Comment by krick
8 years ago
I would love to agree, because I always cared for details deeply. How can it be a bad personality trait? But later I started to reconsider that. The most effective high-level managers I know outrageously little care for details, as it seemed to me. When I was their subordinate it caused me a great deal of a problem.
But then it dawned on me. Things somehow play out well in the end. Why? Well, because there I was, to care for details, to find solutions for what it seemed like an impossible problem to solve. If they cared for details as much as I did — we wouldn't even begin anything, because the amount of detail was so overwhelming. The general plan wouldn't be born in the first place.
Now I sometimes wish I could care less for details and try to be... well, easier, I guess.
those managers had to care for at least the existence of details if they allowed you to do what was needed to honor those details. A truly "I dont care about details" manager would ask you to do something, you'd explain it cant be done that way for X, Y, Z, etc., and they'd say, "I don't care, do it anyway". A manager might not know the details of the thing you are doing for them, but they need to have an appreciation that details exist, which probably means they know about details from some other field they've been involved in, like sports, carpentry, art, or something else like that, such that they understand when someone says, "we need to do it this way because X, Y, Z", they know that those are details, you know them, and that's important to honor.