14.3 Management Style

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The first thing you want to understand is the degree of involvement you can anticipate from the boss in your own daily affairs. From a rating perspective, the extremes are "control freak" and "laissez-faire." Micromanagers are very difficult to have hovering over you, especially when you have a lot on your plate. The quickest way to spot them is to watch how they react to project documentation or lack thereof. I had a supervisor who went over all my documentation like a cranky high school English teacher. This included Gantt charts, scope documents, issue logs, and so forth. Managers who spend a lot of time going over your documentation are control freaks who are going to give you little free reign in any aspect of the job. In other words, you will function more like a project administrator than a manager. A struggle between you can ensue, almost immediately, because you feel your supervisor:

Cramps your style with constant scrutiny
Has too rudimentary an understanding about project management in general
Has a poor understanding about your project in particular

The natural fear a project manager experiences in this circumstance is that deferring to a demanding boss like this threatens the project. That being the case, the project manager goes into stealth mode, at least as far as that snoopy boss is concerned. Managing all the documentation "by the book" is incredibly time-consuming, wearying, and, at some point, counter-productive. For project managers, building and managing the interpersonal relationships with team members, customers, and beneficiaries is key to project success. If too much emphasis is put on documentation, ^[1] you spend an excessive amount of time:

Tweaking it
Explaining the gaps between it and the chatter around the water cooler

The bind you find yourself in is that, to meet the micromanager's incessant demand for detail, you interrupt stakeholders so often for new information they are likely to start handing you nonsense, just to get rid of you. As a consequence, the paper you are managing becomes worthless because no one, except your boss, takes it seriously. You may also appear weak and thus lose points on the relevancy scale discussed in Chapter 7.

The other extreme in this regard is the "hands-off" manager. This type can be perplexing and frustrating as well, particularly when you need their support and discover it may not be forthcoming. One wonders why some managers appear to be asleep at the switch. Although ignorance may be bliss for some, others may be cultivating deniability. In other words, should you crash and burn, they can deflect blame onto the next project manager (i.e., your replacement). Look carefully at the laid-back manager, because it may take a while to determine whether they are paying attention, could care less, or are keeping their hands clean, at least until you run into trouble. The way I tend to sniff out the "dumb as a fox" persona is viewing overall behavior for evidence of passive-aggressive tendencies, in other words, sneakiness. Listen to stories they tell about their past endeavors, either personal or professional. This tendency, or lack thereof, reveals itself pretty quickly, usually because the sneaky ones brag about it.

^[1]This kind of emphasis should not be confused with the use of documentation as discussed in Chapter 8.

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