As a grunt, hate them but as a team leader they really help make my life easier. In short, depending on team size, you are sacrificing the producers to make th

As a grunt, hate them but as a team leader they really help make my life easier. In short, depending on team size, you are sacrificing the producers to make the manager's job easier and unfortunately this is a decision that the manager gets to make, so guess what decision is made all the time. The problem is that as a manager I don't want to look bad in front of my manager and he he/her manager's and so on and so forth, so I have to do things that are suboptimal from a delivery point of view to avoid this, e.g. run a stand up to keep a close eye on what everybody is working on rather than say not and ensure that they guys (and gals) know that I'm here to help should they get stuck. To be fair, they do help with managing people that are, for whatever reason, reluctant to look for help, but there are other ways of managing this