Confessions of a Micro-Manager

I know that modern management books and HR people at seminars tell you that you should hand duties to your staff and let them get on with it. Great in theory, but I hear from a lot of business owners that it doesn’t work. “People never listen”, they say, or “They only do a half-arsed job and take twice as long as me”. So what is going wrong?

A common scenario is that the owner is handing over control of some relatively important jobs and not following up like they should, often because it was a job that they didn’t like anyway and were glad to get rid of it. It may not be a core production job (most owners like to keep those) but an equally important support job that is equally as critical to the success of the business. Maybe invoicing, for example. What often happens is the owner ABDICATES the job to another person rather than DELEGATING it. There is a big difference and it is around the process used and the control retained by the “delegator”.

Like many things in business, delegation is a process and involves several steps. Miss one or two and the process breaks down, the job doesn’t get done properly and the boss gets (more) stressed. So step one is to delegate properly, don’t abdicate.

Until you feel VERY confident that a staff member is competent, check and re-check what they are doing until the process is as smooth as a machine running in a bath of oil. Then check some more. Have the staff member report back to you on a regular basis on what is happening, the roadblocks they are facing and the progress they are making towards activity and performance goals. That might be a DAILY reporting process for some tasks. Like President Ronald Regan said during the cold war, “Trust, but verify”.

Keep control of the cash. There are some areas of small business that I am loathe to encourage an owner to delegate. One is the control over the bank account. By delegating (read abdicating) control over the accounts payable function in particular, a business owner can lay themselves open to less than ethical employees taking advantage of the situation and starting to steal money. I remember being in a network group a few years ago and one of our members was a panelbeater. He employed an office lady to look after the accounts as it was an area that he didn’t like and had little interest in learning about. The office lady was actually the wife of a good friend of his. Not long after employing her, the panelbeater’s wife developed cancer and grew steadily worse. They had 2 young children who needed attention and this started to take an increasing amount of his attention, which was not unexpected in view of the situation. Unknown to the panelbeater was the fact that his office lady had a gambling problem and she started to siphon money out of the business to feed her habit. Remember, this was a family friend who on the face of it was saying she would look after the accounts so the panelbeater could tend to his gravely ill wife. The stealing was eventually uncovered after the business started to perform poorly and an audit was conducted, but tens of thousands of dollars had gone.

The moral of this tragic and true story. Trust no one! I am not saying that you need to retain all the day-to-day accounting function yourself, but don’t pass over control of this area until you have some strict policies and reporting functions in place. If you don’t understand about money matters, learn about the critical issues and find a good accountant to help you put good control measures in place.

It’s okay to micro-manage a bit. Wear your control freak label with pride.

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