Having been in and around web development teams for many years, I’ve seen (and committed myself) a multitude of sins but one of the most common is micro-management. Team leaders are often so desperate to ensure they “get the work done” that they forget they’re suppose to be leading.

Defending our heavily burdened development team leaders
Micro-management is an easy trap to fall into and there are some obvious reasons why this might be. It’s natural for the “best” team members to be promoted to leader / manager level. This generally means the person who was most reliable in producing good work or results:

• Being such a conscientious employee means they feel a responsibility to ensure the work is delivered. They are use to delivering by doing. They are use to being able to completely control what they are responsible for delivering.
• They have been praised for their production quality and therefore their way of producing things has effectively been rubber stamped. This might lead them to believe the best way to ensure good output from their team is make them all follow their way of doing things.
• They are probably one of your most technically competent people. Sometimes the frustration of waiting for less competent people to deliver things when they know they can do it themselves in half the time is enough to make them roll up their sleeves. They end up telling people the solution their problems rather than helping them figure out how to solve problems on their own.
• It’s natural for a person to stick to what they know. When directing people doesn’t yield the exact result they hoped for, they will start breaking things into smaller and smaller tasks until they are telling team members exactly want they want (effectively taking away responsibility and ownership of work from team members).

How do I know if we have the micro-management bug?
Unfortunately although micro-management is easily recognised by team members, micro-managers rarely realise they are micro-managing. This management style is where a team leader or manager closely controls the work of their team members. Every step is monitored. The effect of this management style on the team is to create resentment and damage trust.

Classic symptoms are:

• Team leaders that spend a disproportionate amount of time solving low-level problems for team members.
• Team leaders that send out detailed task lists to team members.
• Disengaged team members that show a lack of ownership over their work.
• Team members that operate in silos only generally working together when instructed to do so.
• General lack of initiative in a team.
• Extremely busy team leaders who are trying to single-handedly meet all the deadlines.

But my dev team is still delivering – why should I care?
It’s quite possible that the team might be managing to hit (some) deadlines and produce (some) quality work under these circumstances (at least in the short term). However, it’s bad for the company in the long term:

• It’s not scalable. If the team leader has to be involved at a low-level on every project, at some point the demand will outstrip the team leader’s capacity. The output of the team is effectively limited by the team leader.
• The team leader becomes a single point of failure for the team. The team becomes use to not taking responsibility for anything, their team leader directing everything and making all the decisions. This makes it extremely difficult for anyone else to cover caretaking the team whilst the team leader is away.
• Pro-active team members who want to own their work and take responsibility will get frustrated and eventually leave the company.
• It’s not healthy for the team leader. Carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders could eventually lead to them going off work with stress.

That’s all a bit negative – is there an up side?
Removing micro-management should bring a number of benefits to the running of your business. Rather than your team leaders looking down, they’ll be looking over and forward. Over their teams and forward to where their teams are going. In practical terms this means:

• Actively looking out for barriers to work completion in the team and taking action to remove them.
• More forward planning of resourcing, enabling them to plan for peaks and dips in demand.
• Having time to provide senior management with quality and timely information
• Formulating and implementing a progression strategy for the team.
• Ensuring they are challenging and progressing individual team members (thereby maximising their team’s potential)

A team leader who is micro-managing will never be able to maximise the potential of their team.

Ok I’m convinced – what should we do?
“you manage things; you lead people.” – Grace Murray Hopper
As Colonel Hopper indicates, leadership and management are two different things. We need to train our team leaders to be leaders as well as managers.

leadership - overlapping needs

The basic principle of leadership can be summed up as a balancing act of overlapping needs:

• Task needs - Enable the group to achieve the task
• Team needs - Build and maintain the team
• Individual needs - Develop the individual

For a leader, it is important to focus the right amount on each of these overlapping needs.

A micro-manager is focussing too much one area and reigning as tight control as possible over the team’s tasks. By doing this, they are not paying enough attention to the team or the individuals. They need to learn to let go of detailed control to gain overall control of the team.

Don’t throw our poor team leaders in at the deep end - get them support, get them training and let them lead their team to greatness!