The 1 way to avoid micromanagement as a leader and keep high standards in your team
How accountability can protect your team from compliance and control and keep people motivated
Micromanagement
Micromanagement is a counter-productive management style characterized by such behaviors as an excessive focus on observing and controlling subordinates and obsession with details.
Wikipedia
Micromanagement is a bad practice by definition.
If you ever experienced the “boss is coming” sensation, you probably already know what I am talking about. While you and your team struggle to solve a problem, here comes the “savior.” Sometimes, they come with good intentions, but the problem is that you don’t feel trusted.
Micromanagement comes in two forms: fear and perfectionism.
Fear
Fear comes, usually but not always, with poor experience.
If you have never experienced a disaster, everything looks like a disaster. So, the micromanager needs to ensure that everything is handled correctly and that many people are involved because everyone needs to be there. The more access they have to data, the worse it gets. They make hypotheses of all possible things you and your team might have missed due to a lack of attention to detail.
They may still have good intentions, but it can be unpleasant.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism is the worst form.
While fear is motivated by specific situations like bugs, errors, and customer complaints, perfectionism can come at any moment. But the source is very similar; everything is important if you don’t know what is essential. It may come as a comment on the code, an email, a message, or a question during a meeting. And the only result is interrupting you from whatever you were doing.
It usually comes as an innocent question: “Why did you do that?” Or “I always did it like this,” which is even worse.
How can you ensure high-quality standards in your team without controlling everything?
“I should have done that myself.”
If you ever pronounced or thought that sentence, you probably might end up in the path of micromanagement. You might have good intentions, and your goal is “just ensuring quality in your product,” but if you have other people working with you, it’s because you cannot do everything yourself. You need those people, and you need to trust those people.
People make mistakes, so the goal is not to avoid errors; the goal is to raise the bar day by day.
Peer pressure
It isn’t uncommon that, while playing volleyball or basketball, it’s not the coach calling on action people but their mates.
The team aims to win the game, so if someone plays poorly, the rest is not happy. When playing for a while, the player feels the pressure of playing at their best because everyone on the team is doing it. That is the peer pressure.
Peer pressure is the will to do your best because everyone else around you is doing so.
Peer pressure is the key to reaching and maintaining high standards in your team. It doesn’t mean competition or complaining about others’ failures. Peer pressure is about aiming for the same goal and inspiring others with our efforts.
If you are the leader, make sure to be the first.
Accountability is the key
The first step to having peer pressure is to motivate people to do their best.
It cannot be reached by controlling their work; you’ll obtain the opposite: people hiding mistakes. The only way to motivate people is to make them accountable.
In the context of teamwork, accountability refers to the willingness of team members to call their peers on actions that might hurt the team.
The five disfunctions of a team, by Pastrick Lencioni
Accountability is not a way to blame people.
Making someone accountable for a task doesn’t mean “if something goes wrong, we know who to blame.” Accountability is about empowering people to solve a task and giving them responsibility. Making people accountable means they understand the task and feel connected.
Connecting people to the value of their duties is crucial to making them accountable.
Start with why
Take time to explain the end goal.
Nobody can connect to a small task. We connect to a cause, a meaning, and a goal. We need to feel we play a small part in a bigger game. People need to connect to a cause to be accountable. Accountability doesn’t start with “what needs to be done” but with “why we need this to be done”.
Accountability needs understanding.
You can’t expect people to be accountable because they receive a task. Leaders need to explain how a task connects to the bigger picture. Accountability starts with the person giving the task, not the person receiving it.
Making someone accountable involves ensuring their active participation.
The TASC framework
The TASC framework is a clear set of steps you can use when assigning a task to make people accountable.
It is made of four steps:
T: who is the owner of the Task?
A: do they have enough Authority?
S: are they set up for Success?
C: do we have a Checklist for the task?
T: task’s owner
The first step is to clarify who is the owner.
There can be more than one person. Everyone in the team must know the owner (or owners). This avoids the uncertainties about who should do what.
Clarify the ownership of the task with the team.
A: authority
The owner has to be able to complete the task autonomously.
If the owner needs permission while trying to accomplish something, they cannot be held accountable. Make sure they have enough authority to finish the job. It is possible that while working, they find something unexpected and need assistance, but while planning the task, you must ensure they have all they need and the authority to obtain it.
Ensure the owner has enough authority to accomplish the task.
S: success
Does the owner have everything they need to succeed in the job?
This involves three things:
Time: did you allocate enough time to accomplish the task?
Resources: does the owner have enough resources? Is one person enough? Do they have all the knowledge?
Clarity: Do you agree on what done looks like?
Let me stress a bit on the clarity part since this is the one I’ve seen failing more often in my experience.
Before starting a task, everyone involved needs to agree on a Definition of Done for the task. Write down what you expect once the task is finished. Clarify what you expect and ensure the task’s owner is on the same page.
Success is about time, resources, and clarity.
C: checklist
What are the steps to do the job?
Once you agree on who the owner is, establish that the owner has all the authority they need, all the time and resources, and define a clear understanding of the expectations. Then, you can decide what the steps are to accomplish the task. This is the part where you might end up in the old habit of control.
Don’t fall into that.
Have an open discussion about the possible solutions. Express your opinions and, most importantly, listen to what your team says about it. An open discussion is the best way to help people connect with the strategy.
Discuss the steps to do the job with your team.
Resources
The TASC framework comes from the book Dare to Lead (affiliate link).