Give Your Team Freedom Within Limits
Micromanaging your team leads to two-way resentment.
As a manager, I have no interest in it. As an engineer, I don’t want to feel as if I have no autonomy.
However, giving no directions or guidelines leaves us open to miscommunication and misaligned outcomes. As well as the potential to leave your reports feeling unsupported.
There is a theory in Montessori around “freedom within limits”. We can apply this to our work as a manager. We can provide guidelines that ensure we are aligned on the end goal of our team’s work. This can take the shape of shared deliverables such as:
- Agile epics/stories
- Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
- Project roadmaps
- SMART goals
Along with any of our lovely product partners, we can provide goals and limits, and then let our team have the freedom to execute on these goals. Freedom such as:
- Freedom of Choice: they can choose how the problem should be solved within the technology framework we work in. Giving independence in task completion allows your team to feel empowered!
- Freedom of Time: they provide realistic estimates on how long a task should take or how many story points should be applied.
- Freedom of Communication: they find the pathways to partner and collaborate with others on the task. Folks can decide if they should work independently or together.
- Freedom to Move: they can choose how to prioritize the work within their daily tasks. Maybe they work better on coding tasks in the morning and support tasks in the afternoon. As long as the work gets done by the agreed upon timelines, they have the freedom to move around their tickets.
- Freedom to Make Mistakes: Should we help to minimize risk? Of course. But should we shame our team for mistakes? Never. We must make it a learning opportunity and help to inform our future work.
It’s all about a guiding balance. Being there for your team with your management skills AND letting them be there for you by bringing their engineering talents.
