Conversation

Effort shock is detail shock is reality shock. Many things that seem like they’d be really cool to have done turn out to require way more effort, patiently wrangling more way detail than you realized was involved, than you’re willing to invest.
Quote Tweet
What is the most detail-oriented activity you enjoy? Where there’s a huge number of details to get right and you just have to patiently work through all of them, and you either genuinely enjoy it or it feels like a soul-crushing grind?
Show this thread
5
96
So one of the reasons I'm thinking about this is that work at abstract levels, like management and leadership, suffers from a lack of natural detail. A manager can't be a detail-oriented to the same degree as a mechanic because social reality has a lot less natural detail
3
28
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.
1
26
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.
2
14
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.
2
15
Replying to
One interesting new management learning Eg: in the covid WFH world if you ask N people to do task “A” which is not directly part of their job they will 98% of the time fail to do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a VP or Mid Level manager doing the asking.
1
1
Replying to
I can imagine. You don't even have to quickly open up an excel sheet to cover up the game you were playing. WFH is the opposite of open plan offices with their visibility pressures to at least pretend to do things asked of you.
Replying to
This is one reason I decided this was a good time to push the yak collective experiment. No better time to try doing away with managerial patterns of organization. If people aren't listening to "managers" 98% of the time anyway, why not try to make things work without them
1
Show replies