This week, we rounded up advice from top founders and startup execs for wielding micromanagement effectively.
Is All Micromanagement Bad? Here's How the Best Startup Leaders Balance Details and Delegation
“I’m not a micromanager, but I’m microinterested.”
This pithy remark from Rippling COO Matt MacInnis reframes the "don't micromanage" advice that has become canon for new and experienced managers alike. It means well. But if you take it too literally and step all the way out of the codebase or sprint plans, you risk losing a grip on important parts of your business.
With so much buzz around the notion of the “hands-on founder,” MacInnis’ take got us thinking about altitude shifting as a founder or exec. The collective wisdom around micromanagement tends to fall into two extremes: never micromanage and delegate everything, or control every single detail and delegate nothing. But we’ve found that advice for the middle ground — how to keep a hawklike eye on the important details without stripping teams of autonomy — is in short supply.
So we dug through our archives to put together a tactical guide on when to wade into the minutia, and how to step back to empower your team. Here’s who you’ll hear from:
- Jack Altman, co-founder and former CEO of Lattice
- Matt MacInnis, COO at Rippling
- Krithika Shankarraman, Stripe’s and OpenAI's first marketing hire
- Mike Brown, early Uber employee and former COO at Newfront Insurance
- Will Larson, CTO at Imprint, formerly Carta, Calm and Stripe
- Jay Desai, founder and former CEO of PatientPing
- Sidharth Kakkar, co-founder and CEO of Subscript
- Hareem Mannan, Head of Product & Design at Squint, formerly Pave and Segment
- Michael Lopp, Senior Director of Engineering at Apple
- Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels
Here's a preview of their (sometimes-contradictory) advice for wielding micromanagement effectively — and refraining from the unproductive kind:
- Look for data anomalies as a cue to micromanage. One of Rippling’s leadership principles is “go and see.” MacInnis enacts that by jumping into the field to investigate whenever the dashboard tells a different story from the department heads. “When the anecdotes disagree with the data, you've got a problem,” he says. “You have to go and see for yourself, which means getting straight down to the atomic level of the function you're interested in to gather context.”
- Gather micro-context with ICs. To get up to speed on a new system or culture, whether that’s in a new company or a new function, former Carta CTO Will Larson likes to talk to the people closest to the ground truth: individual contributors. “You can usually get buy-in from other executives pretty easily, but it’s much more difficult to get buy-in from people with the most context around a given problem,” he says. “Their opinion is most valuable because they are the ones who live in the details. You can’t lie to them. They know the truth of how things run.”
- Treat micromanagement like a symptom — and get to the root cause. Former PatientPing founder and CEO Jay Desai brings a diagnostic lens to micromanagement. If he catches himself leaning on it more than usual, he takes it as a sign that he’s losing trust in his report and quickly takes action. “It’s important to intervene early as soon as you recognize you’re starting to lose trust in a report. Micromanagement is a great trigger that this is happening,” says Desai. “That’s when I tell them I'm starting to lose confidence in them."
- Empower team members a few rungs below you to deliver feedback. Hareem Mannan (ex-Pave and Segment) created weekly peer office hours as a feedback mechanism to help ship higher-quality work at scale. “When I felt like the work of a direct report was not of the quality I expected, instead of using my 1:1 time critiquing, I would ask them to go to office hours that week,” says Mannan. “Sometimes I’d chat with the person who was leading the office hours and let them know the challenges I was seeing and where I’d like to see improvement, without dictating exactly how to get to that end result.”
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-A Maven Lightning Lesson on how to delegate with AI
-A 10-minute LinkedIn audience research hack