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I manage a team, and I have to disagree with this article. It is often the employee. For example, I have a client that is going live tonight. Their environment consists of 14 Linux boxes that all need apps deployed, chroot jails setup, monitoring and deployment scripts written or modified, etc. I assigned it to one of my engineers weeks ago, but he works so slowly that most work isn't completed yet. Yesterday, the day before go live, I had to take it over and completed 90% of the work in a single long day.
It's not that he isn't trained... These are basic Linux engineer tasks. It's that he works so slowly, and has to ask so many questions "how did you want me to create the user accounts?" - "I don't know, with useradd, perhaps?" Then 2 weeks later, I say "the client is asking if they can login to their boxes now; are their user accounts created yet?" - "I'll get to that today, he replies."
You might think that I must have hired him, so it's my fault if he works too slowly and asks too many questions, or makes too many mistakes to be of much use. Unfortunately I didn't hire him.
The bottom line is that a lot of employees are just poor performers, and when someone that does good work at a high rate of speed can do it better themselves, in less time, they're going to do it.
He's in that job because someone hired him. Either he was hired way out of his depth (not your fault, but not his) or he was decent when hired but is so burnt out that he needs direction on simple tasks that he would otherwise be able to figure out on his own.
What the OP describes is the micromanagement death spiral. Manager controls employee at an insulting level of detail, sucking all autonomy out of the job, and infantilizing him. Employee becomes disengaged and shows symptoms of mild depression, including taking too long and needing too much assistance on simple tasks. This impels the manager to ratchet up the micromanagement even further. This is actually a mild, sub-clinical mental illness pattern-- anxiety/OCD traits for the manager, depressive behaviors for the employee. Whose fault is it? Both sides are to blame.
I've recently come across this even in the non-profit world. The organization has grown rapidly, and had a large degree of success, primarily due to the entrepreneurship of the director. He dives in, get things done, and has an amazing ability to keep track of details.
But now the org is big enough that this doesn't really work anymore. It's not one guy with three hats who needs clear direction, it's professionals in their fields doing what they know how to do. The website guy knows how to find a new host, the researcher how to plan a research project. Getting involved, especially when they already have a manager, is beyond micro-management.
It's hard for those with an entrepreneurial spirit to switch roles, though. I completely understand the mentality that pushes you to get a grip on everything... but your employees also want to have a grip on everything that they do.
Most of [the entrepreneurs] described themselves in similar terms: impatient, short on focus, easily frustrated, likely to jump in and solve a problem rather than count on the employee to do it.
I manage a team in my day job, and I still feel like this a lot of the time my team is delivering (even when they're doing a good job). I wonder what that says about me..?
It says you're probably deluded... :-)
Seriously, I thought the same at one time...until I did a 360. Turns out the team could have been performing a lot better, and that some people were really frustrated.
a 180?
a 360 would put you right back where you started.
360 is the name for peer feedback. At least at yahoo, but might be different for the gp.
It's a standard term.
Here's the issue: employee productivity generally falls into four categories: multipliers, adders, subtracters, and dividers. Adders are the "vital force" of the company who "do the work" from a ground-floor perspective, multipliers are managers and tool-builders who make others more productive. Subtracters are the harmlessly unproductive people who don't bother any one but produce less than their salary merits-- they should be mentored and turned into adders, if possible. Dividers are the vampires (severely incompetent programmers, bad managers) who make other people less productive and destroy companies. Fire them.
A lot of these entrepreneurs were great at being adders and decided to start businesses in order to capture more of their value-added. The problem is that, once you're a manager, you cannot help but have major effects on other peoples' productivity and can therefore only be a multiplier or a divider. If you're a micromanager, you're going to end up a divider. These entrepreneurs/managers need to transition from an "adder" context to a "multiplier" context. Unfortunately, this transition is difficult and painful because it requires "letting go" of detailed control; you make more money and have power, but you're support staff as much as you're a "boss".
As much as I find his suggestions impractical for the rank-and-file average people, I think a lot of neophyte managers need to read Tim Ferris's Four Hour Work Week. Their goal should be to enable others' productivity and make themselves mostly unnecessary (as managers). This means they have to trust their subordinates to do good work. Most will, a few won't-- and when the latter happens, tough decisions need to be made (can he be trained? Or do we need to fire him?) But starting from the assumption of "I'm the only person who can do things right around here" is going to lead to failure: the best people leave, the middling people degrade-- when you manage people like children, that's what they become-- and the incompetents don't get found out (and trained or fired) because the managerial meddling makes it impossible to differentiate who is capable and who is not.
This poster, MichaelOChurch, is IMHO, a major divider. We are in the process of completely throwing out the last two years of his work as unusable.