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disagreements as if they were merely petty or politically motivated, rather than based on a
genuine difference in opinion over some important issue that affects the project.

When two team members have a genuine disagreement, it is the manager’s job to make a
decision. That decision is going to leave at least one of the team members—and possibly
both—unhappy. It is important to share the reasoning behind the decision with everyone,
and to stand behind the decision. If it turns out to be wrong, it’s the project manager’s
fault, not the fault of the person who originally proposed the solution or of the person
who didn’t fight hard enough for the alternative.
To make a good decision, the manager must understand both perspectives. It’s not enough
to just tell the two people to go decide among themselves: if they could do that, they
would not have brought the disagreement up with their manager in the first place. Some-
times a compromise can be reached, but most team members are capable of recognizing
when a compromise is available, and implementing it themselves.
If you treat each conflict as if it were a trivial or petty argument and tell your team members
that it’s their own responsibility to solve it, you are essentially asking one of them to acqui-
esce on something that he clearly thinks is important. That is unfair and divisive, and it
makes both team members feel as if you do not care about their concerns or the project itself.

That’s not to say that there are no problems that cannot be left to the team. Sometimes a
problem really is petty (“Bill stole my stapler!”) and the team members really should at
least try to work it out between them before involving their manager. But even these
problems can escalate, and if that happens, a concrete decision (“Buy another stapler”) is
the only way to make the problem go away. It’s important for a project manager to learn
to differentiate between trivial problems (“Someone keeps taking the last donut”) and
more serious ones (“Tom won’t let go of his ridiculous database design”).
Regardless of the magnitude of the problem, if two people on your team care enough
about a problem to come to you with it, you should take it seriously. If you dismiss it and
tell them that it’s their problem to solve among themselves, you are making it clear to
them that even though you are their manager, you do not care about the team members’
problems (and, by extension, the project itself).

Avoid micromanagement
When a manager is overly involved in each task to the point that she personally takes over
the work of each person on her team, she is micromanaging. From her point of view, there
are a lot of benefits to micromanaging her team:

• It endears her to the people at or above her level, because it seems like she always
knows everything there is to know about what’s going on with her team.

• She knows that no mistakes will ever make it out of her team.
• She does not have to trust the people who work for her to do a good job. Instead, she
can review everything they produce to ensure that each work product meets her stan-
dards—and she will redo anything that does not meet those standards.

MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP 247