A few weeks ago I have found a very interesting blog by Marc Andreessen, an engineer and an entrepreneur who’s got a few things behind him such as being co-author of Mosaic and a co-founder of Netscape.  Back then I have read his interesting take on hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives.

Now I noticed that Marc has posted a counterpoint from Ben Horowitz which takes Marc to task on the issue of micromanaging employees -  executives in particular, but I think Ben’s points extend further down as well.

Here’s a juicy excerpt:

Everyone knows that the hyper-controlling manager with the severe personality disorder who micromanages every crummy decision is no fun to work for. However, it is wrong to condemn the practice of micromanagement on that basis.

Specifically, there are times and situations where micromanaging executives is not just ok, but also the right thing to do. Andy Grove has an excellent explanation of this in his classic book High Output Management, where he describes a concept called “Task Relevant Maturity”. Andy explains that employees who are immature in a given task require detailed training and instruction. They need to be micromanaged. On the other hand, if an employee is relatively mature in a task, then it is counterproductive and annoying to manage the details of their work.

This is also true when managing executives. Marc might think that he hires an executive because she has the experience and know-how to comprehensively do her job, so any detailed instruction would be unwise and unwarranted. Marc would be wrong about that. It turns out that even — and maybe especially — executives are also immature in certain tasks.

If you are into these kind of things I strongly recommend you check out the rest of the post. My personal experience tends to align closely with what Ben is stating. For example I’ve been told a few times I like to micromanage people (as if it’s not a good thing).  But personally I also think it is not a fair observation as such an individual does not have a good idea as to how I manage everyone and everything else besides the area of interest to him/her. Just as Ben posts, my take is if I feel someone can go and run with their area of expertise and I expect mature results that would hardly need my oversight, then I actually prefer to do it this way. However there are plenty of times when people aren’t great at everything, which is normal, and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t get someone to oversee the progress along the way. It’s just that in a very small company that person more than often tends to be me for lack of having other mid-level executives.

As for executives “especially” being immature in certain tasks, absolutely I agree completely with that too. Hey maybe that’s how many became executives in the first place - they BSed their way out of doing the real work on to managing. Who hasn’t had a boss like that in the past?