Being a good manager requires being a leader, not a micromanaging editor, former president of Microsoft's Windows division Steven Sinofsky writes on his blog.
Sinofsky is the guy who made Microsoft Office a powerhouse and then saved Windows after Vista was a complete bust. He was also Bill Gates' right hand man in the 90s.
"Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them," Sinofsky writes. "If the work requires smart, talented, creative people, then more than anything you want to enable folks on the team to create."
Even though it's easy to fall into the trap of editing the work of the people you manage, doing so disempowers the team and removes accountability, Sinofsky writes.
In Sinofsky's words, here are three of the most common bad management patterns and how to avoid them:
- Receive and rework. You glance at your mobile and that updated specification shows up. While there is an expectation to read the spec and provide feedback, the sender was probably hoping for a job well done reply. Instead, your message back is a quick “did you think of X” or “I don’t like the way you say Y”. This gets even worse if the feedback is about the presentation of the information rather than the information. You hope to be improving the work but inadvertently spin up a PowerPoint or Excel workshop session. There might very well be mistakes or significant missteps in the work. Step back and deliver a clear and focused message on those and just skip the easy adds or tweaks. Suggestion: Make a simple rule for yourself like “never suggest a different format of a report” or “never add more work unless you also take away work” or “save feedback for the critical or strategic elements”.
- Delegate and tweak. When you delegate work to the member of the team, your job is to clearly frame success and describe the objectives. Delegation of work can be as simple as scrubbing the feature list or as complex as asking someone to take on a group-wide stretch assignment. No matter what the scale of delegation, getting out of the way after delegation is key. When the results are in, keep in mind not the results free of context but look at the results in the context of how you delegated the work. If you see mistakes or missteps, ask yourself if you were clear or your delegation caused the problems. Editing the work that ignores the context will tend to alienate folks as they keep thinking “would have been nice if you told me that up front”. Leading is actively taking responsibility for the lack of clarity and triaging the real marginal gain from tweaks at this later stage. Suggestion: Delegate challenges and define success, but don’t delegate the intermediate steps or detailed output, making it clear where creativity is expected.
- Fetch and edit. The best work for creative folks on the team is when the problem is big and the solution escapes everyone. In these cases, as a manager you don’t know the answer. That’s stressful for everyone. The way to increase the stress is to ask a member of the team to build or create an answer for “review” or for a list of options and recommendations. We all know how this process can really go haywire. When one potential solution to an unknown is offered, the next step is to go back and rework it with the new learning, or “no not that rock, a different rock”. We also know that with a big unknown and a list of n possible choices, after a brief dialog the next step is to pick option n+1. Suggestion: Asking creative people solve vaguely defined problems can be the most rewarding work of the team, so don’t drain the energy by thinking you will know the best answer when you see it, driving folks a bit loopy in the process.
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