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A word of caution when cutting ineffective team members. I once worked for a company with a CEO who wanted to “use the ineffective team member as a example”. This does not work! Any team threatened with termination will always produce lower results than a team that is threatened with success. Using an ineffective employee as an example to motivate the other team members may work in the military. It may also work when there is a significant recession. However, it will never work under good employment conditions.

“Example” firings during good to great employment conditions will spell ruin for your project. While it may seem like a good idea to help motivate team members, it will inevitably destroy their trust in you as the micromanager.

Remember, your job as a micromanager is to step into the project and take over the vast majority of what has stalled out in the project, get it back on track, and hand it back to the existing team. Successful micromanagement can never be accomplished if you never let go of the reins.

Removing ineffective players puts you in a particularly powerful position if you have primarily replaced their work. For example, in the ecommerce project I’ve referenced in the first part of this series on Successful Micromanagement, I mention that what I took on was the coding. I put back on my software engineer goggles and started developing website code for the first time in years!

Having had a decade of experience writing software made me a legitimate resource for coding. Taking over the coding duties made me a legitimate resource for determining if the existing developer was the right fit for the job. The decision was simple. The original developer spent more than a moth developing what turned out to be nothing. We could produce results without him. He was removed from the team.

It wasn’t the easiest decision. After all, this particular developer had ties to the CFO of the company and former software engineers at the company who were brought in for consulting from time to time. Popularity contests don’t win you much once you are out of high school, but working smart and empowering your team can transform your business.

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