Stand-up meetings as a form of Micro-Management

(There, that got your attention.)

The client I am working with just now made a comment last week when I was explaining the purpose and mechanics of Stand-up Meetings that I wanted to come back to and address.
He asked, "Isn't this [daily Stand-up Meetings] a form of Micro Management?"

"No, of course not", I said sincerely but not wholly convinced my answer would satisfy.

Finding a better answer to this question became my weekend homework.

I started by googling for a definition of "Micro Management":

"Management "steps in" and directs the day-to-day and hour-to-hour activities of you and your co-workers in order to get things done, to deal with the (continuing) emergency.", ref http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MicroManagement

I have added the emphasis to highlight what I consider to be the key difference, namely that the purpose of a daily stand-up is to allow the team to reflect on how it's doing and make adjustments accordingly, be they resource based, in effort or expectations. It is not the manager's job to do this for the team, it is the team's responsibility to do this for itself. Our aim is to have a barely sufficient process but to have a team that has highly effective communication mechanisms. Our aim is to have a self-organizing team. A collocated team will do most of it's communication in the minute-by-minute interactions that make up an ordinary day. Here the stand-up is often more useful for the other (let's say, higher level) stakeholders in the project; it is their chance to hear first hand what progress is being made, and what impediments are getting in the way. Where it is the latter, they are often in a position to help. If the team is distributed then the minute-by-minute interactions are no longer available to us and we must employ other mechanisms to make up for this shortcoming. In this environment, there are many other challenges but communication remains central - the stand-up meeting becomes essential if the team is to keep in sync and come close to operating at an optimum pace.