> As a manager, I actually find people doing "big picture" thinking quite annoying to deal with. What I want you to do is concentrate on the tasks in front of you and do those well. You shouldn't be caring about the total amount of tasks to do, or if we are going to finish the project on time. That is my problem, not yours.
Your attitude is probably sound and productive in itself, but it's going to drive away a lot of top performers and leave you with a predictable but modestly achieving team at best. You may benefit from finding a way to accommodate some of those "big picture" thinkers who show more initiative and who might bring attention to some of your own blind spots and misjudgments.
A lot of high performers do like to think about the big picture, and they have good ideas. A lot of them become managers, and good managers usually ask for their input. But also, a lot of people on a team like to think about the overall status of a project or a company rather than the task at hand. Many problems are more interesting than the one in front of you. Worse, sometimes contributors like to obsess over org problems as a way of validation. As in, I am only a week behind but the project is over two months late! That can be annoying.
That's... fine? They can't all be Jeff Deans, or John Carmacks. Nor would you want them to be. Promote those that are up the engineering ladder and let the L4's do L4 work. You need L4 work to happen or else the annoying bugs don't get fixed and the small but important pieces of functionality don't get built.
I don't think the suggestion is that they _never_ do big-picture thinking, only that they concentrate on the current task. The wider view can be addressed in retrospectives.
Your attitude is probably sound and productive in itself, but it's going to drive away a lot of top performers and leave you with a predictable but modestly achieving team at best. You may benefit from finding a way to accommodate some of those "big picture" thinkers who show more initiative and who might bring attention to some of your own blind spots and misjudgments.