Leverage through Micromanagement

Yes, sometimes you do in fact have to micromanage your employees. But if done right, you should only have to do it once for a new task.

I’m Nick Avaria, agency owner, and founder of Agency Acquisitions. As an agency owner and consultant, every week I share what’s working in my own agency and my clients to increase profits - without increasing the hours spent at your desk. If you were forwarded this email to your inbox, you can subscribe for weekly updates here.

We’ve been focusing the last few newsletters on the Internal Drive matrix and the when to use delegation to get more leverage as an agency owner. 

Today we’re going to round out the last box for, “Micromanage.”

This is a really good style to use when people are learning something brand new from scratch.

Micromanagement is when skills are low and internal drive or motivation is also low.

This is something that we can long-term fix if the lack of motivation stems from not knowing. If it's from something else, this person should not do this task.

For this, I like to use a combination approach of the 1-3-1 method + 10-80-10 method. 

First use 10-80-10:

10-80-10 in micro-management is done so you can teach/train the person as much as possible as they do this work.

• You figure out what has to be done and put a high-level plan together (structure) and even get it started – the first 10%

Then you use 1-3-1 and ask them how they are going to tackle the middle 80% of the work (You can see how to use 1-3-1 in the previous newsletter here.)

• The other person you are passing the work does the middle part of the work – the middle 80%

• You check, tweak, and improve the work – 10%

• Bonus - you debrief and show them how you finished the task for learning/motivation. Make sure to find the good and accentuate that to give them motivation for this task in the future.

Micromanagement takes up a lot of time and should only be used when you are investing in others as a means of teaching them a new skill. 

If you need to micromanage a person in a core part of their job, it is likely we hired wrong and should consider moving this person somewhere else in the company where they can be more successful based on their skill set.

Next week we’ll cover the hardest part of the agency scaling journey: going from 1 to 2M in annual revenue.

Ready to chat about getting more leverage out of your team? Book a time in my calendar now to connect before to walk through the process in more detail.

Nick