You don't, not if you want something to get done.<p>> <i>I felt that there must be a better way to do this so that the principals know the problems we have that I need help with (and also know about the problems I don’t know about), without me doling them out.</i><p>This is not management. Management involves delegation and monitoring and control of resources. It's not, "hey gang, here's a workboard of the stuff that needs to be done, you know what to do."<p>> <i>Quite often, someone will email or mention at stand-up a problem that they have picked up and solved before I’ve even heard that it exists.</i><p>This is problematic because that means nobody on the team (including the manager) has a holistic view of what's going on in the project. That's supposed to be one of the manager's responsibilities.<p>There's some stuff in this post that might be beneficial for managing a team more efficiently, but it shouldn't be described in the context of "this is how a manager abdicates their responsibility".<p>This is pretty well understood in ICS (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System</a>). There is one incident commander; one section chief for each section (who may have one or a couple of assistants); one branch manager, and so on, all the way down. An incident commander may have a briefing with multiple branch directors, but typically that'll just be for purposes of sharing common information. Actual instructions go out to each branch director individually. Each branch director in turn passes instructions and additional information further down the chain. Eventually the information gets to a team, but even then there's a designated team leader and if someone is in charge of multiple teams, they gather the team leaders together and address them first as a group and then give them instructions individually.<p>ICS is designed to scale up or down depending on the scope of an incident, so these layers aren't present for all incidents. In small incidents you may have an incident commander speaking directly to one or more team leaders.<p>It works really well in practice and this is the system that multiple organizations use to find their ass when everything's going pear-shaped all at once. Startups and businesses could learn a lot from it.<p>One of the essential parts of the system is that every person has a clearly defined role. Another is that there's a one-on-one relationship between each level, so that nobody's left trying to understand more of the situation than is necessary or trying to figure out what their task is.<p>ICS is used all over the world to get stuff done in urgent situations that would just blow the tops off the heads of most mid-level business managers. It's a good system to learn.