I don’t think this is right. Managers can be hands-on or hands-off, task-oriented, or people-oriented.<p>Very task-oriented + very hands-on = micromanager.<p>Very hands-off = a disengaged manager.<p>In my experience, the best managers can find a beneficial spot on those axes for each employee.<p>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.<p>IMO, saying one extreme is better than another tells you a bit about the author, nothing helpful about management in general.<p>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.
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.<p>So what's the lesson here?<p>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.<p>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.<p>The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
Communication turns to shit either way.<p>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.<p>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?).<p>One was for deployments to JBoss 6 and 7, the other for EAP 6.4.<p>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.<p>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.
No thank you. I absolutely <i>detest</i> 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 <i>just enough</i> 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.
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.<p>The moment I got the micromanager my productivity dropped and I lost interest in the job. I <i>hate</i> having someone constantly check on what I am doing. I quit the job because I started hating it so much.<p>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.
This just speaks to an environment that lacks trust.<p>Micromanagement happens when you can't trust that people will do the work.<p>Disengagement becomes bad if you can't trust that people will do the work.<p>Hire people you can trust to do the work and let them do it.
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
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.
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.
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
i want two kinds of manager:<p>me: wtf is this doing connecting to this socket and getting this response?<p>mgr: because ............<p>and:<p>me: how do i claim expenses on the last trip i went on?<p>mgr: get form ... i will sign it, and then take it to accounts<p>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.
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.
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.
Is this a discussion of micromanagement at the CEO level, or of general managers?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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?<p>Keeps you on your toes.
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.<p>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.<p>There's rarely any other reason.
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"
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.
I hate micro management usually because they're more worried about slack time than building value is neither good for employee neither for shareholders<p>as employee I optimize "work rate" for value output
as shareholder I optimize spending for profit<p>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.<p>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 :)<p>Because the transpiling part is gone in few years LLM will do it better than any average programmer
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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Either extreme you will resent them. With a balance however, you will respect them.
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.
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.
In my experience 3 people have 5 opinions what MM really means.<p>I would love to hear a very clear and succinct definition of micromanagement. Any good references?
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.
Rampant false choices – in the article and in this thread.<p>When things are getting done on time and on budget, let the team run free.<p>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.<p>Trust & responsibility is a two-way street.