Advise #50 The boss is not the center of the universe (Micromanagement explained)

I got the excerpt below from the link displayed on Javi's ym status message. The site contains numerous essays on selected topics. I like Scott Berkun's essays because it offers a fresh perspective on matters that are often seen as practical common sense but not too often practiced as such. We can all surely learn a thing or two from him.


by Scott Berkun


The stereotype we learn as children is that the manager, the boss, tells other people what to do, and yells at them when they do it wrong. This doesn't work so well. Few people enjoy being told what to do, and frankly, it's not so interesting to be a boss if everyone always does everything you say. The stereotype fails because it's boss centric: the manager is the center of the work universe, when it should be the work.


The job of any manager is to make the best possible things happen. A successful manger gets the best possible work from the team and contributes as much as possible to making their organization successful: any management tactics they employ are done with these goals in mind, rendering a boss centric universe counterproductive. If you take this view of "best possible things" all kinds of clever and interesting approaches come to mind that wouldn't be considered otherwise. (For example, follow the logic: to get their best work, I need the best people. To get the best people, I need to provide interesting work. To provide interesting work I need to create clear, but challenging goals, delegate responsibility, and back them up when they need help.)


However the ego trap many managers fall into is that the only way to make good work happen is to place themselves in the center of everything: every decision, every task, every meeting. This is the opposite of management: it's anti-management. Instead of 5 people working at full speed, you have 5 people limited by the manager's speed in checking and re-checking every single tiny decision they make. Micro-management, the need to control everything, is a fundamental failure of the management to control his bad habits, or to grow a team sufficiently skilled not to need so much of his involvement.

Learning how to delegate, the obvious way out of micro-management, isn't easy. Anyone who previously worked alone and took pride in their perfect work will struggle with assigning work to others. But this is a trap, and a sign that the person isn't ready to manage. It's the giving away of work and gently guiding it, and the person doing the work, to quality results that is the core of what managers are supposed to do. It's a two way process as the manager won't always be right and won't always know the best way to solve a particular challenge (especially if the people reporting to the boss are talented). So the smart manager must delegate, in part, to keep learning new ways to do things.


The best managers build trust with their team, every day, in every meeting, so that eventually critically important and complex tasks can be delegated away. If a manager feels his team isn't capable, his job is to figure out exactly what they're capable of, and then helping them to grow: things that only happen by delegating work and seeing what happens. People need the opportunity to prove themselves and that opportunity is only granted by the manager. If it turns out that work is done poorly, was too hard or the goals weren't set properly, then as a manager, you have a living example to discuss and explore with the person in question. You can work to understand what your expectations of each other were and what they should be. Those conversations, openly exploring the differences in perspective of the manager and the worker, is the heart of management. It is where trust is built and lessons for how to make better work happen are discovered.