Why is this especially a concern with more senior teams? Because many senior people are often much better able to rise to the occasion of contributing to solving hard problems when the team environment both allows and encourages them to do so; and they are often the most likely to get bent out of shape and experience falling productivity when their manager starts to give detailed input on how to spend each minute of day.

I saw a recent blog post that was nicely on point to this issue, from the PM Alliance. I excerpt it below, but the slightly longer piece is worth the read as well here.

Credit: iStockPhoto.com

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8 Ways to Banish Your Inner Micromanager

By PM Alliance President, April 2, 2011

1 – Stop hovering. If you find yourself peering over a teammate’s shoulder, step back …

2 – Ask fewer questions. That’s right—instead of assuming that you need to request every bit of data you want, you should be relying on your team to keep you informed proactively [and holding them accountable for doing so]…

3 – Delegate more. Micromanagers are famous for giving tasks away without ever really letting go, and sometimes for not giving tasks away at all…

4 – Stick to working hours. Some projects require overtime, but constantly pulling employees’ brains back to work after they’ve gone home is just a variation of hovering…

5 – Empower your team. Are your employees forced to seek approval for every decision, from the big stuff all the way down to day-to-day minutiae? Set up a process that instills responsibility and grants authority based on each staff member’s seniority and experience.

6 – Watch your temper. Getting overly upset or losing your cool with employees is a classic sign of a micromanager. It frequently leads to hovering and incessant questioning, both of which you want to avoid. When you feel something isn’t going well, stop. Take a minute, gather your composure…

7 – Take mistakes in stride. Glitches are the siren song of the micromanager—they make it easy to doubt your team’s abilities, assume you have to do everything yourself, and generally make life miserable for those around you. Remember that mistakes happen to the best of us…

8 – Don’t let your boss bring you down. If your boss is a micromanager (or perhaps just a difficult personality), you may find yourself offloading stress by funneling your frustration and anger into your team. It’s a tough position to be in, but you somehow need to separate the way you’re being treated from how you treat your team…

As I said at the start, this is just an excerpt; the whole article is worth reading at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/project-management-tips/8-ways-to-banish-your-inner-micromanager-45275 BTW, the PMAlliance, Inc. is a project management consulting, project management training and project office development company that helps Fortune 1000 companies improve the execution of their mission-critical projects.

Project management is the combination of art and science working in unison for an ultimate goal. Science is the bringing together all the theory and experience acquired over the years, while art is the way you use and adapt these ideas to suits your situational needs. Many people have all the skills and experience of science, but without the adaptability of art a project manager will not succeed.

To read more, click here.

- Mara Pederson

December 2009