Inario

Identify your controls

One of Andy Grove’s strongest concepts (from High Output Management) is that of task-relevant maturity. Specifically, that for a manager being hands-on is neither better nor worse, in general, than being always hands-off.

Managers stumble when they are stuck in a mode and can’t adapt ; usually that manifests when they start being really hands-on and can’t grow beyond it when their scope of control grows beyond their technical expertise, or just beyond their available time. Managees stumble when they don’t understand why their manager suddenly becomes hands-on. They feel adversely micro-managed and don’t realize they are growing into a new realm of know-how.

I’ve found however that the advice for the manager to adapt to the task-relevant maturity of the person being managed is not enough. The better advice is to always communicate about exactly how close or how far they intend to remain.

Ways of doing that are excellently summarized here :

Identify your controls. | Irrational Exuberance

Working with the door open

“I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

You and Your Research