Many managers think that what they need most is a greater control over their office and staff.  If you are one of those managers, you might be right, as long as you don't make the mistake of initiating an elaborate system to determine if your employees are doing what you want, only to suddenly discover that they are accomplishing less overall and that even your own productivity has declined and that the system you created has produced the opposite of what you intended. To many managers, "control" means requiring approvals before allowing certain activities to take place or must know, with varying degrees of detail, what employees are producing, compared with what they are supposed to be producing.  So what can go wrong if you insist on controlling your staff?  You may assume that you have accomplished your job as a manager when you initiate controls, though you think you need more controls if you want to see results; the fact is you may actually have overlooked sensible corrective actions. So what can go wrong when you put controls in place? You may not get accurate information if your employees are uneasy about what you will do with it.  Even honest people won't bring any rope if they think you may hang them.  One example is an employee responsible for tracking of insurance payments found an ingenious way of counting to show that she had little problem with backlogged claim postings.  She simply counted as "backlogs" only those claims she had payments for and not those with denials she had not handled yet. It later showed that she had thousands of dollars not recovered sitting in a draw un-worked. Many managers feel reassured that their authority is still intact when they continue to receive reports but they may be getting information that they used to need but they do…