8 ms·

Better to micromanage than be disengaged

123 points by tapanjk 4y ago

drewcoo 4y ago
An essay on how to create false dichotomies to justify bad behavior would have been more generally useful. But this serves as an object lesson.
greesil 4y ago
False dichotomy
- mouse_ 4y ago
  Maybe. But sometimes situations come up where inaction could cause problems that look like negligence, and action could be seen as micromanagement. An argument could be made that in these cases, negligence is worse than micromanagement.
  - atoav 4y ago
    But micromanagment is also not good. Just because boiling hot showers burn your skin off doesn't mean you have to shower ice cold all the time. > action could be seen as micromanagement Micromanagement is a certain way of doing action — the typical micromanager is someone who wants to control all the details of everything, all the time. Granted sometimes it is beneficial for a manager to go through something with their subordinates in all the detail, so the subordinates gain some implicit understanding how you would approach the thing on a detailed level. But this should be a one off, not something you do all the time. Also: every act could be misunderstood as something else, that is in itself the reality of working in a team. The best teams I have ever worked in intuitively did something similar to Crew Resource Managment (CRM as used in aviation, expeditions, ...) — the point is, the manager is a resource themselves if they micromanage they spread themselves too thin for when a real problem occurs — if they are not present, they waste their resource and have a team that might be used to work without management, so when a problem arises the new focus of the manager might or might not help. A manager is part of a team and a manager is a resource of the team. If your team will work better if you are gone, or collapses if you are gone, you are doing it wrong.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  True, but as much as people talk about micromanangers, I’ve found that in reality they’re rare, meanwhile clueless disconnected “what the hell do they even do all day” managers are the norm
- laserlight 4y ago
  I agree. Not micromanaging and engaged is an option.
mvkel 4y ago
This just speaks to an environment that lacks trust. Micromanagement happens when you can't trust that people will do the work. Disengagement becomes bad if you can't trust that people will do the work. Hire people you can trust to do the work and let them do it.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  There are many paths to "people you can trust," so what are you suggesting? The interesting part was left out. How do you determine trust? How does trust differ by role? How do you verify continued trust? Etc.
  - shalmanese 4y ago
    Trust, but verify. Start off in a position of default trust, give people clear goals with a understood metric for success. If someone is not meeting expectations, then start more intensively managing for development with the explicit goal that you want to return to a place of trust. Start with small wins to build trust that you can increasingly delegate larger and larger areas of responsibility.
    - danson 4y ago
      The "but verify" here is the difficult bit. Calibrating the verification frequency and intensity is the art of balancing micromanaging vs disengagement. The reality is you verify by being more hands on than you or your report want to in be long term - but a good manager explains what you're doing and that it is time limited intensity to build trust.
      - antisthenes 4y ago
        It's not difficult at all. If you find that someone needs constant micromanagement and doesn't get things done otherwise, it's probably best to part ways with that employee. Assuming, of course, that you gave them a fair chance initially.
      - 4y ago
gregplaysguitar 4y ago
The author isn’t claiming that micromanaging is good - it’s not. But I wholeheartedly agree that it’s better than being absent. Good leaders create great things by caring about the small details and taking responsibility for them. It’s a fine line between that and micromanagement, but I guess one mark of a great leader is that they’re able to tread it
- vba616 4y ago
  A type of traditional story about leaders is how they showed up anonymously to check what was going on. Literally going back thousands of years. I was just reading a story about how a king pretended to be a wandering drunken lout, and when his guards stopped him, he bribed some of them with gold, but others whipped and beat him and put him in a cell. Then he revealed who he was, and the guards who didn't lock him up and beat him, were whipped and banished.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  That's a visionary with control/esteem issues and an inability to communicate. Micromanaging is a lack of trust in yourself as a leader and your team's ability to deliver. Good/great leaders never micro manage because they trust the vision was communicated and received and seek feedback to confirm this. When I can't connect or trust my team I've failed at leadership. Failing at team leadership doesn't mean you can't be a detailed product manager with a strong vision for a successful product. But you shouldn't be managing the team, those responsibilities need to go to someone focused on the team and not the vision
ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
Most of the time I see micromanagement, its actually gatekeeping. Senior person/engineer is stopping lower level employees from learning the system by forcing them into these micro tasks. I really dont think it comes from lack of trust, it comes from fear of someone below you growing in scope
- ido 4y ago
  Maybe from the lower level employee not managing to get work done otherwise? I've on multiple occasions seen junior folks have negative contributions (causing more harm than good, by no fault of their own) by being left alone to "self-manage" when they're not yet ready for it.
khazhoux 4y ago
Contrarians view: micromanagment can be great — but like anything else, only when done right. A manager who trusts you, but has more scars than you and can help you avoid pitfalls, calls out when you’re making obvious (to them) mistakes, and who actually did your job 15 years ago and still has the chops to know what’s what. You could learn and grow from this person, who ideally would oversee multiple projects so they’re not on your back literally 24/7.
stakhanov 4y ago
This reminds me of a story I heard at film school about some movie director (don't remember his name). Basically the guy was an alcoholic and was too dysfunctional to pretty much do anything. His crew loved being left to their own devices. Everybody got to do what they were good at. The sound person did the sound the way they wanted. The lights person did the lights they wanted. The costumes person did the costumes the way they wanted. No one around with lesser expertise to boss around the real experts. That way, the director had a stellar career winning lots of awards for being drunk at the pub while his crew made great movies. So, guess what happens next. The director eventually sobers up, starts involving himself in his movies, and watches his career go down the tubes. It turns out, he was actually a pretty bad director. So what's the lesson here? If the manager is actually shitty at what they do/manage and has great people working for them, then being at the pub might actually be the most constructive / least destructive thing they could be doing. The problem is: No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true. The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
- ido 4y ago
  Another problem you didn't identify: it requires their crew to be composed entirely of fairly senior, talented people. Hire a bunch of junior (even good juniors) and see how this "self-managing" crew never finishes a film, let along a good film.
  - stakhanov 4y ago
    You have to hire senior people anyway if you want to measure by quality/quantity of work output. The software engineering crew composed of 5 people straight out of college plus one grown-up to play the role of kindergarden teacher is quite common in our industry, but I very much doubt that such a team produces more/better stuff than if you just had one senior person do it all by themselves with zero communication/management overhead. The real reason for having such teams is that you have to have some way of progressing these junior people to become senior and of progressing ICs to first-time managers. In those teams, the manager is at least part-way a teacher/mentor. And, in some cases, they might best teach a lesson by letting their subordinate make a mistake, so they experience the consequences first hand and have the bad experience of having to dig themselves out of it. ...so, even in such uneven teams, there might be surprisingly good reasons for being less involved than a manager's impulse might naturally be. And the first-time manager gets to develop certain mindsets like reflecting on the right level and kind of involvement and so forth. Department heads on a film set are usually people with long and proven track records. So are the people who work directly below a CEO, which the original article talks about.
aranchelk 4y ago
I don’t think this is right. Managers can be hands-on or hands-off, task-oriented, or people-oriented. Very task-oriented + very hands-on = micromanager. Very hands-off = a disengaged manager. In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee. Give the technically competent people lacking confidence reassurance (be hands-on and people-oriented), micromanage a bit with people who aren’t doing their work effectively and not as a result of something that can be fixed with empathy or encouragement, and be disengaged when you’re working with competent self-motivated misanthropes. IMO, saying one extreme is better than another tells you a bit about the author, nothing helpful about management in general. Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate, i.e. be laissez-faire. If you’re forcing people to get your approval and you’re not around to give it, you’ve combined the most incompatible bits of micromanager and the disengaged manager.
- about3fitty 4y ago
  You’re right to identify nuance, but there is a lot of devil in the details regarding classification
- BelleOfTheBall 4y ago
  I'd agree with this an don't see much point in trying to figure out which bad type of management is the least bad. Instead, the approach should focus on finding ways to make a bad manager better in a meaningful way.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  That could make a fascinating 2x2. I wonder what other failure modes the other intersections could reveal. Have you thought about those other 3 quadrants? I did the exercise for myself, and here's what I got: hands-on + task-oriented = micromanager hands-on + people-oriented = professional office politician (deeply involved, but only to the extent it enables shaping the org chart) hands-off + task-oriented = scrum master (no technical background that would allow being hands-on, but still very concerned with tasks) hands-off + people-oriented = HR rep, I guess? Relatively distant from the day-to-day of the team, but still concerned with "people." On reflection, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch. But — definitely an interesting thought experiment overall.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pugworthy 4y ago
Is this a discussion of micromanagement at the CEO level, or of general managers? If the manager is the CEO (often referenced in article), then either the writer is high level, or in a small company. If this is about CEOs then it's really not quite a question of management style, but leadership style - at a pretty high level.
rwmj 4y ago
Why is this pablum linked here? No evidence at all is presented. Most links point back to the same website, except for a link to Amazon and links to the author's own books.
jackblemming 4y ago
Anyone notice a type of person who's always doing weird abstract fluffy meta analyses constantly? Their library is normally chalk full of self help books and they can go on at length about nothing. You can't really debate them because there's no concrete numbers and it's usually just a few experiences they've personally had.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  I think the group you're talking about makes up roughly 70% of all white-collar workers.
baxtr 4y ago
In my experience 3 people have 5 opinions what MM really means. I would love to hear a very clear and succinct definition of micromanagement. Any good references?
- atoav 4y ago
  Without reference the way I understand it micromanaging means a manager goes too deep into the topics they are managing. A manager should give the broad strokers and directions and their subordinates should work out the details. If a manager manages in such a way they basically end up doing the complete mental work themselves, they are micromanaging. This might be bad for two reasons: first the manager themselves might loose the big picture, second the subordinates loose interest in their job because there is no challenge, no creative freedom, no wiggle room and no trust in their work. If you want your subordinates to grow and improve you need to give them work with which they can learn and grow and you need to have a certain level of trust in their ability — all things a micromanaging manager will not need to do. That being said it is not micromanagement if a manager goes into the topic deep once in order to explain it to their subordinates — if they do it constantly then it becomes micromanaging.
heisenbit 4y ago
The main point is disengaged managers can be a huge problem. I experienced a period of bullying when my manager got a lot more responsibility and disengaged. One of my peers started abusing his power, his people and me and there was no effective way to put a stop. Narcissists at the top are bad but on the side with deliberate ignorance from the too is hell. Forced me to learn more about boundary setting than I ever wanted. Eventually boss was fired due to lack of performance and shortly latter bully left to a place with fewer constraints.
23B1 4y ago
Rampant false choices – in the article and in this thread. When things are getting done on time and on budget, let the team run free. When they don't, step in; if in the course of inquiry there's a bunch of bad decision-making, dysfunctional team, shoddy results, or an otherwise drastic departure from best practices, then it's time to micro-manage. Trust & responsibility is a two-way street.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- blowski 4y ago
  In general, I agree with you. I see it as a ladder of autonomy. The more effective you are operating as an individual, the more you can make decisions for yourself. But there is a lot more nuance than that in the day-to-day life of a business. What if things are getting done in an unsustainable way? Maybe there's a toxic individual on the team who's delivering lots of value, but building up a key person dependency by not collaborating. Maybe someone's burning themselves out and needs slowing down. Or there's a big upcoming change where the team will need hands-on help to deal with it.
noduerme 4y ago
Has anyone else reading this come up against the CEO who's both disengaged 6 days a week and micromanaging 1 day a week? Except you never know which day of the week that will be? Keeps you on your toes.
- stakhanov 4y ago
  ...or the manager might have bipolar.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    in the case I'm thinking of, a CEO was used to micromanaging 24/7 for years and needed to take some time off for sanity, health, family and travel, then decided to take months away to live in the islands; so eventually they just ignored all emails for a week or two and picked a day at random to unload a billion random micro-tasks.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  If the CEO was micromanaging all the time but cycling their attention through multiple different groups over time you'd get this appearance. I can imagine that being a reasonable time management policy from their side.
- clnq 4y ago
  Yeah, it's called Seagull Management.
yarg 4y ago
Communication turns to shit either way. When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be. As an example, we had two very large ant build.xml files in our deployment tooling (~8000 lines each) - with inlined groovy scripts (why have compile time errors when they can be runtime errors instead?). One was for deployments to JBoss 6 and 7, the other for EAP 6.4. There were ~10 lines of difference between them. Being sane, I unified them - and came in the next day to the angry demand that I restore the second copy. Luckily, he's a fuckwit, and failed to notice that when I restored the second copy I didn't actually revert the reference change; the second copy sat unused in the codebase until he left the company.
- dfee 4y ago
  Upvote for > Luckily, he's a fuckwit, and failed to notice that when I restored the second copy I didn't actually revert the reference change; the second copy sat unused in the codebase until he left the company.
- boredemployee 4y ago
  >> When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be. Man, this. I was dealing with the same shit and just did what you did. I stopped to show what I was doing in a low level, because he is a super technical guy and would try to find issues in things that don't matter and/or were not high priority. And then I started to show and discuss only what matters. My mental health had a 100% improvement.
  - yenda 4y ago
    At least you can do that when you are not the one managing them but can't fire them.
- javier2 4y ago
  I also stopped letting my micromanager know what exactly I am working on. Just giving very broad task headlines.
sn41 4y ago
I'm in academia. This is unquestionably bad advice. Micromanagers in the academia are able to virtue signal a lot, sweating and wringing their hands about all sorts of trivial stuff, bloviating over email and acting tense. However, in the medium run of about two decades, I've seen that thesis supervisors who take things easy achieve almost as much in terms of publications etc. while having the bonus of maintaining cordial relations which are important in the long run.
jFriedensreich 4y ago
disengaging without delegating power to decide seems to be the problem, a self driven senior without much hassle from above and importantly who understands the goals and values and has access to relevant data to go by can strive to the best. now, the alignment on goals and values can be more tricky than anything because its hard to detect subtle or even not so subtle drifts in alignment.
irremediable 4y ago
Micromanagement, depending on what it means, can be a valuable tool in fixing a broken system. e.g. you take over a team where everything's broken and shipping late. It can genuinely be very helpful for you to dive into the details of everybody's tasks and figure out where things are breaking down. You get a detailed look at the bottlenecks that senior people face (but may be reluctant to share for political/personal reasons); and you get a detailed look at the knowledge/skills gaps that hinder juniors. It's not sustainable though. The idea is to dive in, figure out what to fix, then fix it into a system you can stop micromanaging. Otherwise you just won't have enough time to do the other important stuff.
keithnz 4y ago
The title is clickbait, and the point being made is just anecdotal, not based on evidence. But the point of the article is to not be either. To be honest, not sure the article actually says anything most people don't already know, I think the whole point was to write something clickbaity and say something sensible along side something that seems "bad"
vouaobrasil 4y ago
I still remember the day I got a micromanager when I was a programmer. Previously, I had a manager that was fairly hands off and just let me follow my own path with very little intervention. At that time I produced fairly good work. The moment I got the micromanager my productivity dropped and I lost interest in the job. I hate having someone constantly check on what I am doing. I quit the job because I started hating it so much. Now I have a boss who only ever communicates with me when I get something done and I come to them first. It's the best and I am very productive. So, I think one size definitely does not fit all.
- javier2 4y ago
  I also really, really hate this. I think its because I take it as a violation of trust.
  - vouaobrasil 4y ago
    It is a violation of trust, but it's more than that. It's also a violation of my mental space. I need space to think and not be herded like a lamb. I get that not everyone is like that but I am very independent so I don't work well in these environments. However, to be fair, I don't work well in any corporate environment either so there's that.
zabzonk 4y ago
i want two kinds of manager: me: wtf is this doing connecting to this socket and getting this response? mgr: because ............ and: me: how do i claim expenses on the last trip i went on? mgr: get form ... i will sign it, and then take it to accounts unfortunately, you don't often get both, but i have had a couple, so it is possible. and i have tried to be one myself - it is hard.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  This has names like dual track, popular in larger organisations. Everyone reports to a technical lead (your first example) and a management one (the second). Having one person do both puts a lot of load on them, popular in smaller organisations.
noam_compsci 4y ago
Boils down to “need balance”.
StreamBright 4y ago
As a manager I still struggle how to motivate people. There are very few people who just work because they would like to achieve something. The rest of people are using all kinds of excuses to just sit around and do nothing or go for easy wins which are flawed many way instead of putting in the effort to do things right.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Share the rewards as proportionally as you share the work.
  - StreamBright 4y ago
    - 100% wfh - flexitime - good salary - more time off than the law enables (we live in the EU so this is not a small thing) I mean seriously what else?
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      Either you hired bad people or what you offer isn't all that abnormal in the marketplace (ie. you can be replaced fairly easily). Your bosses receive a larger proportion of the rewards of any particular initiative and they are considerably more motivated, that isn't a strange coincidence. Be prepared to move some of those rewards down the chain and watch the magic happen.
wg0 4y ago
Micromanagement only means either one of two things: a) You've not hired competent and responsible enough people to follow the high level directions and they need handholding. b) You've not hired confident and articulate enough people that they can trust others to be able to execute their vision. Which usually boils down to hiring processes which are generally shallow and mediocre in our industry no matter how much pride we take in them. There's rarely any other reason.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  Another reason micromanagement is a popular technique because the manager is incompetent.
LocalH 4y ago
No thank you. I absolutely detest micromanagement. It's borne from the idea that everyone is stupid and nobody knows how to do the tasks at hand, so they need to be handheld the entire way. People sometimes know just enough to be dangerous in this regard. I've had a long-term client for whom I've performed general tech support and creative work with Adobe software, for the last two decades or so. When it comes to something he doesn't know how to do at all? He lets me just "do it". However, he knows just enough Photoshop to make working with him sometimes annoying as all piss (although he has pulled back some from that as the years have gone by). It was like pulling teeth to convince him that "72dpi" was an obsolete concept in almost every single situation for web graphics. "Now make it 72dpi" is a phrase I hope I never, ever hear again.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  How did we possibly get to a point where we've let people 'oversee' work that they themselves can't grok, much less do themselves? It's insanity.
  - LocalH 4y ago
    Overseeing the final result? That's fine with me, especially if the working relationship is one-on-one versus part of an organization. It's the mindset of over-estimating one's own competency in the relevant area. We all do it to some degree, at some point in our life, but some are infested with it.
more_corn 4y ago
My best managers have encouraged and enabled me to be more than I was. No micromanager has ever come close to doing that for me and probably not anyone else either.
perrygeo 4y ago
This doesn't resonate at all with me. If anything, the most disengaged decision makers are often the ones to resort to micromanagement to cover their incompetence. They don't have the skill or context to make the actual impactful decisions so they start filling up the backlog with useless (but tractable and measurable) tasks. Micromanagement seems to function as an excuse to keep people looking busy, so you can avoid hashing out the real macro issues.
smel 4y ago
I hate micro management usually because they're more worried about slack time than building value is neither good for employee neither for shareholders as employee I optimize "work rate" for value output as shareholder I optimize spending for profit In real life of software building value output is decoupled from "work rate" for other professions like factory where quantity and quality are metrics easily measured then value output can be coupled with work rate. If the job is task oriented why bother having employees just pay per task but maintaining and evolving software is not task oriented even some structures consider software engineers as transpilers of (bad written) user stories :) Because the transpiling part is gone in few years LLM will do it better than any average programmer
thenerdhead 4y ago
Will writes great stuff, but I feel this one is just taking the side of one extreme which has just as many challenges as its polar opposite. You want someone who can generate energy and not always chase it. You want someone with skin in the game and drives ownership in others. You don’t want someone who never takes a watch apart only to put it back in the same exact way, but experiments regularly with the parts. Either extreme you will resent them. With a balance however, you will respect them.
78666cdc 4y ago
It never ceases to baffle me how people in the tech industry are completely unaware of everything that preceded them. The meandering exploration described in this article could have been short circuited by an understanding of things are standard topics in organizational psychology. There’s a wiki article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style
T3RMINATED 4y ago
[dead]

123 points by tapanjk 4y ago

An essay on how to create false dichotomies to justify bad behavior would have been more generally useful. But this serves as an object lesson.

greesil 4y ago

False dichotomy

mouse_ 4y ago
Maybe. But sometimes situations come up where inaction could cause problems that look like negligence, and action could be seen as micromanagement. An argument could be made that in these cases, negligence is worse than micromanagement.
- atoav 4y ago
  But micromanagment is also not good. Just because boiling hot showers burn your skin off doesn't mean you have to shower ice cold all the time. > action could be seen as micromanagement Micromanagement is a certain way of doing action — the typical micromanager is someone who wants to control all the details of everything, all the time. Granted sometimes it is beneficial for a manager to go through something with their subordinates in all the detail, so the subordinates gain some implicit understanding how you would approach the thing on a detailed level. But this should be a one off, not something you do all the time. Also: every act could be misunderstood as something else, that is in itself the reality of working in a team. The best teams I have ever worked in intuitively did something similar to Crew Resource Managment (CRM as used in aviation, expeditions, ...) — the point is, the manager is a resource themselves if they micromanage they spread themselves too thin for when a real problem occurs — if they are not present, they waste their resource and have a team that might be used to work without management, so when a problem arises the new focus of the manager might or might not help. A manager is part of a team and a manager is a resource of the team. If your team will work better if you are gone, or collapses if you are gone, you are doing it wrong.
khazhoux 4y ago
True, but as much as people talk about micromanangers, I’ve found that in reality they’re rare, meanwhile clueless disconnected “what the hell do they even do all day” managers are the norm
laserlight 4y ago
I agree. Not micromanaging and engaged is an option.

mvkel 4y ago

This just speaks to an environment that lacks trust. Micromanagement happens when you can't trust that people will do the work. Disengagement becomes bad if you can't trust that people will do the work. Hire people you can trust to do the work and let them do it.

drewcoo 4y ago
There are many paths to "people you can trust," so what are you suggesting? The interesting part was left out. How do you determine trust? How does trust differ by role? How do you verify continued trust? Etc.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  Trust, but verify. Start off in a position of default trust, give people clear goals with a understood metric for success. If someone is not meeting expectations, then start more intensively managing for development with the explicit goal that you want to return to a place of trust. Start with small wins to build trust that you can increasingly delegate larger and larger areas of responsibility.
  - danson 4y ago
    The "but verify" here is the difficult bit. Calibrating the verification frequency and intensity is the art of balancing micromanaging vs disengagement. The reality is you verify by being more hands on than you or your report want to in be long term - but a good manager explains what you're doing and that it is time limited intensity to build trust.
    - antisthenes 4y ago
      It's not difficult at all. If you find that someone needs constant micromanagement and doesn't get things done otherwise, it's probably best to part ways with that employee. Assuming, of course, that you gave them a fair chance initially.
    - 4y ago

gregplaysguitar 4y ago

The author isn’t claiming that micromanaging is good - it’s not. But I wholeheartedly agree that it’s better than being absent. Good leaders create great things by caring about the small details and taking responsibility for them. It’s a fine line between that and micromanagement, but I guess one mark of a great leader is that they’re able to tread it

vba616 4y ago
A type of traditional story about leaders is how they showed up anonymously to check what was going on. Literally going back thousands of years. I was just reading a story about how a king pretended to be a wandering drunken lout, and when his guards stopped him, he bribed some of them with gold, but others whipped and beat him and put him in a cell. Then he revealed who he was, and the guards who didn't lock him up and beat him, were whipped and banished.
ipaddr 4y ago
That's a visionary with control/esteem issues and an inability to communicate. Micromanaging is a lack of trust in yourself as a leader and your team's ability to deliver. Good/great leaders never micro manage because they trust the vision was communicated and received and seek feedback to confirm this. When I can't connect or trust my team I've failed at leadership. Failing at team leadership doesn't mean you can't be a detailed product manager with a strong vision for a successful product. But you shouldn't be managing the team, those responsibilities need to go to someone focused on the team and not the vision

ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago

Most of the time I see micromanagement, its actually gatekeeping. Senior person/engineer is stopping lower level employees from learning the system by forcing them into these micro tasks. I really dont think it comes from lack of trust, it comes from fear of someone below you growing in scope

ido 4y ago
Maybe from the lower level employee not managing to get work done otherwise? I've on multiple occasions seen junior folks have negative contributions (causing more harm than good, by no fault of their own) by being left alone to "self-manage" when they're not yet ready for it.

khazhoux 4y ago

Contrarians view: micromanagment can be great — but like anything else, only when done right. A manager who trusts you, but has more scars than you and can help you avoid pitfalls, calls out when you’re making obvious (to them) mistakes, and who actually did your job 15 years ago and still has the chops to know what’s what. You could learn and grow from this person, who ideally would oversee multiple projects so they’re not on your back literally 24/7.

stakhanov 4y ago

This reminds me of a story I heard at film school about some movie director (don't remember his name). Basically the guy was an alcoholic and was too dysfunctional to pretty much do anything. His crew loved being left to their own devices. Everybody got to do what they were good at. The sound person did the sound the way they wanted. The lights person did the lights they wanted. The costumes person did the costumes the way they wanted. No one around with lesser expertise to boss around the real experts. That way, the director had a stellar career winning lots of awards for being drunk at the pub while his crew made great movies. So, guess what happens next. The director eventually sobers up, starts involving himself in his movies, and watches his career go down the tubes. It turns out, he was actually a pretty bad director. So what's the lesson here? If the manager is actually shitty at what they do/manage and has great people working for them, then being at the pub might actually be the most constructive / least destructive thing they could be doing. The problem is: No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true. The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.

ido 4y ago
Another problem you didn't identify: it requires their crew to be composed entirely of fairly senior, talented people. Hire a bunch of junior (even good juniors) and see how this "self-managing" crew never finishes a film, let along a good film.
- stakhanov 4y ago
  You have to hire senior people anyway if you want to measure by quality/quantity of work output. The software engineering crew composed of 5 people straight out of college plus one grown-up to play the role of kindergarden teacher is quite common in our industry, but I very much doubt that such a team produces more/better stuff than if you just had one senior person do it all by themselves with zero communication/management overhead. The real reason for having such teams is that you have to have some way of progressing these junior people to become senior and of progressing ICs to first-time managers. In those teams, the manager is at least part-way a teacher/mentor. And, in some cases, they might best teach a lesson by letting their subordinate make a mistake, so they experience the consequences first hand and have the bad experience of having to dig themselves out of it. ...so, even in such uneven teams, there might be surprisingly good reasons for being less involved than a manager's impulse might naturally be. And the first-time manager gets to develop certain mindsets like reflecting on the right level and kind of involvement and so forth. Department heads on a film set are usually people with long and proven track records. So are the people who work directly below a CEO, which the original article talks about.

aranchelk 4y ago

I don’t think this is right. Managers can be hands-on or hands-off, task-oriented, or people-oriented. Very task-oriented + very hands-on = micromanager. Very hands-off = a disengaged manager. In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee. Give the technically competent people lacking confidence reassurance (be hands-on and people-oriented), micromanage a bit with people who aren’t doing their work effectively and not as a result of something that can be fixed with empathy or encouragement, and be disengaged when you’re working with competent self-motivated misanthropes. IMO, saying one extreme is better than another tells you a bit about the author, nothing helpful about management in general. Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate, i.e. be laissez-faire. If you’re forcing people to get your approval and you’re not around to give it, you’ve combined the most incompatible bits of micromanager and the disengaged manager.

about3fitty 4y ago
You’re right to identify nuance, but there is a lot of devil in the details regarding classification
BelleOfTheBall 4y ago
I'd agree with this an don't see much point in trying to figure out which bad type of management is the least bad. Instead, the approach should focus on finding ways to make a bad manager better in a meaningful way.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
That could make a fascinating 2x2. I wonder what other failure modes the other intersections could reveal. Have you thought about those other 3 quadrants? I did the exercise for myself, and here's what I got: hands-on + task-oriented = micromanager hands-on + people-oriented = professional office politician (deeply involved, but only to the extent it enables shaping the org chart) hands-off + task-oriented = scrum master (no technical background that would allow being hands-on, but still very concerned with tasks) hands-off + people-oriented = HR rep, I guess? Relatively distant from the day-to-day of the team, but still concerned with "people." On reflection, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch. But — definitely an interesting thought experiment overall.

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pugworthy 4y ago

Is this a discussion of micromanagement at the CEO level, or of general managers? If the manager is the CEO (often referenced in article), then either the writer is high level, or in a small company. If this is about CEOs then it's really not quite a question of management style, but leadership style - at a pretty high level.

rwmj 4y ago

Why is this pablum linked here? No evidence at all is presented. Most links point back to the same website, except for a link to Amazon and links to the author's own books.

jackblemming 4y ago

Anyone notice a type of person who's always doing weird abstract fluffy meta analyses constantly? Their library is normally chalk full of self help books and they can go on at length about nothing. You can't really debate them because there's no concrete numbers and it's usually just a few experiences they've personally had.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
I think the group you're talking about makes up roughly 70% of all white-collar workers.

baxtr 4y ago

In my experience 3 people have 5 opinions what MM really means. I would love to hear a very clear and succinct definition of micromanagement. Any good references?

atoav 4y ago
Without reference the way I understand it micromanaging means a manager goes too deep into the topics they are managing. A manager should give the broad strokers and directions and their subordinates should work out the details. If a manager manages in such a way they basically end up doing the complete mental work themselves, they are micromanaging. This might be bad for two reasons: first the manager themselves might loose the big picture, second the subordinates loose interest in their job because there is no challenge, no creative freedom, no wiggle room and no trust in their work. If you want your subordinates to grow and improve you need to give them work with which they can learn and grow and you need to have a certain level of trust in their ability — all things a micromanaging manager will not need to do. That being said it is not micromanagement if a manager goes into the topic deep once in order to explain it to their subordinates — if they do it constantly then it becomes micromanaging.

heisenbit 4y ago

The main point is disengaged managers can be a huge problem. I experienced a period of bullying when my manager got a lot more responsibility and disengaged. One of my peers started abusing his power, his people and me and there was no effective way to put a stop. Narcissists at the top are bad but on the side with deliberate ignorance from the too is hell. Forced me to learn more about boundary setting than I ever wanted. Eventually boss was fired due to lack of performance and shortly latter bully left to a place with fewer constraints.

23B1 4y ago

Rampant false choices – in the article and in this thread. When things are getting done on time and on budget, let the team run free. When they don't, step in; if in the course of inquiry there's a bunch of bad decision-making, dysfunctional team, shoddy results, or an otherwise drastic departure from best practices, then it's time to micro-manage. Trust & responsibility is a two-way street.

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blowski 4y ago
In general, I agree with you. I see it as a ladder of autonomy. The more effective you are operating as an individual, the more you can make decisions for yourself. But there is a lot more nuance than that in the day-to-day life of a business. What if things are getting done in an unsustainable way? Maybe there's a toxic individual on the team who's delivering lots of value, but building up a key person dependency by not collaborating. Maybe someone's burning themselves out and needs slowing down. Or there's a big upcoming change where the team will need hands-on help to deal with it.

noduerme 4y ago

Has anyone else reading this come up against the CEO who's both disengaged 6 days a week and micromanaging 1 day a week? Except you never know which day of the week that will be? Keeps you on your toes.

stakhanov 4y ago
...or the manager might have bipolar.
- noduerme 4y ago
  in the case I'm thinking of, a CEO was used to micromanaging 24/7 for years and needed to take some time off for sanity, health, family and travel, then decided to take months away to live in the islands; so eventually they just ignored all emails for a week or two and picked a day at random to unload a billion random micro-tasks.
JonChesterfield 4y ago
If the CEO was micromanaging all the time but cycling their attention through multiple different groups over time you'd get this appearance. I can imagine that being a reasonable time management policy from their side.
clnq 4y ago
Yeah, it's called Seagull Management.

yarg 4y ago

Communication turns to shit either way. When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be. As an example, we had two very large ant build.xml files in our deployment tooling (~8000 lines each) - with inlined groovy scripts (why have compile time errors when they can be runtime errors instead?). One was for deployments to JBoss 6 and 7, the other for EAP 6.4. There were ~10 lines of difference between them. Being sane, I unified them - and came in the next day to the angry demand that I restore the second copy. Luckily, he's a fuckwit, and failed to notice that when I restored the second copy I didn't actually revert the reference change; the second copy sat unused in the codebase until he left the company.

dfee 4y ago
Upvote for > Luckily, he's a fuckwit, and failed to notice that when I restored the second copy I didn't actually revert the reference change; the second copy sat unused in the codebase until he left the company.
boredemployee 4y ago
>> When I was dealing with a micromanager I just stopped letting him know what I was actually doing - because bothering to communicate with him only ever made my job harder than it needed to be. Man, this. I was dealing with the same shit and just did what you did. I stopped to show what I was doing in a low level, because he is a super technical guy and would try to find issues in things that don't matter and/or were not high priority. And then I started to show and discuss only what matters. My mental health had a 100% improvement.
- yenda 4y ago
  At least you can do that when you are not the one managing them but can't fire them.
javier2 4y ago
I also stopped letting my micromanager know what exactly I am working on. Just giving very broad task headlines.

sn41 4y ago

I'm in academia. This is unquestionably bad advice. Micromanagers in the academia are able to virtue signal a lot, sweating and wringing their hands about all sorts of trivial stuff, bloviating over email and acting tense. However, in the medium run of about two decades, I've seen that thesis supervisors who take things easy achieve almost as much in terms of publications etc. while having the bonus of maintaining cordial relations which are important in the long run.

jFriedensreich 4y ago

disengaging without delegating power to decide seems to be the problem, a self driven senior without much hassle from above and importantly who understands the goals and values and has access to relevant data to go by can strive to the best. now, the alignment on goals and values can be more tricky than anything because its hard to detect subtle or even not so subtle drifts in alignment.

irremediable 4y ago

Micromanagement, depending on what it means, can be a valuable tool in fixing a broken system. e.g. you take over a team where everything's broken and shipping late. It can genuinely be very helpful for you to dive into the details of everybody's tasks and figure out where things are breaking down. You get a detailed look at the bottlenecks that senior people face (but may be reluctant to share for political/personal reasons); and you get a detailed look at the knowledge/skills gaps that hinder juniors. It's not sustainable though. The idea is to dive in, figure out what to fix, then fix it into a system you can stop micromanaging. Otherwise you just won't have enough time to do the other important stuff.

keithnz 4y ago

The title is clickbait, and the point being made is just anecdotal, not based on evidence. But the point of the article is to not be either. To be honest, not sure the article actually says anything most people don't already know, I think the whole point was to write something clickbaity and say something sensible along side something that seems "bad"

vouaobrasil 4y ago

I still remember the day I got a micromanager when I was a programmer. Previously, I had a manager that was fairly hands off and just let me follow my own path with very little intervention. At that time I produced fairly good work. The moment I got the micromanager my productivity dropped and I lost interest in the job. I hate having someone constantly check on what I am doing. I quit the job because I started hating it so much. Now I have a boss who only ever communicates with me when I get something done and I come to them first. It's the best and I am very productive. So, I think one size definitely does not fit all.

javier2 4y ago
I also really, really hate this. I think its because I take it as a violation of trust.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  It is a violation of trust, but it's more than that. It's also a violation of my mental space. I need space to think and not be herded like a lamb. I get that not everyone is like that but I am very independent so I don't work well in these environments. However, to be fair, I don't work well in any corporate environment either so there's that.

zabzonk 4y ago

i want two kinds of manager: me: wtf is this doing connecting to this socket and getting this response? mgr: because ............ and: me: how do i claim expenses on the last trip i went on? mgr: get form ... i will sign it, and then take it to accounts unfortunately, you don't often get both, but i have had a couple, so it is possible. and i have tried to be one myself - it is hard.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
This has names like dual track, popular in larger organisations. Everyone reports to a technical lead (your first example) and a management one (the second). Having one person do both puts a lot of load on them, popular in smaller organisations.

noam_compsci 4y ago

Boils down to “need balance”.

StreamBright 4y ago

As a manager I still struggle how to motivate people. There are very few people who just work because they would like to achieve something. The rest of people are using all kinds of excuses to just sit around and do nothing or go for easy wins which are flawed many way instead of putting in the effort to do things right.

willcipriano 4y ago
Share the rewards as proportionally as you share the work.
- StreamBright 4y ago
  - 100% wfh - flexitime - good salary - more time off than the law enables (we live in the EU so this is not a small thing) I mean seriously what else?
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Either you hired bad people or what you offer isn't all that abnormal in the marketplace (ie. you can be replaced fairly easily). Your bosses receive a larger proportion of the rewards of any particular initiative and they are considerably more motivated, that isn't a strange coincidence. Be prepared to move some of those rewards down the chain and watch the magic happen.

wg0 4y ago

Micromanagement only means either one of two things: a) You've not hired competent and responsible enough people to follow the high level directions and they need handholding. b) You've not hired confident and articulate enough people that they can trust others to be able to execute their vision. Which usually boils down to hiring processes which are generally shallow and mediocre in our industry no matter how much pride we take in them. There's rarely any other reason.

gardenhedge 4y ago
Another reason micromanagement is a popular technique because the manager is incompetent.

LocalH 4y ago

No thank you. I absolutely detest micromanagement. It's borne from the idea that everyone is stupid and nobody knows how to do the tasks at hand, so they need to be handheld the entire way. People sometimes know just enough to be dangerous in this regard. I've had a long-term client for whom I've performed general tech support and creative work with Adobe software, for the last two decades or so. When it comes to something he doesn't know how to do at all? He lets me just "do it". However, he knows just enough Photoshop to make working with him sometimes annoying as all piss (although he has pulled back some from that as the years have gone by). It was like pulling teeth to convince him that "72dpi" was an obsolete concept in almost every single situation for web graphics. "Now make it 72dpi" is a phrase I hope I never, ever hear again.

wildrhythms 4y ago
How did we possibly get to a point where we've let people 'oversee' work that they themselves can't grok, much less do themselves? It's insanity.
- LocalH 4y ago
  Overseeing the final result? That's fine with me, especially if the working relationship is one-on-one versus part of an organization. It's the mindset of over-estimating one's own competency in the relevant area. We all do it to some degree, at some point in our life, but some are infested with it.

more_corn 4y ago

My best managers have encouraged and enabled me to be more than I was. No micromanager has ever come close to doing that for me and probably not anyone else either.

perrygeo 4y ago

This doesn't resonate at all with me. If anything, the most disengaged decision makers are often the ones to resort to micromanagement to cover their incompetence. They don't have the skill or context to make the actual impactful decisions so they start filling up the backlog with useless (but tractable and measurable) tasks. Micromanagement seems to function as an excuse to keep people looking busy, so you can avoid hashing out the real macro issues.

smel 4y ago

I hate micro management usually because they're more worried about slack time than building value is neither good for employee neither for shareholders as employee I optimize "work rate" for value output as shareholder I optimize spending for profit In real life of software building value output is decoupled from "work rate" for other professions like factory where quantity and quality are metrics easily measured then value output can be coupled with work rate. If the job is task oriented why bother having employees just pay per task but maintaining and evolving software is not task oriented even some structures consider software engineers as transpilers of (bad written) user stories :) Because the transpiling part is gone in few years LLM will do it better than any average programmer

thenerdhead 4y ago

Will writes great stuff, but I feel this one is just taking the side of one extreme which has just as many challenges as its polar opposite. You want someone who can generate energy and not always chase it. You want someone with skin in the game and drives ownership in others. You don’t want someone who never takes a watch apart only to put it back in the same exact way, but experiments regularly with the parts. Either extreme you will resent them. With a balance however, you will respect them.

78666cdc 4y ago

It never ceases to baffle me how people in the tech industry are completely unaware of everything that preceded them. The meandering exploration described in this article could have been short circuited by an understanding of things are standard topics in organizational psychology. There’s a wiki article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style

T3RMINATED 4y ago

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