Original content: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/the-evolution-of-project-...

Project Oxygen is a really great resource for any of you out there looking for more information on this stuff.

One thing I’ll call out from this particular summary: > "I love to be micromanaged," said no employee, ever.

One thing to think about is how to junior / in training mode your current team member is. Your level of management involvement scales (micro to macro) as your team member becomes more senior, and you’re able to trust their work, and they’re able to trust your direction. I’ve made this mistake where I had a junior employee, gave them tons of autonomy and freedom, and they floundered and felt “unmanaged”. To me, I was just “not micro-managing” them. To them, I just wasn’t managing at all. Management isn’t one size fits all, and the techniques we use has to vary based on each person on our team. There is no “One True Way”.

Coaching is an interesting topic for a lot of people, as I see this as a gap for a lot of the managers I work with through my mentoring program. We teach coaching during our leadership cohort program ( https://connect.eagerlabs.com ) for this very reason, and I’ll be curious how many of our graduates actually look to start taking ICF workshops or certifications coming out of it (or some other coaching certification network).

To add anecdata to further your point, I wasn't sure engineering was for me until I found a manager who could guide me as a junior. I was fully prepared to quit and change careers, as I felt completely out of my depth and questioned my own competency. Luckily, I decided to try one more work-place and ended up with the fantastic boss I have now.

I'm sure for Google, who generally hire incredibly talented engineers right off the bat, a 'no-micromanagement' policy works well; but for a fresh-faced undergraduate straight out of a second-rate university, micro-management and mentorship is crucial. Something that might take a junior hours to do can be solved in minutes with a bit of guidance. I think sometimes the senior engineers I work with underestimate how much knowledge they have to share, and overestimate how much knowledge a 20-something year old engineer with one internship under their belt has.

It sounds like you're lucky enough to have not experienced micro management, but instead close support.

Micromanagement plays out as a constant barrage of needing to be updated on every single detail that you work on. It's immensely tiring, and essentially comes from the manager not really trusting you and exercising too much control. They need to know about every action you take and how long is it taking (and why is it taking X long). It's horrible and drives people to look elsewhere. Project managers also fail badly at this. They badly manage the customer and try always be a 'yes' man to every whim they have, and end up driving the engineers crazy by wanting constant updates hour by hour.

I'd say it's very much more close to a scale than a binary "good/bad" when it comes to micro-management. Sure, I don't want to have to explain myself every hour as to how things are going, but I likewise I don't want to have to track down my manager to get managed.

With my new manager, by him checking in with me more frequently to see how things are going I can gauge my performance better from his reaction, pick up on errors I've done early on in the process that I wouldn't have spotted myself, and build a better dialogue with him. Frankly, if this comes from the manager not trusting me then I don't blame him; he shouldn't - I'm an idiotic 20-something year old. I haven't built that framework of expertise where I can do a job without error or guidance.

Conversely, a 'hands-off' boss for me meant that I'd be working all day, only to hand in the work and find out I'd done something completely wrong and needed to re-do things from scratch. I might be doing a job as I've read in the spec, but it turns out there's some common practice way of completing it that I'm just expected to know right off the bat. I wouldn't know what the intended outcome of a project was, because I had never completed a project before.

Micro-management is like captaining a boat. If the skipper constantly corrects the course, he'll exhaust the crew - but if he doesn't correct enough, the boat can veer off rapidly with no one at the helm.

Well said. I had a similar reaction when I saw this as to, maybe google just doesn’t hire new grads, but I know that’s not the case. Almost every fresh out of school grad has tons to learn, regardless of how great their education was. Schools don’t teach communication, patience, how to generate buy in, calendar courtesy, or any number of “how we work together” skills. I know when I look back at my 23 year old self I’m embarrassed with how I looked at the world and those that I worked with.

> Your level of management involvement scales (micro to macro) as your team member becomes more senior, and you’re able to trust their work, and they’re able to trust your direction. I’ve made this mistake where I had a junior employee, gave them tons of autonomy and freedom, and they floundered and felt “unmanaged”. To me, I was just “not micro-managing” them. To them, I just wasn’t managing at all.

At work, we have job grades basically on even numbers: '4' is a fresh-out-of-college new hire, '6' would be someone with a Master's degree or a couple years' experience, '8' would be 3-5 years' experience, and so forth.

The rule of thumb I was given when talking with managers was this: you always need to regularly meet with each employee to review their list of tasks and priorities and make sure they're on track. You should meet with a '4' once a day, a '6' once a week, an '8' once a month, and a '10' (senior engineer) once a quarter. It's a rough rule of thumb, but it sets the expectations: a new hire should require more consistent contact and direction-setting than someone senior, who should be able to set directions more independently and just check in.

Really love that model. Thank you for sharing!

One thing I took away from growing up a military brat and then being an NCO myself in the military:

You lead people, you manage things. People are not managed, they are either led well or poorly. Good leaders lead from the front, right alongside their charges. This is one thing I miss from my military time. Leaders should be working, not sitting in an office breathing rarefied air and distant from their charges.

I'm thankful my current "boss" is happy to simply let me and my one colleague run with it. Should we need something, we ask, but otherwise we know what to do and the road map is clear. We work with a sense of urgency, get things done and keep the boss happy. He looks good, we look good. Another thing that is detestable is too many meetings for the sake of meetings. Have a purpose for the meeting. Allow feedback, take constructive criticism (leaders, I'm looking at you), and actually lead with your troops, not away from them. My sole colleague and I get more done in one day than I did in a week at my previous position because the bureaucracy would not get out of the way.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

This is so true. Another thing I've seen great NCOs do:

When someone has to do something boring/dirty/ugly, never let them do it alone. Sometimes having a buddy help you with shit work can actually turn it into something fun.

So true. When I served, the occasional crap job would come around and everyone was expected to chip in.

We had to field day the barracks every Thursday night. There was no liberty until it was done and inspection complete. As an NCO, I made sure that myself and other NCOs took turns on the buffers, mops/buckets right alongside the Privates and Lance Corporals. There is no "I" in team. This is one thing about the Marine Corps I miss. A very few people could move mountains. The Corps is able to do so much with very little.

An interesting comment about leading from the front since most military colonels onwards are desk bound

What you are referring to applies very well to frontline leadership which is the NCO type

I don't know about anything other than the USMC. In the Corps, everyone works, even officers. Our SgtMaj as well as our Colonel were frequently seen filling sandbags when deployed, out on the rifle/pistol range training during deployments, setting up their own GP tents (shared large tent). There are generally no exemptions in the Corps for officers or senior enlisted and nor should there be. If you lead, lead. Show the way. Troops respect men who lead from the front right alongside their men. Ours certainly did. Nothing better than a solid, engaged Gunny or Warrant Officer right alongside you when crap gets weird.

Skip the blog spam and go directly to Google re:Work where they publish tons of useful research about office work, recruiting and management:

https://rework.withgoogle.com/

Having identified the characteristics I would be interested to know how successful they were in training new managers to be like this who didn't have a lot of these traits to begin with. My guess is, not very successful.

Is there a paper or presentation (with methods/data) on this? I've been looking but I haven't found much.

All this article tells me is that good managers manage their staff well.

This is clearly more of the usual click-bait nonsense from Business Insider.

will downvote this if I can :) not good enough to be on HN frontpage...

I don't think you can downvote front page articles, just comments. I seem to have hit the threshold to vote on individual posts, not sure if there is a higher threshold for articles.

Edit: and speaking of voting, since this got downvoted: I wasn't the person who downvoted you. I felt bad you got marked down and wanted to let you know since sometimes on HN people can be weird about "HN is not Reddit" :)

Posts use “flags” instead of downvotes. There’s no threshold to flag a post either.

I thought flags are for TOS violations, not pure disagreement. Or should I go back and flag all those who emacs users who besmirch Vi? ;)

You're correct. I can no longer edit my post, but I should have specified. There's no true "equivalent" of downvoting posts, just the flag system which downweights posts like downvotes do comments. After it reaches a threshold, the post becomes hidden.

It is supposed to be used strictly for posts that violate the guidelines (i.e. off-topic, reposts, incorrect titling, etc). If a user keeps flagging content inappropriately, action may be taken against the user instead.

thanks :)