Manager or maker. Pick one.
There are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Many managers can write great copy, produce great code, or design well. But the majority of managers don’t have the luxury of switching gears from manager brain to maker brain during their day. Unless they can segment their weeks into management days and maker days, they’re going to be wasting time and energy going between both. Consequently, they won’t be effective in either role.
And let’s be honest, few people can segment their weeks like that. Things come up in the middle of the day that require a manager or maker and if you’re in one brain when the other is needed, you’re wasting time rebooting.
I have always been comfortable as a maker. It might seem like I’d be a good manager in that I know what bad management looks like and I stay out of the way. But I have no aspirations to manage people. When I’ve told my managers this, they think it’s absurd. “Surely you want to ‘move up,’ don’t you?” Move up? How do I move up from creating content? That’s the top of what I want to do.
I had a manager who thought of herself as a maker. She didn’t critique my work well. She would shift into maker mode and tear it apart and say, “I would say it this way.” I told her, “That’s not an effective critique of my work. I’ll never be able to think or write how you would. I need to know if what I’ve said is correct and if I’ve said what needed to be said.”
That’s the role of the manager. The manager is not the maker, by definition. Making requires both intense collaboration and intense isolation. Managers don’t have the option of isolating themselves and they’re often not available when collaboration needs to take place.
The same goes for the company: don’t hire someone to manage and make. Pick one. If you need a designer, don’t ask that designer to manage clients or projects. You’re putting an individual in a difficult position because she’s constantly going back and forth between different disciplines.
Just because a person can make a thing doesn’t mean that she can manage the people or projects involved in making that thing. Technicians often lack the “soft” people skills to be effective managers while creatives lack the hard, technical skills required. Being a good manager is a specific combination of personality and skills that not everyone has nor strives to develop. Many of us are happy being makers.
Stop the schizophrenia and define the roles of employees. It’ll help the makers make and the managers manage.
good.simple.open is the little idea that we can do good work by focusing on simplicity and openness.
