Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers :)
But the way this works over the long term is there is a cycle...a sort of ebb and flow of who gets in and out of authority positions.
The Novelty Seekers/Curious/Neurotic personality types are quite bad at anything as boring as herding cats day in day out for years and years. It just drives them nuts. The Conscientiousness personality types love it. Its what they do best and it works out great with problems that have known solutions. Its when problems get more complex/ambiguous where curiosity and imagination matter that they start blundering and looking incompetent, and thats when the doors open for the neurotics to reenter the arena. This is where they shine. After they find imaginative solutions if you keep them incharge of day to day ops they start blundering away too.
'Well unfortunately for humanity, people who are "curious learners and experts" are most of the time bad managers'
Why do you say that? All my best managers have loved to learn, and been expert in some areas. They just -also- were sufficiently self aware to recognize that having the people under them all be out learning things, and owning the decision, was far more efficient than them trying to learn and become an expert, and then dictating decisions. You need the latter to be good; I'd argue the former is entirely orthogonal (except maybe being an added benefit, in being able to recognize who is going to be aggressively learning).
MOST work involves exploit, as in once your scout finds a gold mine on the map what do you do with him?
Do you send him off to go look for new ones or do you make him mine manager and task him with hiring people who spend the whole day digging.
The more experience a person gains doing one thing (explore) or the other (exploit), the harder it is for them to switch when conditions change.
A good explorer has a itch to constantly explore. A good mine manager knows how to sit in one place and keep the spice flowing. You can find people who have a mix but they will always be outclassed by specialists in both camps.
Its always hard when the time come to manage transitions from one mode to another. Once in a while the weather is good and resources exist to keep people of both camps on payroll. But thats rare cause weather conditions are always changing.
> Do you send him off to go look for new ones or do you make him mine manager and task him with hiring people who spend the whole day digging.
This is a false dichotomy. If he is excellent at finding mining locations, the best fit to help him scale out his capabilities is to give him larger responsibilities over the mine finding operation. If he's inclined to lead, that means potentially managing the team who finds mines so he can mentor them and pass along what makes him great at finding those locations and effectively multiplying his impact. The explorers will have more respect for their manager since he's been out there finding effective mines and has demonstrated that he has skills to teach them.
But the way this works over the long term is there is a cycle...a sort of ebb and flow of who gets in and out of authority positions.
The Novelty Seekers/Curious/Neurotic personality types are quite bad at anything as boring as herding cats day in day out for years and years. It just drives them nuts. The Conscientiousness personality types love it. Its what they do best and it works out great with problems that have known solutions. Its when problems get more complex/ambiguous where curiosity and imagination matter that they start blundering and looking incompetent, and thats when the doors open for the neurotics to reenter the arena. This is where they shine. After they find imaginative solutions if you keep them incharge of day to day ops they start blundering away too.
Managing these transitions is no simple thing.