Don't Micromanage Posted on November 21, 2007 Trust your staff to do what you've trained them to do, reminds Victoria J. Grochocinski (bio).

What’s important to remember when you’re early in your research career is to remember the things that you learned in kindergarten, and those are things like play well with others, be nice, hold hands, don’t run with scissors. Now these are metaphors for other things in life, but it’s important to be a team player and I think we’ve said that a lot in these last two days that the lone rangers often do not succeed. Rarely do they succeed in this environment where you can’t possibly know everything by yourself and you can’t possibly do everything yourself. You really need that — colleagues, peers, mentors, staff — to get a project off the ground.

A second thing that I’ve observed over the years in watching young people come through our department is micromanaging and micromanaging of course obviously isn’t going to happen if you have to do all of this yourself. But if you’ve hired some staff and you’ve trained the staff and you’ve come to trust the staff, then you have to let the staff do their own thing. You have to let them do what you trained them to do. Otherwise you might as well just do it yourself if you’re going to micromanage.

It doesn’t give staff a feeling of accomplishment. It’s treating them like you don’t trust them. You have to learn to trust your data, your patients, your progress reports, whatever it is you — whatever people are helping you with. You have to learn to trust other people that they will get it right. Yes, you can have some procedures in place for checks and balances, but let people do what they can. Teach them to ask.

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