Ravi Mehta: belief

Transcript context

…One of the challenges I hear PMs that are moving into leadership roles is they often worry about micromanaging their teams. And so I kind of see two failure modes for people that are taking on their first leadership role. The first one is that they do actually micromanage, and so they don't let the person on their team have the autonomy that they need to figure out a path forward. And there's two problems in that, one that really makes that person feel like you don't trust them. The second thing is that rate limits the size of the team that you can manage because you can only do that for a finite set of people before you yourself are tapped out on bandwidth. And it's usually a couple of folks. So that's one failure mode where people sort of treat their first direct reports as an extension of themselves. The second failure mode that I commonly see is just a completely hands-off mode of leadership where a person assumes that the new person on their team, they trust them, they give them a lot of autonomy, but as part of that, they don't give them the context that they need. So that person may be able to be successful but may actually lack the guard rails and the frameworks to channel their efforts. And so I think the right solution here is to say, actually micromanagement is not a bad thing. Some of the most innovative leaders in tech are famous micromanagers. Steve Jobs is a micromanager. Elon Musk is a micromanager. Mark Zuckerberg's a micromanager. Ultimately as product builders and products innovators, the details matter and sometimes you need to zoom into what does the text on a particular button say, and you might have a strong opinion on that. And so it's okay to engage at that level. I often encourage product leaders to think about their process of becoming more senior, not as a matter of getting more and more high level, but of increasing their dynamic range. So a CPO, it's not that a CPO never thinks about tactical issues, it's that they spend a lot of time on strategy, but they also can zoom into specific issues. And so a framework I like to use with product leaders that I'm coaching is to think about a matrix. Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction. There's another really effective way of leading which is selective micromanagement, which if you don't feel confident in the direction that your team is moving, the right answer is not to be hands-off and to let them go in that wrong direction. The right answer is to micromanage, but do it in a very tactical, in a very temporary way so that you can help them understand what is the right direction moving forward, so that you can then pull back. And the two failure modes are if you're hands-off and you let that team go off the rails, that hands-off mode of leadership might feel really good in the short term. d, so that you can then pull back. And the two failure modes are if you're hands-off and you let that team go off the rails, that hands-off mode of leadership might feel really good in the short term. It might help you avoid micromanaging in the short term, but ultimately it's going to mean that that team doesn't get to where they need to go. And then what we commonly think of as micromanagement, I think more of as micro mismanagement, which is you don't feel like you've got a sense of control or a sense of confidence about what the team's doing. The team doesn't feel like they have a sense of autonomy. There's not a clear end in sight, and ultimately both the leader and the team are frustrated. So I think the two really effective functional ways of leading are scalable leadership where the team has autonomy, you have confidence or selective micromanagement where for a brief period of time you might take away some of the team's autonomy to set them on the right track, but with the goal of getting back into that scalable leadership mode. I really like this topic. I feel like this could be a whole other thread. Maybe one quick question along these lines. Would you call it selective micromanagement?…

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