Micromanagement

A few days ago I read this article from the blog, Coding Horror.  I read it fairly frequently even though it has a very technical slant to it.  It claims that if you answer yes or kinda yes to any of these questions – you are probably micromanaging.  I shared my answers below – in some cases I disagreed or felt it wasn’t as black and white as the article makes it out to be.

1. 1. Do you pride yourself on being “on top of” the projects or your direct reports? Do you have a solid grasp of the details of every project?
2. Do you believe that you could perform most of the tasks of your direct reports, and potentially do a better job?
3. Do you pride yourself on frequent communication with your employees? Does that communication include asking them for detailed status reports and updates?
4. Do you believe that being a manager means that you have more knowledge and skills than your employees, and thus are better equipped to make decisions?
5. Do you believe that you care about things (quality, deadlines, etc.) more than your employees?

Here are my answers to those questions -

1. I definitely feel the need to have at least a cursory understanding of the work my team is doing.  That does not mean I challenge them or distrust them regarding the information they are giving me.  It means my role is to interface with the client and be able to explain, in non-technical terms, why and estimate is X number of hours or why this is not something we can complete in a couple days.
2. I do not feel that I can do a better job developing than anyone on my development team. I did spend a few years in Visual Basic 6 world and some in VB.net – I am not very good at it.  I think that background allows me to relate to my development team better.
3. Because we use the scrum methodology on my current project – we talk Monday, Wednesday and Friday for about 15 minutes during out morning stand-up meeting.  Additionally, we maintain a daily burn down chart.  Considering that during the day I don’t bother them much – I don’t consider this excessive.
4. Absolutely not.
5. If my development team is consistently not meeting deadlines and the quality is poor that then do not care about our client and have very little respect for me.  I see this as a 2 way street.

- Bill Weber

photo credit: tjetjep