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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.
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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?
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To thrive in any kind of making work you have to learn to love the process more than the outcome. The process is where you spend almost all of your time and the outcome is unreliable. And you need to invest in the process in itself to improve.
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In management a lot of people invest in work process: agile or other planning and tracking methodologies. But I think that misses the point. The best leaders invest in the actual material which is people. You have to actually like people and want them to thrive.
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I read the whole thread. What I was trying to say was I think there’s a difference between invasive emotional “detail work” which centers the manager’s access to the employee’s inner life and cultivating people, which often requires emotional growth from the manager themselves.
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Your aspirational model of managers growing is good, but my cynical view is that the number of people both capable of it and interested in it is like 0.1% of the number of managerial roles. Which means the solution is actually to figure out ways of organizing without managers.
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greenleaf was from an era marked by a) highly protectionist/regulated economies b) coming off the conglomerate era pre-Welch. Both fairly unique conditions that were, in hindsight, necessary for the model to work. It could potentially work again but would take huge updates.