Hi all, Lots of good stuff on this thread, and a couple of books I think I'm going to have to check out myself. (One of the advantages of working for a large library is I often already have the good books at my fingertips.)
I came into my current job about 3.5 years ago. My job is defined as half technical, half management. However, as my team has grown from three to five and as the work of the library has shifted, the management portion has expanded. Here's some of what I've learned over the past few years... 1) Be the go-between. One of the roles of a first level IT manager is to translate the business needs coming down from above into terms that make sense to the line staff, and to translate the technical perspective back into business value. When the library management system is down, the director of public services for our library doesn't really care about the technical details of how the database indexes got fubar'd, or why. She wants to know when the system will likely be back on line, and what she can do in the meantime to serve her patrons. The manger for library technical services wants to know when they'll be able to begin cataloging books again. When its all over, they'll want to know what happened not because they care about the structure of the database. They want to know what processes and procedures you've put in place to keep it from happening again in the future. If you can do that level of communication, and let your technical folks focus on fixing the problem, then you are generating value as a manager. 2) Managing people takes active work. Some folks take more than others. Both of these things are OK. I work for a large organization that has both formal job descriptions and annual performance reviews. I find that having the job description be accurate really helps in writing the reviews, and I spend a good bit of effort crafting both of those things. Expect to spend time developing people and guiding their work to meet business needs. It is your job to tell them what their job is, but also to make sure they have what they need to get their job done. If you do the latter well, they won't resent the former. 3) Don't be arbitrary. If you have a reason for requiring your staff to do something, share it. If you can't articulate your reason for doing something, question yourself until you can. Once you've established trust with your staff, you can get away with "just do it my way for now and trust me, and we can talk if it still doesn't make sense later." The way you build that trust is by being open and transparent about your reasons and reasoning. However, don't throw management/customers/whoever under the bus in your transparency. You won't win with "We have to do this because the jerks in accounting are requiring us to do it, and that's the end of it." Instead, figure out why accounting needs that thing. Is it a regulatory compliance thing, that will keep the company out of trouble with the feds? Are they trying to cut down on fraud? If you can find legitimate business reasons for annoying things, people will be more understanding. And if you can't find them, you can say, "I tried to find the justification for this, but I couldn't. We're required to do it, so I guess we just have to treat it as a compliance exercise and move on." 4) Don't try to be expert in everything. When you go from senior technical person to manager, you have to give up the mantle of expert. If you don't, you'll fail miserably and piss everyone off. Instead, figure out what your strengths are and what the strengths of your individual staffers are. If you can assign the work to the person who will be the best at it and will enjoy it the most, everyone will be happier and more successful. Where you have people who have specific expertise in technical areas, defer to them on those technical areas. I have someone who does most of our reporting and data analysis. Anytime a question comes up that touches on how the data flows within the system, I bring her in on the question. She knows I value her expertise, and she catches stuff that I would have missed completely. She feels needed, and I end up not looking stupid. We both win. That the $0.02 that comes to my mind. Good luck! -- Christopher Manly Coordinator, Library Systems Cornell University Library Information Technologies [email protected] 607-255-3344
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