How do I not micro-manage?

How Do I Not Micro-Managing?

“Don’t micromanage” sounds good—until performance starts slipping.

In today’s Question of the Day, I challenge the myth of micromanagement and explain how to support your team, give feedback, and drive results—without hovering or overwhelming them.

In this episode, we cover:

•  What micromanagement actually is (and what it isn’t) 
•  Why lack of clarity often gets mislabeled as micromanagement 
•  How to provide structured support and feedback that improves performance 
•  The balance between accountability and autonomy 

If you’re trying to raise the bar without burning out your team, this episode will help you lead with clarity, consistency, and purpose.

Have a Question? - Submit your questions to chrish@nexstarnetwork.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to the question of the day. Today's question is I'm scared of micromanaging my team. How do I stay involved in influence positive performance without micromanaging? That's a great question. Well, then don't. Don't micromanage. I'm kidding. Like it's not that simple, but I do think the term micromanage gets thrown around a little too much. It's usually thrown around by underperformers, right? So somebody's underperforming. They don't want anybody riding along. They don't want anybody pointing out their opportunities, their flaws, the pieces that they're missing. And so they throw that around as like a defense mechanism. And then as managers, it puts us on edge of like, well, how involved do we get or not get? Because I don't want to be labeled a micromanager. I don't want my team to not like me. But but a great leader, a great leader is defined by the amount of difficult conversations that they have. And so having those conversations, finding those opportunities, you can do that and improve performance without being labeled a micromanager. Now you can also be a micromanager. My very first management job, uh, I managed a team, and I won't lie, I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but like my philosophy was rule with an iron fist and get involved in everything. And honestly, it didn't work out well for me. Everybody hated me, everybody quit. I had big turnover issues. Like it was very honestly a humbling and great learning experience. I learned everything not to do as a manager of people. But I don't think that's that's most people. Think about the role. You were you were good at something. You were good at managing people or good at processes, or you you were sought out for this role. Whoever hired you to be that leader, they want your fingerprints on this. I want your fingerprint. I don't want you not involved. I didn't put you in the role to not be involved and not improve sales. I want your fingerprints on it. And you can do that without micromanaging. This kind of reminds me of the Hawthorne effect. So the the the Hawthorne effect, I'm going to summarize, I'm going to make this much simpler than it actually was. But the back in the 1920s, there was a group of researchers that went into Western Electric plant in Chicago, and they had this belief they were testing out that if they would improve the environment, it would improve performance. And so they tested this out at Western Electric. And what they did was they made the lights brighter and productivity went up. But then they might uh they made the lights dimmer, productivity still went up. And so they were they were flabbergasted by this. Like it seemed like when they made changes, productivity just always went up, whether it was a good change, like lights being brighter or lights being dimmer, a negative change. So they started doing other variables, like they started playing with breaks, break times, length of breaks, hours, pay structures, and the same results. Performance improved no matter what they touched. And at first it didn't make any sense, but but they started to figure out that it wasn't the actual changes, it was the attention. The attention is what was driving results. The workers knew someone was watching, they knew somebody was listening, they knew somebody actually cared about what they were doing. And that alone affected how they showed up. And so now it's known as the Hawthorne effect. And the the simple takeaway for leaders here is if you want better performance, start by being present. Catch people doing something right. Be specific about what they did. Tie it into the bigger picture. Explain why that matters. And and when this all makes sense, just recognize it publicly. And I say when it makes sense because not everybody likes being recognized publicly. I think most people do, but but there are some people that that shy away from that and hate that, right? So part of that is being present, knowing your team, right? Knowing how they want to communicate, knowing how they like to be praised, and then meet them where that matters. Most teams don't need a complete overhaul. Most teams don't need somebody to micromanage every detail, but what they do need is they just need to get noticed. They need someone present, someone involved, someone that cares, someone that's listening. Now, I I'm oversimplifying this, but people do better when they're supported. Often sales, especially in sales, sales is left on an island. We think, oh, they're sales, they'll figure it out. Sales, they run solo, like they're, you know, depending on the sales career, they might be on the road and on their own, like in the trades here. It's very easy to not feel like the rest of the team. The rest of the team has to show up at the shop. Rest of the team has a meeting uh maybe every day or at least weekly, right? Like the rest of the team is getting together. Sales, a lot of times, they're just running calls. They go straight from their house to the to the customer's house. And so they may not even show up at the shop. And it's very easy to feel like you're left on an island, that you're not part of the team. Now, in a lot of sales, we even we lie to everybody, we lie to ourselves that that we can do this. Like, yeah, I'm sales, I can do it, I can do it myself. And I only know two types of people that say, I can do it myself. Toddlers and toxic masculinity, which I also suffer from because I do this a lot. I say, I can do it myself, and I will bend over backwards to prove that I can do it myself. But I'm usually wrong. The best, when you look at the best in any trade, in any industry, sports is a good example, but look at the best. They're not doing it alone. Nobody does it alone. They have a team that supports them. Somebody that's riding along, trainings or practices, one-on-ones, debriefs of what's happening, coaching in the moment, some kind of score that's being kept, like a win the day, and then goals. Specific things that we're focused on and actions that are going to lead us to achieving those goals. Like that this is true for anybody, anybody who's successful, they're doing these things, but they're not doing it alone. Your job, your job as a sales leader, is to support, knock down these hurdles, allow them to shine. I just this morning did a leadership session with a group of leaders at a company, and I opened up by asking them, what does leadership mean to you? Every one of them said some version of support, supporting their people or knocking down hurdles. That's your job to support knockdown hurdles, allow them to shine. But often, often we do this poorly as leaders. An example would be we go ride along. We ride along because we know we're supposed to ride along, right? And maybe you had a sales coach like myself that that that got you to go ride along, but we don't know like what to do with that. So we ride along, we see all these things, and then we beat them over the head with it. We tell them everything they did wrong and everything they should have done better. We just beat them over the head with it. And that's why people hate ride-alongs. Who wants somebody to follow them around and beat them over the head with everything they did wrong? Another example would be airing everybody's dirty laundry out for everybody to see. I worked with a team recently that they've got one underperforming salesperson on their team, underperforming compared to everybody else, and it's the focus of every team meeting. How do you think the morale of that salesperson is when you show up and the focus of every team meeting is how much you suck? That's that's not gonna build confidence, and so we do this poorly. Here's some better examples. Here's here's how you'd want to do this. First, when you ride along, stay curious, ask questions. Don't beat them over the head with everything they should do. Ask questions. There's a great clip. If you go and just Google Ted Lasso, stay curious. I'm pretty sure it'll pop up. Watch that clip. They're playing darts, and he talks about staying curious. Like, man, what a great clip that really ties in how to stay curious. When I ride along with somebody, this is what I do. Even when we get back to the truck, I'm not gonna beat them over the head. Even when they ask me, like, well, what'd you think? Right? Like, I'm not gonna take that opportunity to jump in and beat them over the head. What I do is I ask them questions, and they're pretty simple questions. I just ask them, well, I don't know. What do you think went well? Start on the positive. What do you think went well? And then we shift into the opportunities. I say something like, Well, if we had it to do over again, would you do anything different? That digs into the opportunities, right? And then really the only other question I ask is, like, well, what's the next step? What do we do now? Now, throughout this, the salesperson then is giving themselves feedback. They're saying what went well, which is probably the same things I would have said. They're saying the things they would have done differently or could have done better, which is probably the same things I would have said. And then they're identifying a next step, which is exactly what I want them to do, right? But now none of that came from me. It was all theirs. I didn't have to beat them over the head. They came up with all that feedback on their own. When it's their idea, they're gonna be much more excited about it. They're gonna feel like they didn't get beat over the head. They're gonna be much more open to doing these ride-alongs again. Now, if I see opportunities, let me sprinkle something in an idea here or a question there. So, for example, let's say, let's say they say, you know, yeah, I don't know, an opportunity was the it seemed like they were rushing out the door when I had to present, right? Like I ran out of time. I might just ask the question, well, could we have identified that earlier? I mean, I got thoughts, I got ideas of what we could do, but I'm gonna ask that, wait, could we have identified that earlier? And that's probably gonna lead to somehow setting the agenda up front and how long this call is gonna take. And we can make adjustments on that because we probably would have found out at that point that, oh, this is gonna be too short, we don't have time, and so we're probably gonna have to schedule a second visit. Or might be a little short, and I might have to speed up my process a little bit to make sure I have that presentation time, or I might have enough time. So that's where I'm getting to. But I'm just gonna ask them the question. I'm not gonna beat them over the head with it, I'm gonna ask the questions. So, in summary, I would say stay curious, ask questions. As long as you're doing that, you're not micromanaging. And maybe the last thing I would add in real quick is different personality types. Be aware that there's different personality types. If you if you have kids, like think about your kids. No two kids are the same. In fact, they're usually very different. How you parent one kid is not exactly the same as you how you parent the other kid. It's exact same with sales teams and salespeople. No two are exactly the same. What's gonna work for one is not gonna work for all of them. You're gonna have you're gonna have some people that take a uh need a softer approach taken, and we need to definitely ask them more questions, right? You're gonna have some people that are super stubborn, and you almost have to trick them into it's their idea, right? Um, you're gonna have some people that are just blunt that just tell me what it is, and I'm gonna do it. Right? They have very thick skin. So you have to identify how that person receives information and adjust to those different personality types. But above all, stay curious to ask questions. And from there, set up your structure of support. Set up a structure of riding along with them, training, one-on-ones, debriefs after every call, setting a win the day, that we have a win the day every day, and goals. Everybody has individual goals with action items that we're we're focused on. And then just stay curious. That's today's question of the day. If you're enjoying question of the day, follow, share, give a rating. Question of the day is on major streaming platforms. If you have a question, reach out to me via email. It'll be listed below in the show description. Let's get your questions answered. And if you're a next star member, schedule a call with me and we can address this one on one and get very specific to your situation. I'm Coach Chris. We'll see you tomorrow.