I think the way great managers and leaders become great is by creating a world of detail for themselves that is comparable to the natural detail environment that accompanies individual contributor work. Those who fail to do this fail at their jobs.
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The thing is, the "domain" of leaders/managers is other people, and people are not things. If you bring "thing" like detail orientation to people, you'll come across as creepy/stalkery. You don't want to obsess over people the way you might over a car engine.
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Some aspects do carry over. Attentive listening, empathy, individualization, are "detail orientation" in relationship mode, but it's fundamentally limited by the fact that the other person is a PERSON with boundaries beyond which they reserve details for themselves.
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If the point is not clear: if you don't like the way a rug looks, you can adjust it so it is exactly right on the floor. If you don't like the way someone's hair looks, you can't go around adjusting it.
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So with people-work, while the principle of "reality has a surprising level of detail" holds, that detail is not yours to work with generally speaking.
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But otoh, doing good mindful work and investing satisfying effort requires *some* domain of demanding detail to work with. This is why so many managers get tempted into bullshit work -- it creates the faux-detail the mind demands out of process bureaucracy stuff.
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But *good* managers and leaders otoh, find a way to be usefully and deeply detail oriented without either being creepy about personal boundaries OR getting sucked into bullshit work.
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Technology and finance are functional domains where it is possible to craft a "managerial detail" domain that fits this prescription. It is possible to be very detail oriented in both functions without working at the hands-on "object level"
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This is one reason why I tend to trust tech and finance leaders more. There's a there there to what they do if they're good at it. By contrast, sales leaders for eg. are typically creepy if they're good. They're usually turn people into things in order to produce a detail domain.
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Okay this is clearly a newsletter or blog post...
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Replying to
Went down this bunnytrail via the post I just wrote on leverage... there's a leverage vs. detail tradeoff in work that can kill you.twitter.com/artofgig/statu
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Hmm... I think there's a fundamental tradeoff between leverage (in the effort multiplier sense rather than debt sense) and detail orientation. Leverage spreads the same amount of detail over more area, creating fragility.
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