Drive by management. We’ve all seen it. You and your boss work in different rooms for most of the day, then they walk over to your desk or send you a message. “Hey can you take a look at X? We should do Y.” And then they’re gone again. Drive by management is jarring for everyone involved. It disrupts the task an IC was focused on, then they need to switch to this new task with just a few sentences of instructions. Now the IC has to ask you several followup questions or try to decipher your meaning. This isn’t an effective way of getting things done.

As a manager, you’ll often run across an interesting piece of information from a coworker, industry newsletter, or any other resource. As an IC it was probably easy to drop an article in the office group chat and ask what people thought about it. As a manager, it doesn’t work that way.

My early days as a manager

One of the things I was told when I first became a team lead was that

Your words carry more weight when you’re a leader

I didn’t really understand what this meant until we were having a meeting about a project we were already midway through. I threw out a casual question about our process along the lines of “What if we did it this way instead?” There was a sudden shift in the tone of the discussion and people were starting to talk as though that was the direction we had committed to. Thankfully we caught it early and were able to course correct. I was able to clarify that I was just curious how doing the project differently would affect the outcome, and not that I was suggesting we change course.

When I was an IC, I would share links to cool things I found or throw a casual question into a Slack channel throughout the day and maybe someone would give me a thumbs up emoji. As a manager, I need to be more careful. There’s been times where I’ve thrown a link into a Slack channel and it’s turned into a half hour conversation with my entire department.

Avoiding drive by management

The big takeaway from that conversation was that, as a leader, you can’t drop casual suggestions without additional context. Here’s some questions to consider before dropping an idea on someone

• Is it urgent?
• Is it important?
• Is it just a fun thing you wanted to share?
• Who should be the one to act on it?
• Is it a suggestion that the driver can choose to consider or ignore?
• Is it a command that must be implemented?
• What is the value?
• Who do you see the value for?

It’s important to provide enough context to allow people to prioritize things as they see fit. As a leader, you need to demonstrate the level of communication that you want to see your teammates replicate. If they know why you’ve made a suggestion or shared a new piece of content, they will know what to do with that information. Give your people the information they need to make the right choices.