Deep dives are powerful tools – when applied with care and used in rare situations

I have always seen myself as a partner to the people I manage, neither micro nor macro manager. This self-understanding was accompanied by a hesitancy to dive too deep into details of topics my teamsters work on. I wanted to understand enough to be able to challenge them on approaches and progress, but not so much that I’d challenge the minutiae of their work.

This week though I got hands-on involved in the daily work of 3 projects. One critical project hadn’t progressed as promised by key stakeholders and despite asking multiple times I didn’t get satisfactory answers to my questions. So I digged into the data myself and scheduled a conversation to discuss future of this project. In another project support was needed to achieve our goal as some blockers had come up. And in the third project a new hire flagged some issues with a third party, that I needed to understand quickly for budget planning this week. So I was forced to dive into details myself given the time pressure.

There are 3 key take-aways I have from these 3 deep dives.

First, they can have a lot of value for yourself as a manager to understand the overall work better and be able to better coach your people. While you shouldn’t take a lot of time from your people in doing so, it’s a definitely a worth investment when either one of your teamsters is stuck and coaching hasn’t helped so far, or when you are not able to lead topics with stakeholders of your team because you lack understanding.

Second, they provide a different perspective to your teamsters which they usually don’t get from peers who are not involved deeply into their projects (different of course if you have a larger project with multiple people involved).

Third, given the value of the 2 points above, you should use deep dives as a tool to provide value but don’t do so extensively. Dive into details quickly, ask key questions, and then move out again so your teamsters, who are the experts, can take the new impulses and drive their work without you slowing them down.

In the end, my role as manager is to enable my teamsters to be successful. The key tools I have for that are a clear, co-created direction, stakeholder management that sets the stage for them, building strong team collaboration, and regular feedback and coaching. Detailed deep dives should be seen as a powerful tool to be applied with care and only in rare situations.