Musings on management

Wow, long time no blog! I started this one about 3 months ago, and things have changed since then – but I still think it’s a useful reflection on management for anyone who, like me, is reaching the point in their library career where it is a consideration. Enjoy!
—–

I’ve been thinking a lot about good management recently, not just in the context of a library service but more generally, as a set of skills.

Professionally, I’ve never previously considered myself to be ‘management material’. In my working life, I have always positioned myself as someone who delivers results, rather than someone who makes decisions about what should be achieved – I found the idea of management-level power and responsibility scary and not at all appealing. I’ve always been happy to subscribe to strategies dictated from higher up, to aim to exceed the bar that someone else has set. My attitude has always been can-do, and I’m quite good at identifying how to – but what to do at the macro level has mostly been someone else’s department.

I had framed this lack of lean-and-hungry zeal in the context of my chosen profession. I’m a librarian, a naturally assistive rather than assertive role, service-orientated, helpful. And having always been lucky enough to be managed well, perhaps I had been content to follow simply because I had had great confidence in where I was being led, and in the people doing the leading.

Moreover, I feared that management would take me away from what I love most in my job – direct contact with service users: forming strong relationships with them; the high of getting it right for them, and of seeing them benefit from that.

My last post had a much more diverse and devolved range of responsibilities than I had had hitherto, and this along with other factors got me to thinking about myself as a professional, and the career path I would like to carve out for myself in years to come. For the first time, that wish list now includes a wish to take charge. Take charge of more than just my own workload: of procedures, of planning, of people. Call the doctor, I’ve contracted managerial ambitions!

I think the main lightbulb moment behind this change has been my realisation that, if you are a manager, you do still have direct contact with customers of sorts – that is, with people to whom you’re delivering a service. It’s merely that the service you are providing is good management. And the client base you are delivering it to is not the service users, or even the person paying your salary; it is the people you have been assigned to manage.

Management, like government, cannot be effectively imposed. If you can’t persuade your team to buy what you are selling, you will fail as a manager. Even if your team nevertheless succeed, it will be in spite of you, rather than because of you. If, however, you can offer leadership that they can confidently follow; authority that they can respect; and support that they can trust, you can enable them to achieve far more than they ever could have done without you there.

Looked at from this perspective, a desire for managerial responsibility has no conflict at all with a service-oriented work ethic. And so, I can confess: I’d like to manage staff one day. And I’d like to be great at it, thank you very much. And so I’ve been giving it quite a bit of thought.

It seems to me that there are three core attributes that have been shared by all the excellent managers I have had the good fortune to work under. These are the traits that I should seek to emulate to prepare myself for a future managerial role.

Competence

This is probably the most important thing for anyone who seeks to tell other people what to do – they should be demonstrably knowledgeable in their field, and capable in their own role within the organisation. It is possible for managees to forgive their manager any number of shortcomings and irritating quirks, as long as what needs doing that only the manager can do gets done efficiently. It’s not the only thing that matters, but it’s the bedrock on which everything else is built. Competence at the top inspires confidence in the workforce, as well as simply serving as a good example.

Clarity

As a manager, a good bit of one’s time will inevitably be spent telling people to do things they don’t want to do, and making sure they do it. Nobody enjoys this. However, from my observation, management style is key to how painful this process is for all parties.

Most workers accept the fact that they will sometimes have to do things they don’t like. However, if you want co-operation and commitment, rather than mere mulish compliance, it is essential to communicate clearly what exactly it is that must be done; why it is that it has to be done; and when exactly it has to be done by. This covers the manager’s back as much as it helps their team to find focus.

Clarity is also about everyone knowing the difference between a discussion and a decision, an idea and an instruction. The clearly written summary of assigned action points is the manager’s friend. Nobody likes being told they have failed to do something they were never aware they needed to do in the first place!

Consistency

This goes back to confidence, which is to my mind the lynchpin of the relationship between a manager and their team, and the effectiveness of the team overall. Nothing will demoralize a workforce faster than a sense of instability. People who think that unpredictability as a management style is somehow motivating, that chronic insecurity keeps staff ‘on their toes’, are little better than sadists in my opinion.

Quite aside from the human element, it’s counterproductive. If half of a team’s time is spent trying to keep track of the fluctuating tides of their manager’s mood and allegiances of the moment, then that is half its potential productivity lost. If your team is hesitant to follow your instructions because they are often countermanded or simply disowned whenever it becomes expedient, then delays and failures of delivery will soon become systemic.

Consistency is also important when it comes to interpersonal behaviour. You can’t tell your team that you value and support them one moment, and then attempt to cow them by emphasising their disposability and dependence upon your good will then next. You cannot expect one member of your team to trust you, if you share their colleague’s secrets and shortcomings behind their back. It is important to remember – teams talk. If you try and play one off against another, you’re going to be found out.

There are plenty of other characteristics that may be desirable in a manager, and different teams will want different things at different times: charisma; creativity; caution; compassion – these attributes and many more may be called upon at different stages of any management career. But without the holy trinity above – competence, clarity and consistency – you will not be able to provide a good management service to your team; they will not buy in to your management of them; and everyone will suffer as a result.

Use your words

I am – to put it kindly – an opinionated person.  Less kindly, but perhaps more accurately, I am a mouthy cow.  I always have been.  This is the result of being raised by highly articulate, argumentative people who frankly didn’t have the patience to treat me like a child, even when I was one.  While I would rarely be fobbed off with a simple and unequivocal “Because I SAY SO!”, if my parents took the trouble to argue with me, then they were playing to win.  I wasn’t going to get my own way (or even the time of day) unless I was able to put forward a compelling argument.

And then there was the question of my cultural consumption. I refused to learn to read at all until I was five years old.  My resolve was finally cunningly undermined by my grandmother.  On my fifth birthday, she displayed a pair of beautifully illustrated hard-back books she had bought me (The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, if you’re asking) and then ostentatiously handed them to my father for safe keeping, saying what a shame it was they were no use to me yet, but that he could look after them for me until I had learnt to read them myself.  I got those books within the month.  I read them; then I read everything else.  My tastes were catholic: I read the standard children’s fare – comics, Judy annuals, and the inevitable Enid Blyton (resulting in a lifelong preoccupation with pork pies and ginger beer) – but also anything else I could lay my hands on: Catherine Cooksons at my nan’s, my father’s eclectic mix of Tolkien and Tolstoy, Dune and Louis L’Amour, and anything and everything in my mother’s glass-fronted book cabinet – a treasure trove of Terry Pratchett and Thomas Hardy alongside heavy tomes on genetics, astrology and zen, not to mention crack-spined copies of Lolita and the Kama Sutra, guiltily inhaled while standing by the shelf, one ear turned towards the living room door.

I loved to read, because I loved words.  Because words gave you power. They allowed you to put ideas in people’s heads.  And they allowed you to make people see you – really see the real you, whether they liked it or not.  Without them, I could only be what other people chose to see.  But by using my words, I could force them to see the parts of me I was proud of – that I was clever; that I could be funny; that I had all the same hormone-driven desires as my prettier peers, that no-one wanted to recognise could be roiling beneath my dumpy teenage surface.

Most importantly of all, words gave you the power to say what you wanted, explain why you wanted it, and prove that you deserved it.  They allowed me to take the mass of unmet wants and inchoate passions sloshing formlessly around in me, and shape them into something I could work with.  They gave me tools to track down the elusive truth of an argument, an idea, a person, to whittle and refine my concept of that truth until I was as close to it as it was possible to get.  And that proximity to what was real was an exhilirating drug I found I couldn’t do without.

The practical upshot of all this is that I am an INTENSELY verbal person.  I honestly don’t ever have a feeling that I can’t articulate – in fact, for me, the feeling barely exists until it is articulated.  I feel compelled to talk about things that are difficult or painful, or that I just don’t understand, as it is only by reasoning my way through them with words that any kind of resolution is achieved.  An unexplored emotion will nag at me like a sore tooth, and I just cannot keep from prodding.  I’m lucky I was born when I was, not a few hundred years ago, or I’d barely have been out of the scold’s bridle or off the ducking stool I fear.  Simply put, the worst thing anyone can do to me is present me with a problem and then say “I don’t want to talk about it.”

However.  There are people I encounter with whom this characteristic is a problem.  What works for me does not necessarily work for them, and my need for clarity and conclusion can on occasion actually inhibit them.  Some feel intimidated by the demand that they verbalise their thoughts and feelings on sensitive or complicated subjects even to themselves, never mind a third party.  Others are intuitive, instinctive people, for whom it is enough to simply feel a thing without having to define what it is and why.  I have had to learn to know when to stop with these people, because what to me is an exchange of views, feels to them like an argument; what from my perspective is an investigation of who they are and how they feel, to them is an intrusive interrogation.

Because my power lies so completely in my words, power over me resides in silence – not just those who can force me to be silent (mercifully few since leaving school), but those who have mastered silence themselves, who refuse to be drawn at all onto my home turf.  It is a method of control that seems to go much deeper than mine, than grappling the world to the ground with words.  Satyagraha means “insistence on the truth”, but is exemplified by passive resistance – it is what I always think of when I encounter one of these people, who are capable of sitting with a feeling or a fact without needing to understand or argue with it, to challenge or to change it.  I envy those who hold this alien power, frustrated by their power over me – for if they won’t give me their words, I cannot share or shape them, must stand struck dumb before them, seeing only what they choose to let me see.