Daily exhausting meetings. Developers who write reports instead of coding. Teams that must coordinate their every step. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone.
Overcontrol was not a rare thing in team management before the lockdown. But the switch to home offices seems to have sparked a new pandemic – the micromanagement pandemic.
The results of Blind study in 2021 showed that 42% of employees find that “their bosses began to micromanage them when they started to work remotely”. In many large tech companies such as IBM, CISCO, Microsoft, etc. the vast majority of employees see a negative impact of remote work on their relationship with the boss.
Why was the transition to remote or hybrid work a trigger? How can micromanagement harm an IT project? How to get rid of micromanagement habits? We will consider these questions in today’s article. Let’s start with the definition of micromanagement.
Micromanagement is a management style where the manager seeks to control every step of every employee. In the US, micromanaged managers are also called “helicopter bosses”, as they hover over their subordinates.
The negative impact of micromanagement on the software development process
Redeemed creativeness
The key problem with micromanagement is that it opposes the essence of software development. Development is creative intellectual work. It involves a constant search for solutions, brainstorming of ideas and a rejection of these ideas.
Micromanagers are afraid of such “free-floating” and often insist on using ready-made, albeit outdated or ineffective solutions. The time spent on “searching for a solution” rather than “creating a solution” feels to a helicopter boss like a downtime on the project and a loss of control.
Such an attitude discourages the team from suggesting new ideas. And the value of teamwork in IT is exactly in the variety of experiences, knowledge, and backgrounds that each team member brings to the project. In today’s highly competitive IT market, innovation is the key to new successes. Micromanagers throw this key away and prefer to reopen old well-known doors.
Learned helplessness
Micromanagement creates a work culture of soldiers silently waiting for orders. Developers can not be proactive in such an environment. They do not take responsibility for their decisions and do not want to accept any challenges. Instead, they passively wait for instructions from managers.
During development, however, code decisions have to be made by the developer, as they are a specialist in this field. A project manager should not interfere and control every line of code even if they have experience in the field of software development. This doesn’t only slow down the development process, but also calls into question the expertise of the employee, the expertise of the HR who hired this employee, etc.
Fear of failure and no feedback
Micromanagement is perceived by employees as a lack of trust in them and their expertise. Every mistake becomes critical and might lead to an inadequate response from the project manager. For example, they might end up humiliating the employee and take up even greater control of his or her work.
This attitude negatively affects the self-esteem of all team members and pushes them to hide problems. This is a vicious circle: excessive control to prevent problems leads to employees’ fear of failure, which leads to employees hiding their failures, which leads to them creating a non-viable product, which leads to even more control.
Staff turnover
Most Senior and Middle developers are Millennials or Gen Zs. According to numerous studies, for both these generations, the opportunity for professional growth, interesting and creative tasks, as well as feedback from management are as important in their work as money.
Micromanagement prevents the growth of such employees. Consequently, the employees who don’t provide ideas and don’t have the desire to grow, stay in the team, while promising and skilled employees leave.
Additionally, any experienced candidate looks for information and feedback on the company before making an application. And the image of the company in which you “only have to write reports and don’t get a chance for further professional growth” will scare away the employees you need. Micromanagement hinders corporate growth.
When micromanagement can be useful
Crisis management
Delays in an IT project can cause numerous problems for the company such as elevated budget, customer lawsuits, etc. Micromanagement can be helpful if it’s necessary to bring the project back to life in a short time.
A crisis manager must learn about and control all the details of the project background to understand the source of the problem and prevent the situation from recurring in the future. But these are temporary measures.
Careful onboarding and support
The company must have a clear and very detailed onboarding process for new employees. At first, managers should also support the new employees on every step of the process. Sometimes, the learning process might take a rather long time. However, in the end, managers should let the employee work independently.
Micromanagement at some stages of development
In some cases, the project manager may also take on the roles of quality assurance specialist and business analyst. For example, when it’s necessary to verify the results of work with numerous client’s requirements, to check project compliance with certificates, etc.
Why remote bosses turn into ‘helicopters’
For software development companies, the pandemic should have been less stressful than for most industries. In this niche, remote work, high autonomy of employees, online meetups, etc. were commonplace before 2020. But as the aforementioned Blind study revealed, the sharp loss of “visual control” has affected IT project managers. Let’s consider the possible reasons.
The main trigger of micromanagement is a lack of trust that can stem from several reasons:
- Poor remote team management skills. The fear that no one works at home;
- Belief that the teams are not able to manage their work and time effectively;
- No clear plan. Instead of working according existing deadlines, the manager constantly reviews the progress. This turns the life of remote employees into a permanent deadline;
- Personal qualities of a project manager (perfectionism, nervousness, authoritarianism, etc.);
- Surprisingly, popular agile practices played a rather negative role in justifying overcontrol. Helicopter managers focus their attention on one from the 12 agile principles: “Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers”. Very close.
How to understand that you have fallen into the sin of micromanagement
This is a quick self-check test to see if you are turning into a helicopter:
- You are in charge of operational tasks. There is no time to think about the strategy;
- You believe that all team members should always be present during all meetings and know about the smallest details of the project, even if these details aren’t connected to their tasks directly;
- During the meetings, your team talks about the process, not about the results;
- You prefer to ask the team members about current issues in person rather than checking the status of the tasks in Trello, Jira, etc.;
- You demand progress reports several times a day;
- You cannot delegate tasks because “no one can do it but you”;
- You can’t go on vacation because “everything will fall apart”;
- You are always ready to advise on the work of any team member;
- You get anxious when someone makes a decision without consulting you;
- New ideas in the running projects seem like a waste of time and budget and a distraction from the main task;
- You discuss employee’s mistakes during common meetups so that others could learn a lesson;
- You believe that any employee can be replaced if necessary;
- You’re afraid that now, when everyone is sitting at home and doing their work without your presence, the need for you as a manager is lower.
What if “I’m a helicopter”?
The fear of losing control when you don’t see your team ‘live’ is understandable. But it’s important not to let your concerns affect the teamwork and the project. So, if you answered more ‘yes-es’ than ‘no-s’ in the test above, try to return to the healthy and effective management style.
The main rule here is to set clear goals and objectives and analyze the results. To adhere to this rule daily, you need to:
- Build communication processes within the team at the employee-employee level;
- Develop clear, detailed requirements using which every employee can check their work themselves;
- Delegate and enable growth. Yes, everyone has become their own manager at home. But this is a great opportunity to grow your team’s competencies. This makes you a good manager, too;
- Work through your fears and distrust. Your colleagues are professionals in their field, and if you constantly question their work, then why were they hired in the first place?
- Give enough space and time for feedback and respond constructively to it;
- See the software development process as a process of creation and discovery, not mindless copying. The process in which errors are hardly avoidable;
- Understand that as a manager, you are also a member of the team. Your value is to see the whole picture, and not to split it into puzzles. Your task is to control the results, communicate with the team, develop strategies for the future, and be helpful.
Wrapping up
Micromanagement in tech companies is almost always related to lower efficiency, higher employees turnover, and project failures. So even if you feel anxious and wish things went back to normal and you could see your team members live, try to take your internal control freak under control.
