The sum of it is an employee that knows the right way, and is given the freedom to do that will make the correct choices, if they fail occasionally that's ok. If they can't be trained, or refused to follow the expectations, then they need another job.
Micromanagement will just repress those employees further where they'll be too afraid to make their own decisions.
Humorously, the book is called "It's your Ship", by a navy captain who turned the worst ship in the navy into the top ship
Personal example of this, an old foreman I knew on a job, had a boss who didn't understand that people had strengths, so as an example he would routinely swap people into tasks that emphasized their weakness to prove it.
Additionally, this allowed people who didnt do X job because they didn't have the confidence or skill, to actually get a little extra experience as well
"It's Your Ship", Captain D. Michael Abrashoff "Turn the Ship Around", (Captain) L. David Marquet
I'd actually be curious how much the advice overlaps.
Fellow workers, the boss and management is not looking out for your interest, the default is they're looking out for their interest. Your best hope is once in a while to find a "good" boss who is not 100% on board with the investors and is willing to split the difference. If you're on the top half of people in your position in terms of skills, if you're willing to do what reasonably needs to be done within 40 hours a week, then the boss is who needs to be questioned, not yourself - you are the one who is doing the work and creating the wealth for the company.
Some have backed off when they realized I know what I’m doing. We have a good working relationship.
Others double down hard, and take it as personal insult that I’m not going to be micromanaged. These cases end badly.
Others give try to micromanage, I let them know I’m not going to follow their rules. They don’t actually care what I do. But they keep trying. Basically pretending they are managing me. These situations are depressing and sad.
To contrast.
Then there are the ones that just point a general direction and encourage good team dynamics. I love these ones
Investors care about results; they don't care about the style middle management uses. This is a false dichotomy.
If the company is focused on short-term wins to the detriment of long-term viability, that's a separate issue (and really has nothing to do with management style).
> ..then my excellent boss leaves for greener pastures, and suddenly a new much worse boss comes in and begins micromanaging...
> ..then the boss is who needs to be questioned
If this means results suffer (probably), then it's pretty obvious the cause in this case, right?
This is decentralized command, and really the best place to be. That's why I believe being a leader in software dev. is really about serving the ppl under you - not the opposite.
I think it's about balance:
I will micromanage new hires initially, so that I can ensure they are sticking to SOPs, code standards etc. and developing the habits we need to be successful.
After awhile, the training wheels can come off and you can give them ownership of larger and larger stakes in projects. They'll stumble once in awhile, but chances are that goes back to something you (leader) left as ambiguous - or that they genuinely didn't know.
I've not heard any negative feedback, but I think it requires a 'fine touch' - or you risk drowning people in information / tedium. If they get things the first time, I won't be prone to checking up on them as much.
If I hired a dev with significant experience, I don't think I would use the same process, aside from knowledge gaps.
I definitely have received negative feedback on processes that are in place, and I welcome that, because if something can be done better, or more efficiently - then we should change it. Flexibility is key.
I disagree. It's like parents who spend all their time on the problem child, and then the children who are doing well become bitter and resentful. You're neglecting the rest of the team for one individual, who they all probably see is problematic, which is not a good way to run a team.
While I would love for my boss to purposefully ignore me; it's ok if my boss is only ignoring me because there's no time for me after tending to the other employees. I will not be sad or resentful if my 1:1 had to be canceled because my boss had something else to do.
Essentially you build tools that help avoid some of the problems you're seeing, and slowly ratchet up from beta test to mandatory as the tool becomes more reliable. At the end if the problem person refuses to use the tool, then you have a clear HR problem.
The people who make mistakes aren't your enemy. The people who make mistakes and insist they don't need help are the enemy.
Absolutely. A manager should regularly have conversations with everyone on their team. During reviews, absolutely nobody should be surprised by their review. If a manager has to fire someone, that person should not be surprised by this. Constant communication is not micromanagement, it is an absolute requirement of management. It is not one way, either; it is an open conversation.
> As an employee, try to be as a reflective person as you ask your boss to be one.
Yes and no. A manager cannot push their responsibility of open communication onto the employee by expecting them to just know what their performance is. That being said, upon proper feedback, yes, an employee should ingest that and reflect upon that feedback.
Did you take the micromanaging approach because you didn't open a channel for feedback between you and the team?
Micromanagement is one thing: a lack of trust. You micromanage because you don't trust, or maybe they don't trust either. So, what do you do to build up trust? You talk.
Note that this is different to accountability. You can hold people to account without micromanaging them.
What do you do when talking leads to them saying "I understand, next time I'll either get it done faster, or let you know when I realize it's gonna slip" but then what actually happens is that it slips without them giving you any updates again after all? Repeatedly? Talking doesn't build trust when the actions don't match the talk.
If there's a persistent lack of communication when it should've been known that a deadline is not going to be met or is at least going to be close, set-up a PIP where you lay down a checklist to follow at the start/end of the day of behaviors you expect regarding communication.
If that doesn't help, then yes, firing is the correct response, not permanent micromanagement.
This is all under the generous assumption that your deadlines are actually very important in the business and plans will have to be shifted if they're not met because of a harsh business reality. Otherwise it's your fault for allowing the cost of deadlines to be incurred in a team where all they will do is hinder morale, add bureaucracy and reduce productivity.
As far as most dev teams are concerned, timelines are less important for the business than they are to each other.
People don't like it when they are constantly waiting on person X to finish their part of the work. (That's a good way to know you've really dropped the ball as manager: the other team members start asking YOU what's going on with the other person.)
You say that you want X. X has to be reasonably achievable. You don't tell them how to do X, though.
That introduces another set of problems. You have to do X within Y.
Suddenly you know more of Y than X. So then you turn towards Z and you have to do XY within Z, but Y is more important than X.
Another possibility is that the environment is one in which it’s not okay to admit that schedules are slipping, despite the manager’s insistence to the contrary.
There are many more possibilities of course. Does the employee have any insights into why they failed to take the action they promised?
If a designer makes an unresponsive site, the manager can just say "hey do a responsive design tutorial". But if the designer gets all kinds of patterns or structures or the company design language just wrong, it's very hard to discuss that without making the designer feel like you're micromanaging them.
All of your examples can be handled with good communication. If a designer makes an unresponsive site but the site should be responsive, then the communication failed and the requirements were wrong.
If you're a manager or a leader then, ultimately, you are responsible for the failures you presided over. You can't sit back and observe the chaos.
Sometimes you can have a Frank discussion about it, or regular ‘adult’ type discussion, and there is something that can be done that fixes it, and it can be fixed. That is not always the case. Sometimes the person is fundamentally incapable of doing the work (rare), or in a place they can’t care about or don’t want to do it - but won’t or can’t acknowledge it.
Re:accountability - there are many different definitions one can use for what this really means. The clearest I am familiar with is ‘if you can’t or won’t do the job to standard, and there is no special circumstance like a leave that should be applied, you don’t have that job anymore’.
That is easier said than done in many business environments.
I’ve worked in places where someone literally not doing any useful work was going on a year+ of dragging on with the team, constantly changing reasons for why they couldn’t do the job, and killing the teams morale. Literally 4 layers of management involved in HR processes trying to drive this to a useful conclusion, but new buttons being pushed every month by the employee and a highly risk adverse HR/Corp culture meant the situation couldn’t be resolved. All this on top of 6 months of coaching and attempting to help this individual be a productive member of the team.
These environments all require micromanagement of low performers as part of the performance management process - it’s the way things have to be to get the documentation and proof of coaching for CYA.
Accountability isn't easier said than done; it exists everywhere, but you choose how to apply it and when and you use your bias to decide how hard to apply the discipline.
If you feel you need to micromanage someone, then you've lost your leadership too.
If you, as a leader, will get fired for holding someone accountable to the job (and firing them) and stopping a toxic environment from happening on the team, what then? What if the reason for that is some meta PR corporate reason that makes sense for corporate maybe but not for you and your team?
What if your job includes not causing those larger corporate issues and following the rules of the larger org?
It’s a failure of a large organization, and part of that failure is often making sure there is no one to actually hold accountable in a real way. It sucks. It happens.
This is great advice about being reflective, however most humans don't like such conversations (for example like most friend groups). Do you have advice on how to approach such conversations?
Micro-Managing underperformers doesn't scale; better to raise more money and raise the hiring bar.
And yet...
> The truth is probably that I should have gotten into more serious talks with those employees instead.
There you go. Very often employees are unproductive because they are unhappy.
> As an employee, try to be as a reflective person as you ask your boss to be one
It's the people-manager job to understand people. It's not the employee's job or skillset.
It's the right thing to fire them. For you and for them. Wrong match, end of story.
Could be they lack experience or something else, but it might just as well be you lacking clear goals etc. Either way, wrong match, end of story.
In many situations none of those things hold. In some of these situations investing in the failing team is far better than checking them out and then repeating the disaster.
And, remember others are watching. If you have a rep as an axeman a lot of people won't work for you - no ifs, no buts, no amount of comp will make a difference. You can end up with the B team - a B team who won't look you in the eye and produces 70 pages of evidence at every evaluation.
Good luck with your management career!
The remaining 25% approx. fought the whole way, refused to take any ownership of their issues, and were a huge relief for the team when they were gone - and in the environment I dealt with most of these cases? It was incredibly, incredibly hard to get rid of them. 3+ months of constant work, mandatory weekly check-ins and micromanagement, you name it.
I don’t like firing people, but I hate toxic team environments, and recognize it helps no one for someone to stay in a culture/org/team that clearly doesn’t work. I personally always put the work in, because I knew how important it was. I’ve seen many managers not do that.
I agree with you that it’s better to fire a not fit. I’ve also seen many (50%ish) turn it around after or shortly after other companies would have summarily fired them.
Big Corp, especially big tech Corp, has a giant target on it’s back and is very risk adverse to firing (justifiably so) in many cases, even if it hurts the team or the individual.
Ex-Amazon here. Most FAANGs are known for their aggressive stack-ranking and high attrition rate. Amazon has the highest attrition rate.
But note that to the extent that someone suffers from ADHD and just needs a stronger hand from their manager as an accommodation in order to be productive, you might be legally required to give it to them.
I feel there's a very LARGE and DISTINCT difference between effective management and micromanagement. The article's points show that when dealing with a micromanager, you're dealing with a narcissist. Nothing the employee does is right; the manager's path forward is likely not even possible; and, most importantly, only the manager feels they themselves can do it correctly.
When a team is underperforming, there are ways to help out which do not amount to nitpicks and providing poor direction. Offering very direct support and feedback is NOT micromanagement.
I think most people would consider that the case. There is also the trope of the ‘micromanager’ who is the insecure ‘I asked 5 minutes ago, why isn’t it done exactly right already’ type. They might be narcissists, but I’ve seen plenty who weren’t - insecurity always plays a huge part, and seems correlated with workaholism too. They micromanage everyone.
It’s entirely possible to be micromanaged by someone due to something you’re doing, and by someone who isn’t a micromanager or prone to micromanaging. They’ll hate it, but they have reasons why specifically they are doing it with you that may suck to hear, but probably have some grounding in reality. I’ve been on both sides of this and it sucks on both sides.
It’s also possible to work for someone that micromanages everyone because that’s who they are.
Micromanaging is complicated. When I was in a leadership position I was the happiest boss when I could let people just do their thing and come back with great results and we'd be all happy. And that's how I loved working with my bosses before as well.
But then again, I had some employees I had to micromanage. I really, really abhorred it. But there was just no other way to achieve results. The truth is probably that I should have gotten into more serious talks with those employees instead. But before you fire people, you have to invest to be absolutely sure you're doing the right thing.
What I am trying to say is: As an employee, try to be as a reflective person as you ask your boss to be one. Maybe your work is the reason for him/her to be micromanaging you.