Having A Manager That Does Not Micro-Manage You
Its a widely held belief that employees leave managers and not companies. Your manager is your everyday point of contact, they train you on the job, manage you, give you tasks and projects to work on and oversee, your manager set your objectives and reviews them. Managers are basically at the heart of your employment – the relationship you have with them determines EVERYTHING!
Just like love, if you have never experienced it, you will not know how to receive and rate it. If you have never had a good manager – it becomes hard to rate as to what a good manager is. As a professional growing through the ranks, you learn along the way as to what good management is, once you glued up you will never be caught off-sight, the very sight of a bad manager can put you off, a bad relationship with a manger which usually happens due to micro-management can be traumatic and damn right depressing because you interact with them on a daily.
Below are just a few things that I’ve come to appreciate as a professional from having a manager that does not micro manage me.
1 You get to learn to be self-disciplined
Having someone look over your screen and work constantly creates an employee that only acts when they are being chased around, soon as the cat goes away, your become a mouse and end up not doing anything. We see such individuals at work every day, when the manager is around they always want to be seen to be doing their work – soon as the manager disappears, a totally different ill-disciplined person pops us.
A manager that does not micro manage you allows you the opportunity to build within yourself a habit of forcing yourself to do what is right even when no one is looking and as such, you stain such traits on your DNA and this eventually becomes habit.
2 You become your own person
Micro-managing managers have a tendency of pushing their way of doing things down your throat, there is no one good proven way of doing things. By having a manager that allows you to be YOU at your work, you get to pave your own path in solving problems and as such you end up merging this solutions with your own DNA of doing things – thus you fully utilise your Genius Level and past accumulated experiences that have worked for you.
3 You get credit for the good work you do
Usually micro managers are individuals who were experts at what they used to do before they were assigned to a managerial position – human nature at times gets us to try and relieve those moments where one used to be good as something, such managers do that by making you their little protégés and guinea pigs and get you to do things the way they used to do them – as such whenever such methods are used and they end up working, micro managers end up feeling as that it’s them that made the breakthrough and not you…. Annnnnnd as you would have guessed, they take all the credit for that project or task completion.
4 Lower levels of anxiety
Having someone look over your work every minute creates within high levels of anxiety, you always trying not to mess up, you always try be right and that can never materialise. It’s really bad for your anxiety levels if you constantly having to look over your back to see if someone is watching. Good managers afford you space to be creative and find the solution yourself without having to worry you. Sure you will fail sometimes, but that brings great learnings with it. You learn to get up yourself and dust yourself up and most importantly, you learn to be resilient! Nothing can break you after having gotten up 10 times.
5 A Good healthy relationship with your manager
I personally would be at my wit’s end with a manager that has little faith in my ability to do MY work and constantly tries to impose on me their way of doing things.
A manager that allows you to find your own feet on the other hand is a bliss to have **Insert smiley face**
6 You learn to manage
You learn to manage yourself, your deadlines and also learn to manage your work and projects when given the autonomy to bring the best out of your own abilities. Constantly following a route that has already been paved sometimes leads you to not learning anything. Monkey see monkey do.
7 You get to learn the art of being efficient and not busy
If someone is constantly looking over your shoulder, you most likely are going to always try look busy. Busy is not always efficient. A combination of working smart and hard can be good for your work and work-life-balance; don’t burn yourself out with late hours trying to impress the boss. Focus on results and not working hours.
8 Happiness, Competency, peace of mind and a higher earnings potential
being left alone to do crucial work can be an ego boosting incentive that also helps release endorphins which are the happy hormones in your body. You get to believe in yourself and your abilities. No self-doubts.
Goes without saying that all these benefits contribute to your experience and growth tremendously. You begin to live in the now and what that does is – it channels your trend of thoughts to be more solution focused vs being reactive in your job. All this leads to a more sort after, more value adding employee – this all leads to you being worth more and as such your earning potential also accelerates.
So if you are a manager reading this, I do not mean to impose onto you on how to manage your subordinates – ask them how they’d like to be managed, allow them to do as they say they’ll do and only when you start seeing small cracks do you step in to mentor and guide. Ask yourself if your methods of managing are working and efficient.
If you are a subordinate reading this, do not get mad or impatient with your manager if they micro-manage you, sometimes it might be that it’s all they know. Work hard at earning their trust, but also open a dialogue with them on how you’d like to be managed and explain the benefits you see coming from that arrangement, hell show them this article and many other articles and research that supports my claims.
All the best!
[ABTM id=6634]
