Featuring an Article: T.L. DO(!) R.
The other week, in Curiosity and Curation, I looked into and gave my reasons as to why digests — which mostly have gone into obscurity as a category of blog posts by now — deserve every chance for a renaissance. Today, I’m going to re-introduce another way of writing a blog post, and namely: featuring a standalone article.
In digests, we share a collection of links along with a few brief comments on why we’ve chosen to include this link into our digest. When we feature only one article written by someone else, we go more in-depth, as we build our argument re: why we consider it worth sharing. So, today, I’d like to feature a piece which first caught my eye by… it’s whoppingly non-positive headline, and the headline is:
How Can I Avoid Turning Talented Workers Into Crappy Managers?
Upon a second look, when I actually read the article (Medium’s algorithm would probably estimate its read time to ~11 min), gave it my full undivided attention, and reflected upon it — and this took >11 minutes, and that’s why I’m not a fan of those “read time” estimates because an article might make a profound impact evoking a thought process which can take days, weeks, or even years! — I saw how this read provides some precious clues to answer some very practical and burning questions, such as:
How to distinguish why some engineers fit into managerial roles better than the others? What to take into account? Why conscientiousness — the quality no one speaks about — is an essential skill for a manager? Why empathy, as a quality, has to be balanced with the systems thinking, and the other way around?
Actually, the very “negativity” of the headline, on a second thought, turns out to be an upside of the article. Many of us have been biased, culturally, to think positively, and to focus more on “how to do things in the right way” vs. “why things have gone wrong”. And, if you run a web search for effectual vs. causal reasoning (that’s a high-fly terminology for those two modes of thinking), you’ll see how they thumb the first option up, and the second one down. Today, I’m not focusing on why and how this very effectual thinking has backfired on our well-being, on our businesses, and on our civilization, in many ways. I’ve got some stories to back my point which I hope to share some other time. For now, let’s just assume that the imbalance of focusing on effects calls for the back-balancing momentum, where we will want to be more concerned with the causes rather than with the intended effects themselves because the answers that we find by looking into the causes save us the trouble of sorting through the side effects of the intended effects, so to speak, which we’d otherwise be unprepared for.
And, I could’ve served you a neat pack of quotes from the article. That’s what pretty much everybody is doing these days. And, I do have my other reasons, as to why I consider this negatively-headlined article immensely practical and helpful. However, this time, I prefer to not do the work of digesting for you :) Just…. take my word, check the article, and… choose if you want to do some effectual or some causal thinking this time :) Or, better yet, see how both the effectual and causal thinking can be aligned for the pragmatic purpose of organizing the work of humans in harmonious, thoughtful, caring… and wholesomely productive ways.
Related:
Senior Engineer: How to lead a project
One Product Owner Is Not Enough
Project Managers: Nurturing vs. Hiring
Two Approaches to Focus in Knowledge Work
..as well as many more Q-Blog posts tagged #leadership, #writing, and #productivity :)
