Signs you might be a micromanager

Well innovation or no mistakes. Which do you prefer?

> they have failed over years to really provide a quality service. Not only that but they over bill me and I frequently catch it. Why don’t I switch forms - well, I’m scared I’ll have a worse experience with another firm

You could be making the classic mistake of throwing good money after bad money. If you try a new firm, you still have a chance of things going wrong. But if things are going wrong with your existing firm and you can't pinpoint/address the root cause, you can be a lot more certain things won't change.

> Big difference in big companies and small ones. If you’re not micro managing as a small startup, you will fail.

Success is a better teacher than failure, so are you sure you should be speculating about what kinds of management styles succeed or fail when by your own admission, your micro-management leaves you burnt out and without results? Based on my experience, it's almost always the case that startups only succeed in scaling by avoiding it. It has to do with delegation.

Micro-managing is tacit acceptance of an inability to delegate. A team which fails to master delegation will fail to scale past the team lead's individual communication bandwidth capacity. That happens really quickly if you hit hypergrowth. You basically guarantee failure in a way that will make it really difficult for you to learn how to run a team any more effectively.

It looks like that's your experience. Could you consider the possibility that an alternate approach could get you mileage? Why not find a trusted advisor to help you select a better firm? Perhaps you might have difficulty selecting a good firm, but it's possible that someone you know who has more experience with software could help you. After all, by your admission, you spend a lot of money on this purchase. Why not experiment with different approaches and see if you can get more ROI out of it?

I'd bet money that if you found a good engineering leader and delegated delivery to them, you'd save money, time and headaches. Of course, you'd need to be willing to take the risk to invest in that, which is something you could fail at. But running a business these days is all about figuring out how to take risks successfully and improve your ability to do so.

I was a micromanager when my team refused to go in the direction the rest of the company was going. My hiring was actually a trap, in that my job was mainly to fix and/or fire an entire team of people. Nobody on my team liked me, nor did they like the direction the company was going, so a nontrivial part of my job was monitoring that my team doing anything at all in the right direction.

It was rough, because I was held accountable for things that my team refused to take part in. I was a new manager, and my boss had made it clear that I should basically do whatever it took to not fire anyone. I was a new manager, and I tried really hard to work with the team to get them on board, but ultimately there just wasn't any resolution other than "These people aren't right for this company". By the end of it (meaning when I quit), I was so burnt out I didn't care. I fired two, two quit, one changed teams. I got terrible reviews that year, but I also didn't really care. I didn't want to be good at what they wanted out of me, I learned.

What can make this hard is wearing multiple hats. Your boss might be micromanaging, but not with the boss hat, but a senior engineer hat, or an architect or product owner hat. I have considered introducing a convention where people declare what hat they are wearing first!

Also if the manager is also the expert in the technical area this can have the same effect. This often happens in small companies where the managers have been there about 10 years and wrote all the early systems. They take the role of manager, mentor, architect and code reviewer.

The solution which takes time is to start delegating out a stream of that work to a individual contributor who becomes the expert. This is a win for everyone. Less bottleneck for the team, less micromanaging, new ideas can flow in, and members build up skill and experience. New eyes on code, if they are good eyes can also lead to tech debt being paid off.

I'd even go as far as label some of these behaviors as toxic, and not micromanagement. "Every task needs your approval" and "You need to be cc’d on every email" show that you, as a manager, are just a paper pusher who rubberstamps things to justify your massive paycheck.

There are more subtle forms of micromanagement that even well-meaning managers and senior engineers do. The best instance from my experience as both is "leading by example." Even as a tech lead and a manager, I went oncall, I fought fires, and I was just not efficient at delegating.

I later realized my juniors took this message in a different way. I wasn't "leading by example", I wasn't empowering them to take on what they perceived to be "my work" and drive organizational change in a way I couldn't.