Ask HN: How do you avoid micromanaging? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you avoid micromanaging?

7 pointskostarelo3 comments

Quite often I find my self watching others on my team very close, commenting on every PR, trying to have an opinion on every discussion, etc. While I understand I am doing it, at the same time I find it hard to stop my self, in the fear of things going "wrong" or not work.

Where do you draw the line when it comes to letting the team (or individuals) go on their own?

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It's simple! Get a big enough team and you'll have to stop!

...

I found it useful to reframe my goals as a manager. Now my primary goal is to set up systems and people so that if I went away for a month, the team would keep functioning. With this goal, stepping in to prevent a single mistake is now counterproductive, because you have squashed a learning opportunity that would benefit your team long term. I now imagine that I have a budget of 5 or so interventions per week. I can use them to prevent a problem, or offer advice, or adjust a process. But I know that if I go over budget, I will either overwhelm my team and break down their autonomy, or I will be trying to do too much myself. Setting a goal of staying above the fray keeps me from succumbing to the anxiety that I must always be improving everything I can touch.

If the whole team is junior, your role is to mentor them. Set high expectations and help them reach the results you require. If you have senior members, lean on them to do that mentoring. I think it is appropriate to ask quality questions: how are you measuring success and failure, what alerting and monitoring is in place, what happens if condition $FOO occurs, how are you measuring costs, etc. But your role shouldn't scale to reviewing all code changes and likely should evolve to not looking at code at all. As a manager, you are supposed to be a multiplier of your teams efforts and help them all to level up. By interacting at the PR level, you are not multiplying their efforts. I also recommend reading The Manager's Path

Manage your team like building a machine. It should run on its own and keep running without your input. If you're always micromanaging, it won't have room to run on its own.

The role of many managers is to observe the team, relay/filter information coming in from other teams and out to other teams.

At a later stage you can start to optimize the process. Observe common mistakes and inefficiencies - things from sexual harassment to too many emails dragging the team down. You don't always want to patch mistakes with more tools and regulations, as every patch has a cost. Treat every problem like a bug. Sometimes there is a root cause, which causes several problems at once.

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