The Right Amount of Management 👌
How to think about micromanagement, autonomy, and guidance.
When I was a child, I loved proverbs. I learned many, and tried to use them whenever they fit.
Sometimes, though, they confused me by giving, apparently, conflicting advice:
Opposites attract but, also, birds of a feather flock together.
Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power.
Actions speak louder than words, but the pen is mightier than the sword.
As I would learn later, for any sufficiently nuanced topic, you can’t really give good, universal advice that fits in one sentence.
Good advice is contextual — which is just an opulent way to say “it depends”.
One famous example of conflicting, contextual advice is about management style:
Good managers pay attention to details — but also give people autonomy.
Micromanagement is bad — but neglect is bad, too.
How do you solve this conflict?
Today’s piece explores what micromanagement really means, how to find the right amount of management, and how to implement it in your relationships with co-workers and entire teams.
Here is the agenda:
🎯 Management Goals — let’s walk backwards from what you want to achieve.
👌 Definition of Good — the difference between healthy and toxic feedback.
✔️ Task-relevant Maturity — a handy mental model to think about guidance.
🥇 Task importance — should it affect your behavior as a manager?
📊 Mandate Levels — going for bigger and bigger things.
💬 Community Ideas — examples and insights from our community members.
📚 Resources — my favorite articles to learn more.
Let’s dive in!
🎯 Management goals
In many cases, to explore complex matters, it is useful to identify the final goal first, and walk backwards from there.
In the case of good management, you typically want to achieve two things:
✅ Good outcome for the task at hand
🏅 Autonomous + empowered teammates
Both items are crucial: (1) is about business goals, while (2) makes your team grow and scale.
However, they are also aspirational. In many situations (unexperienced co-workers, unclear tasks, etc) you can’t have both, so managers need to choose between two routes:
Being more prescriptive — sacrifice some autonomy to get a better outcome.
Being more hands-off — sacrifice a better outcome to preserve more autonomy.
Now, in my experience, option (1) is almost always the right one. I know, this looks controversial :)
In fact, the idea that to get autonomy faster you should temporarily sacrifice the outcome, is usually both false and wrong:
False — because people learn by understanding what’s good. Correcting output until it matches the definition of good just accelerates the learning.
Wrong — because, in any case, you shouldn’t make customers pay for your teammates learning.
I also believe this shouldn’t be controversial — at all. And if it seems so, it’s only because we need to agree on what being prescriptive means, and how it differs from micromanagement 👇
👌 Definition of good
To perform a task correctly, people need to understand what good looks like for that task.
This context is often quite nuanced, and is made up of a combination of:
📋 Task-specific specs — e.g. the initial PRD you need to follow to create a design doc.
✨ Principles — general ideas that apply to all tasks of that kind. E.g. design docs need to include a testing plan, and how the software will be instrumented.
This definition of good is crucial to separate between healthy and toxic feedback: