Is your micromanagement driving your team away?

How micromanagers can manage their teams better

From the moment you wake up, you feel the weight of ensuring everything in your team runs smoothly, convinced that only your constant oversight can keep things on track. Every task feels like a potential disaster if you’re not directly involved. 

While you might tell yourself this is the best way to ensure success, it often leaves you feeling drained, overwhelmed, and stretched too thin.

Deep down, you’re aware that your behavior might be rooted in insecurity or a fear of failure. You feel immense pressure to meet high expectations—whether from your superiors, your team, or even yourself. We see you, and we understand. That’s why we’re here to help you spot signs you’re a micromanager, how it can be affecting your team and how you can improve.

How do you know if you’re a micromanager?

Pallavi Rajankar, a Counseling Psychologist says, “A lot of times, micromanagement, in relationships or in the workplace comes from trust issues. In the workplace it’s because when the person started out, they weren’t given the space to do anything, and so they start repeating the same behavior. They might have also been constantly let down before, and they become very protective of their work.

Micromanagement can also stem from deep-seated personal issues. When the person wasn’t given proper care in childhood by their primary caregivers, they feel the need to become hyper-independent. They also feel like they can’t trust anyone, so they start doing everything themselves.”

You’re always on calls every second of the day, even when you have a big team

Imagine having a large team, but still hopping on every single meeting, having to approve every file, proposal, email, requisition email and just about everything else. Having a meeting every second of the day, even if someone from your team volunteers to help out is a clear sign of micromanaging. It feels like you’re always underwater. You feel suffocated but you’re also holding onto something tightly.

It goes without saying that if you have a team you need to be able to take a step back and support them as they work. When you’re in every single meeting it starts putting a little bit of pressure on your team members. 

You’re closely observing your team to catch them off-guard

You regularly provide employees with highly detailed task assignments with almost no room for individual interpretation or autonomy. While your intention might be to ensure everything runs smoothly, your constant surveillance can come across as mistrust. Your team feels like they’re always being watched, which can make them anxious and overly cautious. Instead of fostering accountability and growth, you may be unintentionally stifling their confidence. 

You tend to jump the gun and give unsolicited feedback

You often provide feedback without waiting for your team to ask for it or even complete their work. You might see this as being proactive, but to your employees, it can feel intrusive and discouraging. They might feel like they’re never trusted to finish a task without intervention. You risk interrupting their workflow and undermining their ability to develop their problem-solving skills. 

You set unrealistic expectations and deadlines without considering the human doing the work

You often set ambitious goals and tight deadlines, believing this will push your team to perform at their best. While striving for high standards is admirable, you might overlook the human limitations of your employees. When workloads become overwhelming or deadlines feel impossible, your team starts to burn out.

Your team is constantly telling you they have more bandwidth

Your team comes to you with frequent requests to do more for you, but you keep dodging the request saying ‘I’ll let you know’. When this happens frequently, your employees start feeling like you don’t trust them. This can be very demoralizing for a team member when you don’t take them up on what they said. Also, this can be worse if the people coming to ask for tasks are high-performers and have a lot of capacity to do more. They can see right through it. 

What happens to people working with a micromanager?

Chieh Huang, founder of Boxed.com says, “Do you remember ever having to work and get something done with someone watching your every move? And then, of course, the moment you are in charge, you do exactly the same thing. Why does this happen? Everyone starts at the bottom when they start working, and as you perform better and rise up your rank, you lose sight of the final product, or the end result, and you only manage the people who are responsible for it. This is where your doubts, lack of control, and mistrust come in.”

This excessive control, close scrutiny, and frequent intervention in the tasks, responsibilities, and decisions of subordinates is very detrimental to employees’ autonomy, and growth. It’s a very prominent management style today, but it leaves no room for innovation or flexibility. Knowingly, or unknowingly, you tend to shoot down any attempts your employees make to innovate because you adhere to the ‘my way, or the highway’ policy strictly. 

Your employee engagement drops sharply

Micromanaging effectively diminishes your employees’ sense of autonomy, ownership, and satisfaction. Your people would be more disengaged than ever and can be frustrated big time. This can very demotivating for the team. 

Employees stop coming to you with creative ideas

You might have the right intentions when you tell your team every single thing about every single task. It may seem supportive to you, but if you are in every conversation, watching over your every move and correcting every word you say, people don’t want to share ideas anymore. They fear you’ll simply brush off the ideas they bring in. They’d feel like they can’t grow and express themselves.

Your team struggles to make decisions 

Pallavi Rajankar, a Counseling Psychologist says, “If you’re an adult and you’re holding a job, you need to be autonomous. We crave autonomy as adults. When you, as a micromanager take away this autonomy, people are going to feel slighted. It can have a severe impact on employees’ self-esteem.”

Every single decision for your team and function has to go through you, and if it doesn’t, you become fidgety. You compulsively have to give it a thumbs-up and sign off. You don’t have to verbally ask for decisions to be made with your input, but they still do. Whenever you shoot down any decision your team makes, they get frustrated first but later on stop caring and simply bring the decision to your table. They don’t feel empowered, and it’s going to prevent people from being proactive.

Your team isn’t able to work effectively

You don’t allow your people to build effective relationships with clients and stakeholders (internal and external). If you’re in a small business, your people don’t get to build a relationship with the client. The client is always going to go through you to get to your team member, which means work is stalled, and decisions take time to be taken. 

Employees stay away from work more often

Pallavi Rajankar, a Counseling Psychologist says, “Micromanaging puts burnout on a fast track. It can lead to burnout very easily. This way productivity declines sharply, and conflicts with you and other team members escalate.”

If you notice your employees calling in sick frequently, taking more personal days, or consistently arriving late, it could be a sign that your micromanagement is driving them away. It erodes the sense of purpose and ownership employees feel in their roles. When they believe their contributions aren’t trusted or valued, the workplace starts to feel like a place of control rather than collaboration. This emotional toll can manifest in increased absenteeism as employees seek ways to escape the stress. 

How can you slowly stop being a micromanager?

Make an audit of all decisions you have to make

This is an important task. Take a look at your calendar and draw three buckets in a notebook. In one bucket you write down the meetings you have to be in because you’re the decision maker. In the second bucket, you have those you could delegate. This is a good opportunity to ask someone else to step up as a leader. 

In the last bucket, you have those you’re already delegating. When you delegate it’s not like you never hear about it again. Set very clear expectations, and check in regularly (not often) to review the content. 

Listen to your team members, especially high-performers

High-performing employees often thrive when given autonomy and trust, and they can offer valuable insights into how they work best. Make a conscious effort to ask for their feedback and opinions, not just about tasks but also about your management style. Questions like, “How can I better support your work without interfering too much?” can open the door to honest conversations and help you learn how to step back while still staying connected. 

Observe your people from afar and asynchronously

Assess how your team is performing via call recordings, client testimonials, feedback, etc, as proof of their performance, instead of intervening when they’re performing. Instead of constantly being present and involved in every task, give your employees the space to work independently while you monitor their progress through tools and systems that don’t require your physical or real-time presence. Observing asynchronously also helps you focus on outcomes rather than processes, which is where your attention as a leader is most valuable. 

Familiarize yourself with uncertainty after delegating

More often than not, when you’re a micromanager and you delegate, you become worried – what is my job about? What will I do after I delegate all my work to my team members? Will I still be relevant, or important? It’s very common to have these thoughts because you’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty. It’s important to acknowledge this fear. 

You can talk to your team about how you’ll be a mentor to them going forward. They’ll need your help then more than ever, while you can move on to more income-generating activities and reinvest your time in more strategic roles. 

Recount all the times your team succeeded when you weren’t there

Take a moment to reflect on past successes your team achieved without your direct involvement. Whether it was completing a project on time, solving a complex problem, or exceeding performance goals, these moments demonstrate that your team can thrive independently. Acknowledging these successes can help you combat the fear that things will fall apart if you’re not overseeing every aspect of the work.

Talk to leaders about how they started delegating work

Delegation can feel challenging, especially if you’re accustomed to being deeply involved in every aspect of your team’s work. To ease this transition, seek advice from other leaders who have successfully moved away from micromanagement. Ask them how they overcame their fears of letting go and what strategies they used to build trust in their teams.

Hearing about their experiences can provide practical tips and reassurance that stepping back doesn’t mean losing control—it means empowering your team to take responsibility and grow.