Forget about micromanagement — do you even like being managed?

Before we start, I feel a disclaimer is in order: I am in no way arguing for setting up organizations without managers or management, nor do I mind having a manager! I just don’t like being managed, and to be honest, I think I can be pretty difficult to manage as well. What I do want, though, is to pose better questions than the ones usually asked when it comes to management, and chief of those questions is this: would you like to be managed? Now, with all that out of the way, and the caveat that English is my second language, let’s get on with it!

As a manager, I usually have a lot of things I can choose to spend my time on. Responding to emails, doing 1:1s, recruiting, being a sounding board for ideas, approving requests, managing budgets, coaching direct reports or peers, managing various projects, writing/reading/commenting all sorts of documents, attending meetings etc. I could also spend my time managing people, but I really try not to — because it often doesn’t make much sense! Now if that sounds absolutely bonkers, let me first give you my personal definition of managing people before you dig in:

Managing people — The act of telling someone what task to perform and/or how to perform it, instead of telling them what to accomplish and what the context is

Save for very few, specific exceptions (such as if I’m teaching someone how to perform their duties as part of an onboarding program or a training initiative), I generally try to stay away from being prescriptive, because there are so many other tools I can use instead to get better results than if I just told people how to do something! Among those tools, my favorite ones are goals, resources, and constraints. Still not sold? Let me illustrate with an example from the world outside of humdrum offices, and see if we can get there. Let’s say I want to get to the airport, and to get there I decide to hail a cab. When the cab pulls over, I have approximately this conversation with the driver:

“Hi! Can you take me to terminal C at Newark airport (the goal)? I need to be there at 5pm, because my flight leaves at 7pm (the constraint and some context). How much (the resources) will that be? $60? OK, sounds good!”

Now, could I have done this any other way? Sure! Instead of saying that I wanted to go to terminal C at Newark airport, I could have printed a list of directions and told the driver where to turn all the way from the pickup to the airport. I could also have told him to floor it whenever that seemed like a good idea, and I could have skipped the part about asking about the price. Would any of those approaches have yielded a better result? A better experience for me as a passenger? A happier driver?

If you still haven’t found the answers to the questions above, I’ll give you a hint: they all end with “bsolutely not!”. So why is it that we often believe that a direct approach — managing people — will give us managers better results in our own environments? Haven’t we hired people who know more about how to perform their assigned tasks than we do (and for me that specifically means hiring developers who are better at developing software than I am), just like we enlisted a cab driver who knows more about driving to the airport than we do? And if we have, what’s stopping us from managing expectations, goals, budgets, constraints and resources instead of people? I really can’t think of anything, so instead I’ll leave you with this question:

Would you like to be managed?