Crazy Superman

Well all of us know our super hero Superman, who is always there to help out his people in times of need. This Superman is a fictional character and regarded as the most influential and popular superhero of DC comics, but the superman I would like to talk about is a real character and is regarded as the most influential and popular superhero of Software Industry. Think for a moment, what if the superman starts helping people even if they don’t need his help. Your mother asked you to prepare some tea for her and the moment you enter the kitchen, superman comes up and starts telling you how to make tea. You went to the market to buy some vegetables and the moment you reach the vendor, superman comes up and starts helping you out in picking up the right vegetables. What do you think would be the result of that??? Well, our superhero will end up running from one place to another helping out so many people and as a result will get tired and all stressed out. With his overly ambitious task, ultimately he will miss out people who really need his help with all his superpowers. Would you still call him Superman??? I guess you would better like to call him Crazy Superman. Hey you started laughing, right. Well you disappointed me because I expected you to start thinking about why your superman doing this all.

Well, Superman is doing this because he is taking his job quite seriously accepting responsibility for everything that’s done. Because of his obvious super powers he feels that everything must be done well and if he wants something done well, he got to do it himself. He doesn’t have enough confidence in his people. He feels that he must personally make every decision, take a lead role in every significant task and must dictate every step his people take. He constantly hovers over the people who are trying to get their work done and rarely considers their ideas and opinions. But with such an ambitious task, the superman ends up helping one person for a moment and then suddenly disappearing for a couple of weeks while he runs around helping out other people. He doesn’t realize that he literally doesn’t have enough time to help people at such level because there simply aren’t enough Superman’s and even if he work through late nights and weekends, he alone won’t be able to help out everyone with everything. Finally, all he ends up with is disturbing everyone every once in a while, leaving them wondering what to do with their task for the next couple of weeks, till the superman returns.

Researchers have termed this as micromanagement and define it as a style of management where a leader closely observes or controls the work of his people. In micromanagement, instead of giving general instructions on smaller tasks and supervising the larger concerns the leader monitors and asses every step getting into the minute details. I would like to term this as “Too Much of Management” which leaves OOPs (Overburdened, Overstressed, Programmers) effect in the team.

“If I go crazy will you still call me Superman” — 3 Doors Down

Watch out next time someone calls you Superman.