eManagr News

If you’re coming in late, last week, I suggested that management is harder than it should be because we consistently fill management positions with people who probably shouldn’t manage.

There are people who understand what their team does well enough to keep tabs and smart enough to manage rather than interrupt.  If you have such a manager, ignore this post and do everything it takes to keep that job.  The rest of us see our primary facilitator make our jobs more difficult.

By looking at bad management, we can hopefully see how important a good manager is, and find a path to good management along the way.

When it comes to technically-oriented managers, there are two serious problems, one at each end of the spectrum:

• Micromanagement
• Neglect

Micromanagement is probably the more irritating of the two issues, the nagging need to spell out every part of a project in painstaking detail and then to see continua status reports to ensure that everything is done exactly as demanded.  This, of course, leads to some serious problems in turn:

• Collaboration benefits are lost.  The saying, taken to heart by the Open Source community, is that “all of us are smarter than one of us.”  Unfortunately, under micromanaging policies, none of us are smarter than one of us.
• Overhead increases.  The project loses valuable time that is now taken up by waiting for the manager to consider, explain, verify, and approve every step of the project.  Not only is time wasted, but often money as well, by asking well-paid, talented professionals to effectively sit on the sidelines.

Neglect, assuming that professionals neither want nor need guidance or set expectations, seems like a safer bet.  However, there are significant dangers here, as well.

• Teams idle:  Let’s be honest, here.  Yes, there are some purely self-directed workers out there.  However, the overwhelming majority of people, without guidance, will tend to wander the depths of the Internet rather than stay ahead of the schedule.  After all, there’s always time later.
• Goals mismatch.  Unsurprisingly, when a manager leaves the team to “just do the job,” invariably the team members not only don’t know what their priorities are, but also don’t know each other’s priorities.  This wastes time
• Help is late.  The team has slacked off and doesn’t quite know what parts of the project are important to the consumer.  When do we find this out?  That’s right, not until it’s time to integrate or check the results, usually close to when the final product needs to get out the door.

So–big surprise–the project is late.  As they say,

There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it again.

There are our (exaggerate) technical managers.  Next time, we’ll look at the (exaggerated) outside managers.  In the meantime, as the joke goes, “don’t do that,” because there actually isn’t time to do it again.

Tags: Management, Series

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.