I’m a big believer in ‘it depends’ as an all-purpose answer to questions on engineering and management. How should I decide what to work on? It depends. How do I get promoted? It depends. How should I store this data? It depends.
In the case of giving general advice to an audience that you don’t know well, this is still the best short answer (followed by a bunch of questions to tease out something more specific). But I’ve realized that I fall into a related trap too often as a manager. I provide very little structure, requirements, or processes to my team to help them figure out how to do things. After all, it depends! If your team is in heavy execution mode, spending a bunch of time in meetings talking about strategy and filling out vision docs isn’t useful. And who am I to care about how you track the work your team is doing? As long as it’s getting done and hitting goals, I don’t care about your Jira structure!
Well, surprise surprise, this has its limits. It doesn’t help people figure out what is important to you. And worse, you deny your managers a powerful tool to use with their own teams: the threat or reward of attention from their senior manager.
Source: Gaining insight and preventing misalignment without micromanaging, Camille Fournier, https://leaddev.com/culture-engagement-motivation/gaining-insight-and-preventing-misalignment-without-micromanaging