Google spent ten years researching what makes the 'perfect' manager
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Project Oxygen is a really great resource for any of you out there looking for more information on this stuff.
One thing I’ll call out from this particular summary: > "I love to be micromanaged," said no employee, ever.
One thing to think about is how to junior / in training mode your current team member is. Your level of management involvement scales (micro to macro) as your team member becomes more senior, and you’re able to trust their work, and they’re able to trust your direction. I’ve made this mistake where I had a junior employee, gave them tons of autonomy and freedom, and they floundered and felt “unmanaged”. To me, I was just “not micro-managing” them. To them, I just wasn’t managing at all. Management isn’t one size fits all, and the techniques we use has to vary based on each person on our team. There is no “One True Way”.
Coaching is an interesting topic for a lot of people, as I see this as a gap for a lot of the managers I work with through my mentoring program. We teach coaching during our leadership cohort program ( https://connect.eagerlabs.com ) for this very reason, and I’ll be curious how many of our graduates actually look to start taking ICF workshops or certifications coming out of it (or some other coaching certification network).
I'm sure for Google, who generally hire incredibly talented engineers right off the bat, a 'no-micromanagement' policy works well; but for a fresh-faced undergraduate straight out of a second-rate university, micro-management and mentorship is crucial. Something that might take a junior hours to do can be solved in minutes with a bit of guidance. I think sometimes the senior engineers I work with underestimate how much knowledge they have to share, and overestimate how much knowledge a 20-something year old engineer with one internship under their belt has.
Micromanagement plays out as a constant barrage of needing to be updated on every single detail that you work on. It's immensely tiring, and essentially comes from the manager not really trusting you and exercising too much control. They need to know about every action you take and how long is it taking (and why is it taking X long). It's horrible and drives people to look elsewhere. Project managers also fail badly at this. They badly manage the customer and try always be a 'yes' man to every whim they have, and end up driving the engineers crazy by wanting constant updates hour by hour.
With my new manager, by him checking in with me more frequently to see how things are going I can gauge my performance better from his reaction, pick up on errors I've done early on in the process that I wouldn't have spotted myself, and build a better dialogue with him. Frankly, if this comes from the manager not trusting me then I don't blame him; he shouldn't - I'm an idiotic 20-something year old. I haven't built that framework of expertise where I can do a job without error or guidance.
Conversely, a 'hands-off' boss for me meant that I'd be working all day, only to hand in the work and find out I'd done something completely wrong and needed to re-do things from scratch. I might be doing a job as I've read in the spec, but it turns out there's some common practice way of completing it that I'm just expected to know right off the bat. I wouldn't know what the intended outcome of a project was, because I had never completed a project before.
Micro-management is like captaining a boat. If the skipper constantly corrects the course, he'll exhaust the crew - but if he doesn't correct enough, the boat can veer off rapidly with no one at the helm.
At work, we have job grades basically on even numbers: '4' is a fresh-out-of-college new hire, '6' would be someone with a Master's degree or a couple years' experience, '8' would be 3-5 years' experience, and so forth.
The rule of thumb I was given when talking with managers was this: you always need to regularly meet with each employee to review their list of tasks and priorities and make sure they're on track. You should meet with a '4' once a day, a '6' once a week, an '8' once a month, and a '10' (senior engineer) once a quarter. It's a rough rule of thumb, but it sets the expectations: a new hire should require more consistent contact and direction-setting than someone senior, who should be able to set directions more independently and just check in.
You lead people, you manage things. People are not managed, they are either led well or poorly. Good leaders lead from the front, right alongside their charges. This is one thing I miss from my military time. Leaders should be working, not sitting in an office breathing rarefied air and distant from their charges.
I'm thankful my current "boss" is happy to simply let me and my one colleague run with it. Should we need something, we ask, but otherwise we know what to do and the road map is clear. We work with a sense of urgency, get things done and keep the boss happy. He looks good, we look good. Another thing that is detestable is too many meetings for the sake of meetings. Have a purpose for the meeting. Allow feedback, take constructive criticism (leaders, I'm looking at you), and actually lead with your troops, not away from them. My sole colleague and I get more done in one day than I did in a week at my previous position because the bureaucracy would not get out of the way.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
When someone has to do something boring/dirty/ugly, never let them do it alone. Sometimes having a buddy help you with shit work can actually turn it into something fun.
We had to field day the barracks every Thursday night. There was no liberty until it was done and inspection complete. As an NCO, I made sure that myself and other NCOs took turns on the buffers, mops/buckets right alongside the Privates and Lance Corporals. There is no "I" in team. This is one thing about the Marine Corps I miss. A very few people could move mountains. The Corps is able to do so much with very little.
What you are referring to applies very well to frontline leadership which is the NCO type
This is clearly more of the usual click-bait nonsense from Business Insider.
Edit: and speaking of voting, since this got downvoted: I wasn't the person who downvoted you. I felt bad you got marked down and wanted to let you know since sometimes on HN people can be weird about "HN is not Reddit" :)
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