Trusting people to do the work they were hired to do

I graduated college in 2014 and joined TCS in October of the same year. The first two months after joining TCS were earmarked for training.

There were two streams primarily, technical and non-technical training. The technical training was designed around Windows server technologies. The non-technical training was around communication skills primarily, managing others, and other similar things.

Training was fun. I made friends. It was a good ramp from college to professional life.

There were a couple of lessons I took from the training period. The first one was around how to give feedback’s. The second was about managing people.

When we become managers, there is a tendency to micro-manage, to hand-hold. We can’t seem to let someone else do the work they were hired to do. During training, we were split into teams of five, with one lead. I would end up doing other people’s work as I felt their work was not good enough. That I could do it better. This is a bad tendency to have.

There was a study done in England, which determined that a leading cause of how happy and satisfied people felt at their jobs was if they had independence to make their own decisions. It seems intuitive enough.

And yet there is a prevalence of systems designed to monitor employees. To grade them. To scold them. I was reading Cory Doctorow’s post on bossware and I’ve been thinking about this since.

The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can't do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of "algorithmic management" where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.

As managers and bosses, we need to be better. We need to curb this tendency we have of micro-managing. We need to trust that the people we hired, will do the things we hired them to do.