Blog / What is the difference between makers and managers?

There is a difference and a disconnect between makers and managers, a difference in the ways they work and in their needs.

This difference is driving a wedge into the corporation between makers and managers a wedge that upset people to a degree where they become stressed and often end up changing job.

What you might already know is that most people actually go to work to do a good job, to do what they have promised and if the possibility arises above, but because of this difference, they often end up being stressed – and stress makes especially Makers create less in the same period of time and in a lesser quality.

The Difference

To do their job both managers and makers have one overshadowing need that they try to get fulfilled every day.

But the needs of a maker and the needs of a manager is different, and when the makers and managers tries to get their own needs fulfilled they actually makes it worse for each other instead of working together and helping each other to get their separate needs fulfilled.

The Manager

A manager’s role in a company is to manage people and processes, what a manager needs to make sure that people and processes runs smoothly is overview.

Overview of what is going according to schedule and what is not, where there is roadblocks and where the coast is clear.

The manager needs this overview to do his job when planning into the future, and if he wants to learn from the past.

This need for overview is most commonly sought through communication with the involved people and through data collected.

The Maker

A maker on the other hand, and I define a maker as someone creating something, in my world we create computer programs, but it could also be marketing plans, managing AdWords accounts or tasks like writing content for this blog.

A maker just want to be able to create, in a perfect world a maker would be left alone for a period of time and then out of that would come newly created work.

The thing about creating is, that to create you want to be in flow, a state where noises and time seem to disappear, and where you unleash a creative power that makes your 10-100 times more effective than when you are not in flow.

When a maker is in flow, they understand the entire problem, see all the possible outcomes and makes the right decision for the project in its current state.

There is one important thing about flow that most people do not understand, a piece of information so important that i will emphasis it again and again when taking to people about flow and how TimeBlock can help them.

There is a long period of lead in and lead out of flow, it takes up to 30 minutes to get in flow and up to 30 minutes to get out again.

Take a minute to think about this, 30 minutes is a long time where you are unproductive, so if you only have an hour to work in, you might not even be able to get to the flow state (someone calls it being in the zone)

The TimeBlock solution

The simple solution is to leave the Makers alone during the day and only communicate to them in the morning, during lunch and just before they leave, but this is not enough.

To make sure that Managers gets their need for overview fulfilled, the TimeBlock method reserves every Monday morning for communication between the Makers and Managers, so every Monday I get full access to my Makers for 3 hours, I can ask them any question (and I will) until I am sure that the next 5 days is planned to my satisfaction.

Then, and first then will I leave the Makers alone to do the work during the week, knowing that they will report to me if anythings goes terribly wrong.