4 ms·

Micro-Habits of Effective Managers

95 points by jcs87 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago
WTF is a micro-habit? Most of these items aren't even habits.
- jokab 5y ago
  As i was scrolling hn i imagined the title to be "25 effective habits of micro-managers". Might have finished reading that one instead
- haswell 5y ago
  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-47f572bfc153 https://hackernoon.com/micro-habits-changed-my-life-47f572bf...
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    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.
    - haswell 5y ago
      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.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
kristopolous 5y ago
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
- 3maj 5y ago
  mmmmmmm victory salivates
- trhway 5y ago
  >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"
  - xf1cf 5y ago
    The corporate nonsense is demotivating but also the lack of ownership. No, ISOs are not ownership. The vast majority of ISOs are _more_ worthless than the paper they're written on and to be honest they seem like a scam to justify lower wages in many startups. It's one thing to have your own project where every unit effort you put potentially has an outsized effect in your market. A market doesn't have to be financial here, but it could be academic, open source, whatever. This is powerfully motivating. You matter fundamentally. It's an entire 'nother thing to be pushing hard on a project for work. You're working on someone else's dream with limited downside for you and limited upside subsequently. You can be fired at any time and the only thing your job will say about you (legally) is "yes they worked here". All of your efforts gone in an instant and not a single thing to show for it. You're back in the candidate pool competing with fresh grads on grade school CS problems you haven't touched in years. Maybe you did well enough a couple of your ex-coworkers will throw you a bone at their friend's company or something. It's entirely demotivating. This is the definition of all work-for-wage effort. The scientific term is "the rat race". I suppose if you're compensated well enough you can ignore this feeling. But it's still present. You're cashing in almost 60% of your life. For what? To me, there's no amount of "micro-habits" or "good management" that will correct this. At the end of the day the C-levels and management have a concerted interest in keeping the worker bees happy for some obscure, probably driven by an MBA spreadsheet, definition of happy. All work, aside from work on your own dreams, is inherently demotivating. If it already hasn't, it will eventually suck every last bit of the bright eyed programmer you have left in you. Unless of course you _enjoy_ slaving away on someone else's dream. Then by all means - keep on keepin' on.
awakeasleep 5y ago
This would be a good post to analyze for voting ring behavior on HN
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you're worried about abuse, they ask you to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. I took a quick look and didn't see any indication of voting ring behavior on this post. `
yalogin 5y ago
Along the same lines can folks here talk about what what makes a good director and what makes a director different from a manager?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  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.
- wins32767 5y ago
  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.
- moandcompany 5y ago
  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)

95 points by jcs87 5y ago

cwkoss 5y ago

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

jokab 5y ago
As i was scrolling hn i imagined the title to be "25 effective habits of micro-managers". Might have finished reading that one instead
haswell 5y ago
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-47f572bfc153 https://hackernoon.com/micro-habits-changed-my-life-47f572bf...
- cwkoss 5y ago
  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.
  - haswell 5y ago
    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.
GuB-42 5y ago
> 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

kristopolous 5y ago

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

3maj 5y ago
mmmmmmm victory salivates
trhway 5y ago
>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"
- xf1cf 5y ago
  The corporate nonsense is demotivating but also the lack of ownership. No, ISOs are not ownership. The vast majority of ISOs are _more_ worthless than the paper they're written on and to be honest they seem like a scam to justify lower wages in many startups. It's one thing to have your own project where every unit effort you put potentially has an outsized effect in your market. A market doesn't have to be financial here, but it could be academic, open source, whatever. This is powerfully motivating. You matter fundamentally. It's an entire 'nother thing to be pushing hard on a project for work. You're working on someone else's dream with limited downside for you and limited upside subsequently. You can be fired at any time and the only thing your job will say about you (legally) is "yes they worked here". All of your efforts gone in an instant and not a single thing to show for it. You're back in the candidate pool competing with fresh grads on grade school CS problems you haven't touched in years. Maybe you did well enough a couple of your ex-coworkers will throw you a bone at their friend's company or something. It's entirely demotivating. This is the definition of all work-for-wage effort. The scientific term is "the rat race". I suppose if you're compensated well enough you can ignore this feeling. But it's still present. You're cashing in almost 60% of your life. For what? To me, there's no amount of "micro-habits" or "good management" that will correct this. At the end of the day the C-levels and management have a concerted interest in keeping the worker bees happy for some obscure, probably driven by an MBA spreadsheet, definition of happy. All work, aside from work on your own dreams, is inherently demotivating. If it already hasn't, it will eventually suck every last bit of the bright eyed programmer you have left in you. Unless of course you _enjoy_ slaving away on someone else's dream. Then by all means - keep on keepin' on.

awakeasleep 5y ago

This would be a good post to analyze for voting ring behavior on HN

dang 5y ago
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. If you're worried about abuse, they ask you to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. I took a quick look and didn't see any indication of voting ring behavior on this post. `

yalogin 5y ago

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

sokoloff 5y ago
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.
wins32767 5y ago
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.
moandcompany 5y ago
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)