At my current job, we have a daily 15 minute morning team "stand up" meeting (we don't actually stand up) where I say what I've been doing and share any issues/ask quick questions I have with my manager, but otherwise I don't interact with him unless I have questions or we happen to be in another meeting together.
He's often in meetings the majority of the day (or doing code reviews, or writing up tasks), so the onus is more on me not to bother him too much unless I really need to.
That seems to work out pretty well.
I've also been the project lead on several projects for a couple of previous companies, and except for priority, design, or time estimate meetings (usually one or two a week), I left them alone almost completely, and simply worked on development tasks unless they came to me with questions.
Some days there'd be enough questions at random intervals that I couldn't ever get into the flow of things and didn't get much coding done on my own, and some days there'd be no questions and I'd get a ton of coding done.
One time the boss brought me into his office to say how well he thought I was doing as project lead, and I was like "Really? I kind of just let them work." And he said "Maybe that's why you're good. You know how to leave them alone."
Being hands off works fine when the team is working well and the goal is clear. The problem becomes when the proverbial hits the fan and you suddenly realise you have no real idea what your team members think, who likes who, what their likes and dislikes are, and what their skills are outside of your recent history. The only way to learn all this is to spend time with people getting to know them and them getting to know you so they trust you when you need their support.
Fair enough. There was a decent amount of social back and forth at that company also, and we went to lunches a couple times a week, so I had a pretty good feeling for their abilities.
We mostly stayed on top of things and never really had a crisis moment, though, because we had a boss that would talk to the client and "manage his expectations" since he made so many ridiculous claims and demands anyway (inventing features he never discussed with us and wondering why it wasn't in the builds yet, asking for things that were pretty much impossible and thinking it could be done in a couple of weeks, changing the entire direction of the project based on an article he read the night before, etc.)
He's often in meetings the majority of the day (or doing code reviews, or writing up tasks), so the onus is more on me not to bother him too much unless I really need to.
That seems to work out pretty well.
I've also been the project lead on several projects for a couple of previous companies, and except for priority, design, or time estimate meetings (usually one or two a week), I left them alone almost completely, and simply worked on development tasks unless they came to me with questions.
Some days there'd be enough questions at random intervals that I couldn't ever get into the flow of things and didn't get much coding done on my own, and some days there'd be no questions and I'd get a ton of coding done.
One time the boss brought me into his office to say how well he thought I was doing as project lead, and I was like "Really? I kind of just let them work." And he said "Maybe that's why you're good. You know how to leave them alone."