Don't be a micro-manager

If you want to be a successful leader, manager and mentor while avoiding micro-management there is one key thing you need to understand.

Beliefs. 

And not your own, but those of your team. 

Does this sound familiar? You have a staff member who is not working hard enough, who is not paying enough attention to their work, and who is making mistakes.

So you send them on an accuracy course, you speak to them about it and tell them they need to be more careful and pay attention. 

That's what managers normally do and as businesses we have plenty of process and documentation about addressing behaviours. Its easy to address the actions of the staff member as they are clear and measurable. But, as the actions are only the end link in the chain, this often fails.

People are not their actions. Their actions are a result of who they are, in particular their beliefs and the importance to them of those beliefs, namely their values. 

If a staff member believes their work does not matter they will not do it to the best of their ability. If they think it matters but they do not value it, or they value spending their time on Facebook more than they value their work then they will spend their time on that. 

As humans we spend our time on the things we, consciously or otherwise, believe are true and which we value. 

When people are saying they "don't have time" for something it is not a matter of time management, it is a matter of their values placing other things ahead of that thing. 

The same is as true for our personal lives ("I don't have time to go to the gym" yet will watch a couple of hours of TV per night) as it is for our work lives ("I didn't have time to do that admin" yet managed to complete a flashy graph on an unimportant project).

If you want to lead a team well, to truly get the best from them, you need to address their beliefs and their values around them. You need to help them gain beliefs and values that support the company goals and then the behaviour and actions you want will naturally follow. 

Otherwise at best you will temporarily change their actions. They will slide back when their beliefs & values overtake the belief that you will hassle them and the value to them of not being hassled.

Which will happen as soon as you are not micro-managing them.