Micro-Habits of Effective Managers | Hacker News Reader

Micro-Habits of Effective Managers

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95 pointsjcs8716 comments

Setting people up for a win is what I value the most with managing.

Clearing the path and making sure they can taste meaningful victory.

Work is inherently demotivating. Value is its antidote and its certainly not as intrinsic as the exhaustion and apathy from labor. It's always a social construct but must not be manufactured.

Instead be a protector and guarantor of the most possible reality based on available evidence

mmmmmmm victory salivates

>Work is inherently demotivating.

some parts of our work are demotivating. From my experience building houses, software, mechanical tools are intrinsically very motivating. Dealing with slow JIRA is demotivating, and many other stuff coming from, and especially through, managers is demotivating.

>apathy from labor

sure. The starting point though is all the stuff which converts work into labor.

"Habits maketh the man" and thus i guess "micro-habit maketh the micro-manager"

>slow JIRA is demotivating

"What's wrong?" Asks the doctor as the man continues to weep.

"Doctor," the man says, "I am the JIRA administrator."

There is a LOT to unpack when you assert work is demotivating. I've generally found when mentoring that bad management is common and terrible managers are also common. This is a real cause of demotivation for plenty of workers.

Turning up every day to some mini hellscape created by nasty people and money / need for money then becomes the only reward. Those are the biggest causes of demotivation right there.

Prime example: deliberate hiring to fire. No one should be advocating that. Its incompetance. A real ethical organisation would be investigating who hired the person and who managed the person. Then seriously consider firing them as well. Minimum action is to reduce rewards, eg bonuses, as penalty. Hiring done well is expensive. Hiring poorly implies something bad in the hiring process. Why tolerate that?

WTF is a micro-habit? Most of these items aren't even habits.

As i was scrolling hn i imagined the title to be "25 effective habits of micro-managers". Might have finished reading that one instead

For what it’s worth, that moniker has been around for awhile (e.g. [0]), even though it seems a bit unnecessary.

The general idea is that the habit is so simple/small, it’s trivial to implement. Contrast this against habits that require time, dedication, self-discipline or fundamental life changes.

- [0] https://hackernoon.com/micro-habits-changed-my-life-47f572bf...

It doesn't seem like there is any meaningful distinction gained from this term.

Yes, successful formation of a habit often occurs when you start small. That isn't anything new. Read anything about how to start a habit, and you'll almost certainly find this recommendation.

Author talks about reading books, starting with just one page a night. Well, presumably the goal is to read more than one page a night, at what point does this stop being a micro-habit and start being a normal habit? Maybe that's hard to answer because they mean the exact same thing?

This type of "lets make up a buzzword, so centuries-old ideas sound like something fresh that I did" seems so self-aggrandizing and annoys the heck out of me.

I imagine this probably emerged from blogger’s SEO efforts.

“I’m blogging about habits - the small kind - and I want readers to know at a glance, let’s call them micro habits”.

I don’t love it, but I think I understand how it came to be.

> at what point does this stop being a micro-habit and start being a normal habit?

I think that’s also the unstated point behind “micro habits”. These things are achievable, and oh look, you’ve fully formed a useful habit: reading books.

I think this approach is targeting a very specific type of audience - an audience that wants to make changes, but they want the easy way. They gravitate to gimmicks and buzzwords.

Even though it may seem unnecessary on the surface, if it’s actually leading to results for people who wouldn’t have otherwise made the change (perhaps due to feeling like the thing was too big to tackle), I say why not.

And I’m probably not the target audience, either.

> WTF is a micro-habit? Most of these items aren't even habits.

That's because you need a million micro-habits to make a single habit.

Along the same lines can folks here talk about what what makes a good director and what makes a director different from a manager?

On one hand, there’s a scope difference. Directors will be leading managers rather than individual contributors, but senior managers could also be doing that as well.

Much more defining in my mind is the higher expectations on understanding and directly managing the economics of the business. Managers would ideally be aware of the fundamental economics, of course.

At a high level, Managers are responsible for making their team effective at delivery and make sure their people are growing. Directors are responsible for making sure the right teams exist, that they have the right goals, that they are coordinating effectively and that there is enough opportunity available for people to grow and the right number of people are growing at the right pace to fit what the company will need in the future.

Adding a few quick thoughts to some of the already good responses below:

- Directors are commonly the first level of 'executives' in a large organization.

- A good director builds the environment, managers, and other leaders for the organization to succeed.

- A good director grows the organization's capacity and output by growing its managers and leaders, as well as recruiting others to join.

- A team manager's focus is on their team and individual's success; a directors's focus is on their organization's success, which often requires additional knowledge and greater attention to business factors as well as relationships with other organizations (e.g. "political capital").

Going in the other direction:

- While the director layer is the common next level of organizational abstraction above managers, or manager-of-managers, there are significant behavioral differences; from lead, manager, and manager of managers to director there is a significant regime difference in the role's responsibilities and area of concern.

- A director that acts in the same role of a manager without fulfilling the organization's other needs (e.g. growing the organization's capacity through its managers and teams) will end up becoming the organization's bottleneck. - As with managers, directors that end up needing to be too technically involved with specific technical issues or projects will end up depriving their people of the opportunities and challenges needed for their growth and limit the potential capacity of the organization. - Directors generally should be concerned more with the organization's and functions and capabilities (e.g. ensuring the right teams and people are available to successfully solve problems, versus being directly involved in problem solving, or allowing the organization to require their direct involvement with its day-to-day problems)

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