Jane has given her tech lead Sanjay a big project to manage. It needs to be done by the end of the month, which should be fine, but Jane is worried that the deadline will slip. So she starts attending all of the standups that she normally doesn’t go to, and asks questions directly of the team about their blockers. She looks through the project tickets and makes a bunch of comments, and even reassigns some of them to other team members. When she discovers that Sanjay and the product manager decided to deprioritize a feature, Jane decides that it’s time for her to take over the project, and she tells Sanjay that from now on she will be managing the day-to-day.
It’s no surprise when, despite the fact that the project shipped successfully, Sanjay tells Jane that he feels like he doesn’t want to be a tech lead anymore. In fact, he seems pretty low-energy, and his normal engagement and hard work are replaced by him leaving early and saying nothing in meetings. Her best team member has become a low performer seemingly overnight. What happened?
Micromanagement creeps up on you. A high-stress project that can’t be allowed to slip seems at risk, and so you step in to correct it. You delegate something, but then discover that you don’t like the technical choices the team has made to implement it, so you tell them to rewrite it. You force everyone to come to you before making decisions because they just can’t be trusted to do the right thing, or there have been too many mistakes and you always end up paying the price.
Now, let’s take a look at Jane’s colleague, Sharell. Sharell has given Beth her first big project to run. Sharell knows that this project needs to ship on time, but instead of sitting in on every meeting and tracking every detail, Sharell works with Beth to determine which meetings she should attend, and helps Beth understand which details to escalate to Sharell. With this support, Beth feels confident running the project, but also knows that Sharell has her back, and when things get stressful toward the end of it, Beth enlists Sharell’s help to cut scope and get the project out on time. Beth leaves the experience feeling more confident, and ready to take on bigger projects and work harder for Sharell.
Jane’s and Sharell’s decisions highlight the subtle differences between the micromanager and the effective delegator. Both Jane and Sharell are attempting to delegate the management of a high-priority project in order to train a new leader on their team. However, Jane ultimately never gives up control and undermines Sanjay, while Sharell makes it clear to Beth what the goals are and what her responsibilities are, and provides support and guidance to help Beth succeed.
The hardest thing about micromanagement is that there are times when you need to do it. Junior engineers often thrive under detailed oversight because they want that specific direction. Some projects go off the rails, and you occasionally need to override decisions made by your reports that could have big negative repercussions. However, if micromanagement is your habit, if it’s your default approach toward leading your team, you’ll end up like poor Jane, accidentally undermining the very people you need to be growing and rewarding.
Trust and control are the main issues around micromanagement. If you’re micromanaging someone, chances are you’re doing it because you don’t trust that a task will be done right, or you want to very tightly control the outcome so that it meets your exact standards. This happens a lot when talented engineers become managers, especially if they pride themselves on their technical skills. If your value to the team has shifted from the thing you’re good at (writing code) to the thing you don’t yet know how to do well (managing people), it can be tempting to treat your reports as if they should be mini-mes. When a deadline slips, as it inevitably will, you view it as a failure to control the situation precisely enough, and so ratchet up the attention. You catch something not going the way you expected, and it seems to reinforce your belief that micromanaging the team is an appropriate use of your time.
Autonomy, the ability to have control over some part of your work, is an important element of motivation. This is why micromanagers find it so difficult to retain great teams. When you strip creative and talented people of their autonomy, they lose motivation very quickly. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you can’t make a single decision on your own, or feeling like every single piece of work you do has to be double- and triple-checked by your manager.
On the other hand, delegation is not the same thing as abdication. When you’re delegating responsibility, you’re still expected to be involved as much as is necessary to help the project succeed. Sharell didn’t just abandon Beth — she helped Beth understand the responsibilities in the new role and was there as needed to support the project.