If You're Not Micromanaging, You're Not Leading

This article isn't about micromanagement in any sense.

It's about management having the competency to perform and verify low level data analysis and come to agree or disagree with what they are being told.

I've worked with managers in the past who told their direct reports that they needed to do "selective analysis" (in other words, cook the books), because "people didn't want to hear bad news." Although this was egregiously disingenuous, I think the desire to put spin on bad news is innate.

It's up to management to smell if something's amiss, and to make sure that being honest and forthright is a requirement to maintain employment.

Not only is being able to get to the raw data not micromanaging, it's good management.

Richard Feynman spoke about how he stopped trusting values simply because they came from some authoritative source after getting burned once. After that he calculated things himself.

That lesson relates to the "global telecommunications giant" in the story, whose "critical network software upgrade" was turning into a disaster. In fact, I recently went through a similar situation myself at a job; well before I got there, technical leadership had planned out an overly-ambitious, complex and time-consuming whole-scale rewrite of a critical service, and when I arrived, they were chest-deep in shit creek. As the team sunk lower and lower, I felt compelled to reach out to higher-ups. That's how I lost my head. I hear their collective hair is still on fire.

Is the lesson there that I should have kept more quiet? I'm still not sure. But what is clear to me is that non-technical leadership need to be able to properly assess the risks of technical decisions. As the story mentions, one of the best ways to do that is to get someone from outside the team to analyze the process and the progress. Because even someone half-competent will be able to tell you when some major upgrade creates a major risk, and the best way to mitigate that risk is to divide-and-conquer the major task into minor ones.

Another key smell is how "the program managers' key performance indicator dashboards showed nothing alarmingly unusual". I would dare say that those dashboards are then fundamentally broken. One fix: edw519 has written about the need for task progress to either be 100% or 0%, as a way to flush issues out of the woodwork.

Fred Brooks is right: we're still stuck in the tar-pits. Maybe we'll find our way out in the next 45 years...

Asking tough questions about how the company operates and demanding to see the raw data rather than "executive summaries" isn't micromanaging. Micromanaging is telling your employees how they should do every little detail of their jobs when they're perfectly capable of doing them without your interference.

A CEO who doesn't have a deep understanding of how his company works is probably not worth his hefty salary.

It's unfortunate that the author used the term "micromanagement". I realize it is to make the subject provocative and thereby capture readers, but it will also produce such a negative visceral reaction that the key take-aways will be missed:

1. The best leaders are capable of adding value to other people's jobs. You don't necessarily need to be able to do their job, but you need to be able to stand next to them.

2. There are times you need to step in and demand more detail to find out what is really going on.

3. Good leaders have the [skill|experience|6th sense] to know when they need to do that versus trusting their employees. Sometimes it may be never, sometimes it may be always.

4. Good leaders can do the above without losing themselves in the minutia of trying to do other peoples' jobs for them (or telling them what to do).

Perhaps "If you don't know the details, you can't effectively lead" would be better.

To me, this sounds something like: "If you're not optimizing the assembler output of your Lisp code, you're not programming."

Layers of abstraction exist for a reason.

If you need to micromanage you hired the wrong people.

In my experience (in the software industry), if you micro-manage you are in my way and I will run over you (possibly on my way out the door!)

"Trust but verify" is not micromanagement, it's simply good practice (in management or in engineering).

Schrage outlined how examples of how to manage crisis situations, not micromanagement.

If a manager does not delegate then he/she is not busy enough. That said, one needs to have a thorough understanding of the work of all subordinates, whether technical or not, in order to understand how to quickly ameliorate circumstances that deviate from an anticipated course.

The lesson here is that managers needs to be involved, at a high level, early and often to catch onerous situations before they evolve.

This is more of a story of how executives of large companies lose touch with customers and their raw business because they also have to manage strategically as well as management the entire business portfolio. This is why you hear of managers working the shop floor, answering support desks etc. It grounds them to their key business.

Wildly inaccurate title for a misinterpreted anecdote that has no bearing on programming whatsoever. Flagged.