Your style of management is an important factor that can influence your employees, the work environment, and your business performance. It’s important to choose a method of management that helps employees flourish. Many leaders struggle with whether they should take a more hands-on or hands-off approach to management. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of each strategy.
The Pros and Cons of Hands-On Management
Hands-on management is very common for highly motivated leaders with specific experience completing tasks similar to what their employees are working on. There are lots of benefits to taking an active role in helping your team members, such as:
- Gaining a clear understanding of the day-to-day operations of your business so you can make changes to improve efficiency and efficacy.
- Building more personal relationships with employees, so you can easily reach and accept their feedback to improve your leadership and help them do their jobs better.
- Team members tend to have more respect for managers who are interested in their day-to-day work.
- Employees tend to perform better knowing management is working alongside them and supporting them.
All that said, there are also some cons of hands-on management, such as:
- Hands-on managers that build peer relationships with employees have more difficulty handling performance issues as a boss.
- In some cases, hands-on management can hinder the work of top employees who actually don’t benefit from regular daily management.
- It’s easy to cross the line from hands-on to micromanagement, which can negatively impact employees and your business.
- Overtraining and micromanaging employee projects can negatively impact productivity instead of supporting employees in their day-to-day tasks.
The Pros and Cons of Hands-Off Management
Likewise, hands-off management can have benefits in the right circumstances, such as:
- Giving employees the freedom to make their own decisions helps them grow and learn to become more effective at their job.
- Team members often thrive knowing management trusts them to do their job and make important decisions without extra input.
- Hands-off managers have more freedom to work on different projects and start initiatives to improve work processes when they aren’t busy managing employees.
- With a hands-off approach, managers can focus on actually managing the office and improving efficiency.
Equally, the cons of hands-off management can include:
- Not having a clear understanding of day-to-day business processes means you can’t make informed decisions to improve performance.
- Challenges in work performance can arise from management overestimating the ability of their employees to work independently.
- Too much freedom can lead to a lax work environment with poor efficiency and employee performance.
- Employees that lack proper mentorship can rarely thrive and move up through the business.
Striking a Balance In Leadership Styles
What most leaders don’t realize is that they can take a hybrid approach to their management style. Some aspects of leadership can be hands-on while others can be hands-off. The best idea is to strike a balance to benefit the most from each strategy.
To do this, focus first on avoiding the pitfalls of micromanagement. Give guidance to those who need it, while allowing top performers more freedom to excel and thrive. Build healthy but professional relationships with your employees, so you’re always perceived as the boss. Make efforts to understand the day-to-day business processes, even if you might not always be involved in them. Provide mentorship for your teams but also balance your time by focusing on true managerial tasks.