Management by laziness

    I’ve found that paradoxically I sometimes get the fastest, highest quality 
    progress by asking what’s the minimum control input I can give to be 
    successful?

There's an analogous concept in auto-racing. The fastest drivers are the ones who steer the least. That is to say, any steering input necessarily slows the forward speed of the car. So it's important to find the line or path that allows you traverse the track with a minimum of steering.

The same thing applies to management. Every interruption or rebalancing of priorities for your team causes a shift, and that shift takes time to effect. During that time your team is operating at less than full efficiency, as some of their mental effort is going towards learning the new system or figuring out the new priorities rather than actually delivering the end product for the customer. The fastest teams are driven by managers who apply the minimum level of input to keep the team on the right path, but then back off once the team is heading in the right direction.

This reminds me of a brilliant observation by military leaders in the past:

The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.

More on the history of this quote here: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/

This reminds me of the following: I was brainstorming about startup ideas with a very good friend of mine a while back. Somehow I noticed that while we were making progress it was a lot slower than I was used to compared if I do it alone. And my communication with him is very good (when we play hints we sometimes need 2 words when we're on the same team), so it was kind of strange to experience this. The next day I decided to think about startup ideas alone and I thought up a lot more. I also felt that the quality of ideas were a bit higher.

For me, when I think about it, it has something to do with the sub-conscious perspective that I take. Perhaps I tend to have a bit more of a tunnel vision when I am with people. Maybe more people have this when they are in the presence of other people. I don't know if this is because of the presence of other people or perhaps communication goes inherently slower with someone else than with myself (bottleneck: speed of sounds vs. speed of neurons).

It makes me curious about searching for papers about the presence of other people. I only know about Milgram's experiments on this.

For me the hardest part of management is letting go of control, especially when the habit of asking the lead for advice is necessarily ingrained in junior developers.

What works for me is getting in tune to my annoyance and identifying opportunities for eliminating some task I'm doing that the junior dev should be in charge of. (peer code reviews, for example)