Balancing Manager and Maker Schedules in Service Companies

In service companies, roles often fall into two groups: managers and makers. A lack of synchronization between managerial and creative tasks can lead to project delivery problems. Better time organization and regular team meetings can significantly improve collaboration.

Managers and Makers

Managers plan the work that makers carry out. Makers execute client tasks according to plans created by managers.

You might think these roles complement each other, but on closer inspection their working styles conflict, which sometimes leads to friction and stress.

It’s important for these two roles to understand each other, understand the other side’s goals, and develop a shared way of working.

Where’s the Conflict?

A manager in a service company often handles many projects and clients simultaneously. On these projects, things are constantly happening and makers need to provide information relatively quickly.

The conflict arises precisely in these situations. The manager wants answers from the maker as soon as possible. The maker wants uninterrupted focused time to execute their task as well as possible, without thinking about other things.

On top of this, there’s the sales department, which may also need a maker’s time to estimate work for a new client.

And then there’s remote work and its associated communication tools, where sending someone a message on Slack or Teams asking “got 5 minutes?” is very easy. Much easier than walking from one room to another in the office to ask someone a question. Less friction in asking questions means there are more of them.

But this behavior causes the maker to break away from their work, shift mental context, and what starts as 5 minutes often becomes several dozen. The entire day’s work plan falls apart, the week’s schedule changes, and project deadlines slip. Then the manager is surprised by delays without recognizing their own contribution to them.

On the other hand, if the maker works in a team where tasks are interconnected and they spend too much time on their own work without looking at the team’s other tasks, this can cause delays across the whole project. Not passing along information, not responding quickly to questions from others, not helping other team members (especially when you know how to solve their problem) can also cause project delays.

How to Handle It

When planning team work, both roles must be taken into account: manager and maker. There’s no single rule for organizing such a team’s work, because every team has different people, clients, and projects.

However, there’s a general starting framework you can begin with and adapt to your specific team and projects. I recommend doing this adaptation once a week.

I generally recommend that teams work in 1-week cycles (e.g. sprints). This way, each week there’s time to review the previous period and discuss any issues (like a Scrum Retro, but a single question suffices: “What should we improve to make our results even better?”).

A team working in 1-week cycles can decide to improve their work 50 times a year. A team working in 1-month cycles can decide 12 times. It’s not hard to guess which team will work more productively.

Starting Framework for Team Work (manager and several makers):

Day Division:

Each day, plan time slots for more managerial work (more communication) and slots for creative work (more focused work). Start by dividing the day as follows:

• 1h communication
• 3h focused work
• 30min communication (and e.g. lunch break)
• 2.5h focused work
• 1h communication

Sprint/Stage Division:

Plan work in 1-week periods.

Each week, hold a meeting with these elements:

• 1. Review:
  • Summary of the previous week (planned vs. completed).
• 2. Improvements:
  • Each person answers: “What should we improve to make our results even better?” (prepare the answer before the meeting).
  • This is the place to discuss the day division and adapt it better to the team’s specifics. This division can also change over time as clients or projects change.
• 3. Task Planning:
  • Plan work for the next week.
• 4. Creating more maker time:
  • Review the calendar and consider whether all team meetings are necessary.
  • Could a daily meeting become 3 times a week instead?
  • Are some previously scheduled one-off meetings unnecessary?
  • Could selected meetings have fewer attendees?
  • Or do you actually need to add more meetings to speed up communication (because things aren’t being well described in Slack or Jira)?

Based on this framework, after a few weeks you’ll refine how the team works and make everyone more satisfied with the way they collaborate.

Manager Communication Techniques That Reduce Interruptions:

Here are some rules I’ve been following for a while:

• If it’s not urgent and there’s a team meeting in 1–3 days, I add it to the meeting agenda.
• If I need an answer today but not right now, I write on Slack or send an email scheduled for the second half of the workday (usually 2:00 PM).
• If I need something urgently right now, I send a Slack message immediately.

These practices reduce the number of messages that might pull someone away from their current tasks. Sometimes I find that messages I’d planned to send get deleted because I solved the problem a different way.

What If I Have Both Managerial and Maker Tasks?

There are roles in a company that partially carry out managerial tasks and partially creative ones. In this case, you need to additionally divide your day or week by activity type. I typically start the day by checking email and Slack for fires. If nothing’s burning, I only flag messages I need to reply to and move on to my own creative work. I usually spend 2–4 hours on this in the first part of the day. After that, I switch to communication. I also try to schedule meetings after 10 AM (I usually start work at 7:00 AM).

Some people divide days of the week, e.g. consolidating all meetings into 1–2 days per week to keep the remaining 3–4 days fully available for creative work.

Here too, you should test different options and see which works best for your situation.

Summary

It’s important to be aware of how other people on your team and in the company work. It’s also important to take a few minutes each week to consider whether the current way of working is optimal. Doing so can significantly improve both the team’s results and your own.