Makers or doers work with object-level reality. They are the ones writing the code, drafting the specs, or designing the menu. They see the messy details that are involved in doing something, and will often try to avoid the egregiously tedious tasks whenever they can. Managers on the other hand work at a higher altitude, and don’t necessarily have to deal with the nuance or details of the work. This perspective allows managers to just focus on what is important that should be done, while (for the most part) ignoring how laborious it might be to actually do. Together, this partnership between makers and managers works well, at least in theory, because things that are important will always be done regardless of how unpleasant the work may be. But when the partnership becomes unclear, say for self-employed people or founders at small startups, where the manager and the maker are the same person, things might not work as well. The maker’s bias against messy and tedious things can creep in and overpower the decision making process, and leave critically important things undone.

Of course, both managers and makers have their own biases. Managers are usually less in touch with the weeds of how things are actually done on the ground, and that may lead to poor decisions being made. But this is much easier to overcome than the bias for makers, which is a more innate human tendency to avoid unpleasant work. When someone is both the decision making manager and the maker who actually does the work, the manager’s bias from a lack of object-level details disappear naturally, but the maker’s bias remain. We see this every day with household chores. As the manager, I know that I need to wash the dishes (high priority task), but as the dishwasher, I don’t want to do it, and so I instead work on other less important tasks, and procrastinate.

Things can be pretty detrimental when this bias affects business decisions in teams. This is more commonly seen in smaller organizations, where the founders and early employees are self-managing. It can often result in the more tedious to implement, yet critical to the business decisions being constantly de-prioritized and not worked on. Improving the basic operations of HR, for example, is one such item that I’ve personally been bit by. It is absolutely essential to the proper functioning of the company, yet the boring process of actually doing the work constantly discouraged me from getting to it.

There are a few ways to help overcome this bias. One is to work with a professional executive coach or outsourced personal manager, who will act as the role of the “boss” for self-managed individuals. A more approachable alternative for people who work in teams is to act as each others’ managers when making decisions on what should be worked on. For this to be effective however, the cross-managed people cannot be too similar in their areas of responsibility. If two team members are both involved as makers in a tedious task, then having them act as managers to one another will not really help with overcoming the bias. You can also try to do this for yourself, by deliberately acting as a separate persona, the “manager”, in the planning part of your work, and simply sticking to the plan as the maker when working. But this is the most difficult to accomplish, as it mostly relies on willpower.