Beyond Micromanagement: Harnessing Positive Control for Growth

Control is sometimes understood as gravitating between two extremes: complete creative freedom and severe micromanagement. The middle areas of the spectrum are overlooked; however, that is where success is born. Focusing on the results can help keep a team focused on its goals, but without proper control of the processes, they will not have the discipline to see their plans through to the end. This is especially true for teams with many junior engineers and employees.

This is not micromanagement.

It does not involve a series of calls and meetings to keep a team on track. Controlling processes means analyzing how a team is working. This form of control is not harsh or oppressive and provides an opportunity to support employees when needed because not everyone recognizes when their processes are ineffective or when they need assistance.

Besides the supportive side, control is essential for a business that wants to scale and increase its profits. Growth can create a heavy legacy, such as code bases for software engineering companies or outdated processes in other businesses, that slow down progress. The growth needs to be analyzed for a company to adapt to new realities and opportunities.

The Navy Seals have an approach that matches well with this idea: keeping things in order.

Control is order. It is the chance to reduce the risks a company can encounter when moving toward its goals without sacrificing quality and experiencing team burnout. This is possible when management keeps things in order, which is possible with clear and routine procedures that everyone in a company follows, from juniors to the top. They provide data to analyze and keep the processes on track. The cycle continues while a business grows.

Data is a key ingredient for control, which business owners can use to keep things in order. For software engineering, these are called the "Basic Processes for Software Development" or BPSD. These are the fundamental processes that a team of engineers needs to establish to increase the chances of regularly achieving their goals. They also provide metrics that any business and project sponsor can observe. BPSD include:

• Daily asynchronous stand-ups: Short, written reports on yesterday’s achievements and today’s plans in a group chat.
• Daily worklogs: Worklogs are necessary to understand where project time is going and how a team's plan compares to the facts.
• Using trackers: Any work is conducted within the framework of a ticket with statuses.
• Connect artifacts with tasks: Code or any other artifact that you commit and place in the repository should be connected to the number of the task that you were working on.
• CI/CD and DORA metrics: These measures are strict enough to keep code out of the main branch without first going through basic checks.
• Daily basic status reports: Sent to a group communication channel where engineers, stakeholders, and other team members can see what the team did on a specific day.

These procedures help management see the specific areas that can be optimized.

It is important to ensure that employees understand the purpose of this analysis, because they may be afraid that they lack the skills to produce expected results. That is why control is necessary: to support them to grow and reach new skill levels.

Micromanagement happens for several reasons:

• Immature management personnel
• Weak motivation in the team
• Ignorance of a project's rules and boundaries
• Different work cultures among team members

Another factor that lies behind the ones above is a worried and nervous manager. If they lack trust, they will want to control as much of the work as possible.

Remote teams can suffer the most from micromanagement due to the time and space separating team members and management.

They define the rules and boundaries for a particular project and then use Enji’s analysis to see how well the teams follow the established procedures.

In time, these teams move from micromanagement to being performance-based and data-driven.