[mieubrisse]

Big +1 to "there are no off-hand requests"; this was a failure that I realized I was making as a leader a month ago. I was (ostensibly) trying to give my team ownership, blasting them with the multiple things that needed doing, but in practice I was pushing the stress of "what should they be working on in any given moment" to them.

It's a sneaky trap, because you think "I'm making them so empowered!" but you're actually stressing them out and reducing their focus.

[swatcoder]

> It's a sneaky trap, because you think "I'm making them so empowered!" but you're actually stressing them out and reducing their focus.

As a head's up, the even sneakier trap is that different team members thrive best with different approaches. Some people flail and fret without explicit, procedural direction and others are completely discouraged by it and do feel disempowered.

Rather than taking your lesson as the New Universal Rule, make sure to just add it to your toolbox while trying to learn how to discern who needs what. It's good that you're learning to work better with the people who need more explicit direction, but you're going to burn out managing a team where all of them need that all the time (and if you only practice one approach, you'll eventually get there: filtering down to only have those team members who do thrive by it)

[rconti]

Yup. As a team lead, I fretted that I wasn't giving me one of my new team members enough hands-on time / direction. I'd sort of give him stuff with as much context as I had, meaning to follow up in a few days to see how things were going, but never got around to it.

I later got feedback from my manager that my teammate really appreciated that I was giving him space to figure things out on his own rather than micro-managing him!

[4star3star]

I think I do my best work when it's something no one asked for in the first place. I also do great work when I have a good back-and-forth to clarify requirements until I know exactly what we're going for. Where I get discouraged is when I get half-baked requirements, carefully consider the problem and provide a best effort solution, then get clarification that would have been great to know up front, now requiring a re-think.

[jt2190]

> Some people flail and fret without explicit, procedural direction…

Is this different from the “human command line” mode of operation that the grandparent mentioned?

[xeromal]

Two different points. He's saying not to be one of those but as a leader, you will have to lead those. Some people are just not great at interpreting context and your job will be to spoon feed it.

[bluGill]

When you give someone the power to decide what to do, they also have to be empowered to know the deadlines and costs of not doing each. They have to be trusted to make the right decisions - which often includes deciding not to do something - if you are not willing to back their decision when things are not done then you shouldn't have given them the authority in the first place.

[JJMcJ]

Good that you realized it. Far too many managers have the impulse control of a puppy that just had a double espresso. Every hour a new task that "has priority".