How to Stay on Top of Your Team’s Tasks Without Micromanaging

Quick Tips / January 11, 2017 / JD

As a business owner, you need to be certain that work is complete, done right and on time. Don’t be a micromanager and fight the urge to interrupt your team with extra progress reports, reminders or flat out doing the work yourself.

DontMicromanage

When you delegate a task, you should trust that your team will complete it. You also need a way to verify that tasks are completed but you don’t want to be a micromanager. If you start micromanaging, all you are doing is taking away your employee’s autonomy, making them fear reprisal from you and waste your time on less strategic tasks.

Check out these tips and learn how you can you can fight the urge to micromanage while still getting the updates you need by using Daylite.

Let Go and Start Delegating

When you delegate you empower your team by giving them autonomy. It also allows you to manage the higher level tasks like focusing on strategy and growth.

You may have assigned someone a new task as a comment in a meeting, an email or some other way that can easily be misunderstood or put to the bottom of their task list. Your team needs to know that you expect them to complete the task you assign and that is why the first thing you need to do to when delegating is to document it.

This is where Daylite comes in. Daylite makes it easy by giving you two ways to delegate so no matter where you are looking at a task you can make sure the right person is assigned the job.

In Daylite

  1. Create a new or view an already created task
  2. In the task details, click on Delegate
  3. Choose the person you want to delegate to
  4. Click Notify me of changes and click Delegate

DelegateTask

In the Daylite Mail Assistant

  1. Select an Email related to the task
  2. Create a new task by clicking on + or select > on an already linked task
  3. In the task details, click on Delegate
  4. Choose the person you want to delegate to
  5. Click Notify me of changes and click Delegate

DelegateTaskCropped

Now everyone will see the tasks you’ve assigned to their task lists, and whenever they change a change, you will get a notification in Daylite.

Pro Tip: Add reminders and a due date on a task, so your team gets notifications that they need to complete the job and will see when you expect it done.

Trust but Verify

You trust your team and know they do good work but priorities change and interruptions happen. Even with reminders and keeping a task on their task list, one might get put on the back burner or forgotten.

If you are delegating enough tasks, keeping track of progress might become untenable. Without an easy way to have an overview of which tasks your team has open, you will need to micromanage everyone’s work list to stay in the loop. Instead of interrupting your team, asking for updates, or worse, calling a meeting, keep track of the tasks you’ve assigned with the different task views in Daylite.

Delegated list

On the sidebar under Tasks, you will see the built-in view “Delegated.” When you click on this view, open tasks delegated to you will appear on the top of the list, and then tasks you’ve delegated will show at the bottom. Now you can keep periodically keep take a look and at a glance see what is still opened.

Delegated

Task Smart Lists

For larger teams create you can create a Smart List that you’ve delegated, even breaking it down to each person. Check out this example for a Delegated Smart List:

Delegation Smart List

With the delegated list and Smart Lists, you can get an overview of what each of your employees is working on, and need to complete without interrupting them or bugging them about deadlines unnecessarily.

When you use Daylite, you don’t have to micromanage to stay in the loop with the tasks you delegate. Quickly set up notifications so you can be alerted whenever a delegated task is updated, or view all the tasks you delegate by reviewing the Daylite Delegated List. For those with larger teams, use Smart Lists and always have your team’s task one click away.

Interested in more ways Daylite can help you manage your team? Check out the new Team View feature for Daylite on Mac.

Join 38,877 subscribers making clients happy and growing their business.