We practise Scrum here. We have a fortnightly planning meeting where we feed in the current business priorities, and successes and failures from the previous sprint, and we decide, as a team, what we want to tackle for the next sprint.

One of the ways we do this is to sort the backlog on a board by complexity vertically, and business priority horizontally. After that, the Product Owner has had his input, so it's up to the team to pick off what we want to do. Obviously, picking off a high-complexity low-priority task is frowned upon, but we are deciding this as a team. It makes planning sessions longer, but it's worth it, and a core part of the Agile process.

And we do have micro-management sometimes, but that's a different problem.