Managers can delegate too much and lose control of their orgs and their output. Being in the details can be fun, empowering and impactful.

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Chris Bongers

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Staying informed about the details within an organization is crucial for effective management. Companies are moving towards flatter organizational structures, requiring managers to be more hands-on. Historical and contemporary examples, like Andy Grove and Elon Musk, highlight the importance of being deeply involved. Effective delegation means holding accountability while staying informed about key projects and decisions. Techniques such as regular deep dives, mixing up 1:1 meetings with pairing, and writing weekly brag documents can help managers stay in the details without micromanaging.

The Engineering Manager

Flat organizations: where managers are told to be ‘hands-on,’ which often just means doing everyone else’s job while calling it leadership.

Just blows my mind how anyone can milk their productivity/efficiency to its max to stay a “hands-on” manager. Ive been a tech lead for roughly 3 months and by the sheer amount of time spent on meetings and collaboration, I was convinced being hands-on with this kind of a role is just plain impossible for me.

I kinda don’t agree with a lot of points, however I understand the perspective.
Yes, a manager should know what is happening on a project/team. Yes, in large corporation there are managers who cannot answer the most basic question about how is project A or B is going. I get it.
However, delegation is an art. I would neve pair 1:1 meetings unless I am training a new leader (for example).
As a manager I expect myself to answer the status quo in regards of any project under my scope. Be informed about the bottlenecks and risks, etc. However, if I am deleting a task or a project to someone, I will give space to my colleague to show his worth and expertise.

Devs managed their own -&gt; hire a manager -&gt; manager trying to be more productive and effective -&gt; created meetings 1:1, implementing Scrum -&gt; read article about how Elon made his management better -&gt; added some reports for developers to make sure he knew what they do -&gt; devs do nothing because they spend all day in meetings and filling forms.
There is only one way to successful and productive development — developers should not even know that managers exist. Communication with them is handled by the Team Lead, who shuts down anyone trying to distract their developer from work. They act as a filter: got a heap of problems, turned it into tasks, and assigned executors. Devs has task manager to see tasks and deadlines and communicating only with Team Lead and coleagues.