Grumpy Coworker

Author: Grumpy106

  • The Micromanagement Death Spiral: How to Turn Your Best People Into Zombies

    This post somewhat inspired by Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (Amazon affiliate link)

    Look, I get it. You’re a manager. You’re responsible for outcomes. Things need to get done right. But let me tell you what happens when you decide that “managing” means hovering over your senior engineers like a helicopter parent watching their kid cross the street for the first time.

    You know Sarah? The one who shipped three major features last quarter while mentoring two juniors? Yeah, she doesn’t give a shit anymore. And it’s your fault.

    Here’s What You Did

    You hired intelligent, capable people. People with track records. People who’ve been solving complex problems since before you got promoted. Then you proceeded to treat them like they just graduated from a coding bootcamp yesterday.

    Every. Single. Decision. needs your approval now. They can’t choose a library without a meeting. They can’t refactor a function without running it by you first. They can’t take a bathroom break without wondering if you’ll ask why they were gone for seven minutes.

    Congratulations! You’ve invented the least efficient way to run a team since someone thought “let’s make all decisions by committee.”

    The Insult You’re Not Seeing

    When you micromanage senior people, here’s what you’re actually saying:

    “I don’t trust your judgment.”

    “I think you’re going to screw this up.”

    “Despite your years of experience, I know better than you about literally everything.”

    These are smart people. They hear you loud and clear. And you know what smart people do when you tell them they’re not smart enough? They stop trying to be smart.

    Welcome to Learned Helplessness Town, Population: Your Entire Team

    You wanted control? Cool, you got it. Now enjoy fielding 47 questions a day about things your team used to handle themselves.

    • “Should I use a switch statement or if-else?” (They know. They’re asking because last time they didn’t ask, you “had concerns.”)
    • “Which color should this button be?” (They’ve designed 100 interfaces. They’re asking because you changed it last time.)
    • “Can I go ahead and fix this obvious bug?” (It’s a two-line fix. They’re asking because apparently that requires Product sign-off now.)

    You’ve trained them that initiative gets punished. Compliance gets rewarded. So now nobody shows initiative. They’re just waiting for you to tell them what to do, exactly how to do it, and when to breathe during the process.

    This is learned helplessness, and you’re the world’s most effective teacher.

    Your Best People Are Already Gone (Mentally)

    Here’s the thing about talented people: they have options. Lots of them.

    Sarah’s not arguing with you anymore. She’s not pushing back on your “suggestions” (demands). She’s not bringing new ideas to the table. She just nods, says “sure thing,” and does exactly what you asked—nothing more, nothing less.

    She’s quiet-quit on actually caring about the work. She’s doing the bare minimum to keep her job while her resume is out there getting interviews. Every recruiter message on LinkedIn looks more appealing than it used to.

    You think you’re getting compliance. You’re getting malicious compliance at best, and a resignation letter at worst.

    The Really Stupid Part

    The absolute kicker? You hired these people specifically because they could handle complex work independently. That was literally the job description. “Self-starter.” “Takes ownership.” “Minimal supervision required.”

    Then you proceeded to eliminate every condition necessary for those qualities to exist.

    You wanted ownership? You can’t give someone ownership while controlling every decision.

    You wanted innovation? You can’t innovate when every experiment needs a risk assessment and three levels of approval.

    You wanted engagement? People don’t engage with work when they’re just following orders.

    What You Should Do Instead

    Here’s a radical idea: Let people do their jobs.

    Set clear goals. Provide context. Get out of the way. Be available when they need you. Trust that the experienced professionals you hired are, in fact, experienced professionals.

    If someone’s screwing up consistently, address that person. Don’t punish your entire team with process because one person can’t be trusted.

    And for the love of everything holy, stop checking in every two hours. They know you don’t trust them. You’re not subtle.

    The Bottom Line

    Micromanagement isn’t management. It’s abdication of management dressed up as diligence. Real management is about enabling people to do their best work, not ensuring they can’t do anything without you.

    Your best people don’t need a babysitter. They need a leader who trusts them, supports them, and gets the hell out of their way.

    But sure, keep doing what you’re doing. I’m sure the constant turnover and the team of disengaged zombies is exactly what the company had in mind when they promoted you.

    Filed under: things your team is thinking but too professional to say to your face

  • Meeting Reminders Kill Time, Too

    tl;dr: Use 5-minute meeting reminders unless people have more than a five minute walk/travel time to the meeting site.

    The Problem

    Copyright: neyro2008 / 123RF Stock Photo

    Meeting reminders are just as much an impediment to productivity as meetings themselves are. Ok, fine, meetings aren’t always an impediment to productivity, but they do prevent attendees from accomplishing their own individual tasks, etc…

    Anyway… back to meeting reminders. What happens when your Outlook pops up a reminder? One of several things happens:

    • You completely ignore the reminder.
    • You acknowledge the reminder but go back to what you were doing.
    • You dismiss the reminder, hoping that you’ll actually get another for this meeting you’re supposed to attend.
    • You fully acknowledge the reminder, attempt to go back to work until meeting time, but you focused on not missing the meeting.

    As you can see, the only option that gives you a solid chance of making the meeting means that your focus cannot be on something else. Add to this the setup/teardown time involved in switching contexts from your normal tasks and being engaged in the meeting. (This assumes that you are only going to meetings that you actually engage in—I’m sure that’s not an issue for anyone, right?)

    A Solution

    All of this brings me back to the problem of the meeting reminder. Think of the meeting reminder as a part of the meeting as well. If you have a 15-minute and no one has to travel more than a few feet to attend (or just has to boot up GoToMeeting), then don’t make the reminder 15 minutes as well (or worse, AN HOUR before). A five-minute reminder should be enough for a 15-minute meeting. Realistically, five minutes should be adequate for anything that isn’t going to block out a significant portion of the day.

    Actually, no… reserved reminder more than 5 minutes for abnormally early meeting start times. And make them end-of-day reminders for the previous day.

  • RASMMAMSTCCHWE: Results And Some Mandatory Meetings And Make Sure To Cover Core Hours Work Environment

    ROWE is awesome. We all believe in ROWE. All meetings are optional.

    Except everyone has to attend the bi-monthly two hour update meeting.

    But aside from that, ROWE is great. You can work anywhere.

    Except that our online meeting software sucks, and this is an important meeting, so you really need to be on-site for it. (There are meetings for which we don’t care about the quality of the online meeting software? Why are we having those meetings?)

    Other than that, you can work anywhere, at any time as long as the work gets done.

    Except for core hours. You must work core hours.

  • #operationfreefood Day 3

    Complete failure.

    I managed with leftovers from Costco.

    How can an office grunt get by if other teams aren’t ordering too much food for lunch?

    This is day 2 of the free food drought.

     

  • Here’s an Email to Justify My Existence…

    “Stay tuned for another email on this topic!”

    Nuvola-like mail internet
    Nuvola-like mail internet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Gee, I don’t get enough email these days.” Me neither. Yet, it seems as though any time someone wants you to pay attention to something that they’re doing, they send out not only emails telling you about it, but also emails notifying you about upcoming emails.

    I tune into TV series if I want additional suspense in my life. How many of those do I actually watch? Approximately zero, unless I’m coerced by someone else into watching them.

    Regardless, I don’t want extra emails in my inbox, especially if they’re emails notifying me of upcoming emails. At some point, you’re going to make me train my spam filter to throw away all emails. Oops. Too late.

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  • I Hope Our Business Doesn’t Rely on You Supporting the Customer

    On technical forums, this attitude often exposes itself:

    Someone else might have an easy answer, yet what leaps out at me, when I read this, is that we have no code. Nor do we have a way to ensure you are, indeed, sending the correct auth data to the Web Server. As you might imagine, this makes it difficult to help you debug.

    Can you write and run a simple “test case”, just enough code to test out the NTLM auth bits? If that breaks, feel free to edit your post with the code, removing the actual login and password info, of course.

    How’s that sound?

    —-Asim, known to some as Woodrow.

    Thanks for the help…  Honestly, it took this person a lot of effort to say, in a sarcastic/belittling tone, “We need more information (or we need a, b, and c) to help you.”

    Maybe these two people know each other, and therefore, the jab is of a friendly nature. However, 5 years later, the reply is still available for all to see.

    I really hope that no one’s business depends on this person interacting with the customer. Maybe this person’s usual tone in dealing with support is better, but if practice makes perfect, this person will quickly become skilled in dragging down your business relationships.

    We get it: You’re a genius, and no one has the skills you do. Wouldn’t life be a little more tolerable for you if you’d teach people to be a little more competent instead of scaring them away from learning with your attitude.

     

  • Automate Blatantly Repetitive Bureaucratic Tasks

    AutoHotkey Logo png version
    Image via Wikipedia

    (No, this isn’t a paid advertisement, unless they decide to pay after the fact.)

    Ever have one of those tasks on your computer that you feel like you could get a robot to do? I found that AutoHotkey works well for this purpose.

    You can record tasks in specific windows that you have open and have them repeat the next time you need them.  Recording tracks mouse clicks and keyboard presses and records them to a readable script file.  You can then edit the generated script and add delays.

    This sometimes proves useful when you have to set up detailed time sheets through a slow interface.  You can record what you need, press the button, and let things go.

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  • How to Make Coffee

    Obviously, automatic coffee makers with hot water supply are too challenging, so here is a step-by-step guide:

    1) Pull filter basket out
    2) Put a new coffee filter in the basket.
    3) Open coffee packet.
    4) Pour coffee in basket.
    5) Put filter basket back in place.
    6) Rinse out near empty carafe.
    7) Put carafe back.
    8) Hit green/start/brew/on button.

  • Respect and The Prefix “Pre-“

    In many ways, good parents, good teaching, and good management have similar traits. There has to be respect to have control. Respect is not about being liked; respect is about being trusted to make good on whatever promise or threat is given. Maybe that oversimplifying, but take away that aforementioned trust and see what happens to the respect. Moreover, respect doesn’t just involve the person who is the recipient of the promise or threat; respect involves all observers.

    Sending out materials labeled “pre-” indicates that you are making a request. Not expecting that request to be fulfilled diminishes our respect for you.

    The meeting pre-read: Pre-reads which are read in their entirety in a meeting. This is such an established pattern that many people don’t even bother to open the document prior to the meeting.

    Why bother? We’re going to read word-for-word in the meeting anyway, and spent 90% of our time rereading a handful of sentences.

    Some of the problems with the pre-read are a consequence of no one wanting to read a 80-100 page document for the first time during a meeting. Keep the pre-reads reasonable if you want any hope of them being read beforehand.

    Canceling the meeting for lack of pre-read participation would be a nice luxury, but that would be more likely to encourage people to not do the pre-reads.

    Pre-work for classes: Having pre-work for classes and not expecting it to be done diminishes your students’ respect for you.

    Working through the pre-work as the body of the class makes those of us who do the work beforehand despise you.

    Either the pre-work is an “agenda” for the class and needs to be stated as such, or it needs to be given a good faith attempt by all students. If it’s an agenda for the class, I’ll probably opt for the class that considers it pre-work and save myself some time and aggravation.

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  • The Social Bonds of a Team

    I’m sure that, somewhere out there, some popular business wisdom says that people get stagnant when they stay in the same core group too long. Maybe they’re supposed to start failing to come up with new ideas because they are stuck in the mode of groupthink. Maybe they’re too comfortable and complacent. Maybe well-bonded teams are supposedly full of self-promotion and cronyism.

    There must be some business wisdom that says that, because it seems that reorganizations often target the cohesive teams as non-productive.

    Here’s a different perspective: Teams are families. They have black sheep and dysfunctional members. However, they also find a way to survive despite the individual failings of each team member that would otherwise be somewhat insurmountable. Teams have an implicit loyalty and trust that bypasses the initial trust evaluation phase that occurs with a new relationship.

    What if teams function as an extension of the neural networks that shape the individual members of the team? Just as a person who takes up tennis one year, then switches to piano, then cooking,  never becomes good at anything, teams that never build a cohesive unit never become good at anything.

    Of course, reorganization itself doesn’t have to permanently break down team cohesiveness. New teams can form, just like people join new families. The danger occurs in the perpetual reorganization cycle, especially when team members have no real input about their interests. Such cycles have the same effect on team building that moving a child from foster home to foster home has on trust. Eventually, people just assume that any bonding effort will be wasted and quit bothering to try.