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[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
I did not go to library school to become a manager. I think I would be a terrible manager, even now. I did not want the responsibility of overseeing people, dealing with budgets, paperwork, evaluations, and the like, and I most certainly did not want a job where I would be stuck in an office all day without the opportunity to do programming and public service. Many of the jobs offered for the degreed folk out of library school are the kind where you will be stepping into a managerial role, because the library system feels the best value for your salary and degree is placing you as high up the chain as they can. My perfect interview was for just such a position, and we both realized that it was not a good fit because I didn't want to do the management part, I wanted to participate in programming. My current position started out with no supervisory requirements and no people reporting to me, even indirectly.
And then the recession hit. And as we were getting out of that, and the layoffs that had followed with that, the upper management decided that the people who had the library degree were now people who existed on the totem pole of people who are empowered to make decisions regarding policy, behavior, and asking people to leave for the day, especially for those times when there were no supervisors or managers around to handle such a matter. The librarians were also empowered to "direct the work of the branch" as needed to make sure everything moves smoothly and people are doing what will be helpful. The union went "Bzuh?" and there were some very interesting back-and-forths there about whether or not that meant the librarians and assistant supervisors were being given supervisory powers and needed a commensurate rise in pay and reclassification to acknowledge this new ability of theirs. And also training in their new supervisory powers, because many of the people with the degree in the front line had no training, experience, or desire to take on managerial work. Eventually, the management said "no, you're not managers now, you're just people who are places where the buck stops if stuff happens while the manager is out." Net effect: New responsibilities, no new pay, and no actual power to supervise, but, y'know, the ability to suggest or something and expect that people will follow along with the suggestion.
Cue the people with the new responsibilities going "where's my training?" Which never actually materialized past a single sheet of "here are some examples of where your new responsibilities will need to happen" and an afternoon where specific and pointed questions about what we could and couldn't do and what sort of powers we actually had went...nowhere, and we were told essentially that they trusted our judgement enough to be able to handle whatever situations came up, according to the policies in place. We asked for specific reassurance that we would not end up on the receiving end of disciplinary action if our interpretation or application of the policy wasn't right or wasn't exactly the way they wanted us to handle it. We got none of that past some verbal reassurances that so long as we were giving it our best effort and trying to do it right, we wouldn't get in trouble. (Unless it was a right royal screw-up, of course, or it could be conclusively shown that we were deliberately acting contrarian or in bad faith.) The training still hasn't happened, and we still don't have any specific reassurances past that point. But it's been in place long enough, with enough things having happened, that there's a vague sense of competence that comes with the territory, and the axe hasn't fallen on anyone (that we know of) yet for how they've handled things when they came up. And we're still not actually endowed with any supervisory powers or responsibilities.
As a way of making us learn the ways of the manager, it's a pretty good sneak tactic. We have days as the designated person in charge, where if things go pear-shaped and the manager's not here, it's our thing to deal with. And there's usually a debrief after a thing happens on what we could have done better or alternate ways of approaching the situation. It is not for nothing that I will refer to myself as the "Poor Sucker In Charge" when I've got that particular potato to hold. Because someone who's already gone through a "you've fucked up, here's your disciplinary probation" on the matter of a wrong application of policy (as well as the aforementioned rumor mill and manager interpreting things negatively) is not going to react well to being given responsibilities backed by promises that things won't go badly if things go badly. Because someone has already broken those promises to me once, and it nearly cost me my job when they did it.
Library students now might have a mandatory management course or two to get through, because more and more the library degree is also coming with various levels of managerial responsibility at any given organization. The recession crisis impacted budgets and staffing levels pretty heavily, and so a lot of places are working on a crew that's less than full capacity. And so more responsibilities devolve to the people who may or may not have wanted them in the first place.
And the most insidious part is that if I get to the top of my current payscale and want more money than what I will get through cost-of-living adjustments and the occasional classification study that will reveal we're underpaid compared to the richer county nearby, I'm going to have to learn how to be a manager, because the only way up from here is by becoming a supervisor. Or by finding work in a place that's not where I am right now. I can't say that I'm really all that thrilled about the prospect of any of this. And that's before we talk about things like communication disconnects, the insulated space that's away from public service (and how decisions coming from that space can be clueless), and all of the other fun difficulties that come from having an organization with several layers of management.
I still think I'd be a terrible manager. I don't have the right skill set for it, I think I don't have the temperament for it, and I doubt my record of work as an employee is going to recommend me much to the higher levels. Yet, here I am, gathering experience in doing just that, because my organization decided that everyone at my level should unofficially become managers. It would be like telling all the Adult Services librarians they're responsible for at least one story time a week and then not providing any training on how to do story times the way we want them to.
If I'm doing the work, though, they should pay me for the work that I'm doing. Starting with the training that they still haven't provided.
I did not go to library school to become a manager. I think I would be a terrible manager, even now. I did not want the responsibility of overseeing people, dealing with budgets, paperwork, evaluations, and the like, and I most certainly did not want a job where I would be stuck in an office all day without the opportunity to do programming and public service. Many of the jobs offered for the degreed folk out of library school are the kind where you will be stepping into a managerial role, because the library system feels the best value for your salary and degree is placing you as high up the chain as they can. My perfect interview was for just such a position, and we both realized that it was not a good fit because I didn't want to do the management part, I wanted to participate in programming. My current position started out with no supervisory requirements and no people reporting to me, even indirectly.
And then the recession hit. And as we were getting out of that, and the layoffs that had followed with that, the upper management decided that the people who had the library degree were now people who existed on the totem pole of people who are empowered to make decisions regarding policy, behavior, and asking people to leave for the day, especially for those times when there were no supervisors or managers around to handle such a matter. The librarians were also empowered to "direct the work of the branch" as needed to make sure everything moves smoothly and people are doing what will be helpful. The union went "Bzuh?" and there were some very interesting back-and-forths there about whether or not that meant the librarians and assistant supervisors were being given supervisory powers and needed a commensurate rise in pay and reclassification to acknowledge this new ability of theirs. And also training in their new supervisory powers, because many of the people with the degree in the front line had no training, experience, or desire to take on managerial work. Eventually, the management said "no, you're not managers now, you're just people who are places where the buck stops if stuff happens while the manager is out." Net effect: New responsibilities, no new pay, and no actual power to supervise, but, y'know, the ability to suggest or something and expect that people will follow along with the suggestion.
Cue the people with the new responsibilities going "where's my training?" Which never actually materialized past a single sheet of "here are some examples of where your new responsibilities will need to happen" and an afternoon where specific and pointed questions about what we could and couldn't do and what sort of powers we actually had went...nowhere, and we were told essentially that they trusted our judgement enough to be able to handle whatever situations came up, according to the policies in place. We asked for specific reassurance that we would not end up on the receiving end of disciplinary action if our interpretation or application of the policy wasn't right or wasn't exactly the way they wanted us to handle it. We got none of that past some verbal reassurances that so long as we were giving it our best effort and trying to do it right, we wouldn't get in trouble. (Unless it was a right royal screw-up, of course, or it could be conclusively shown that we were deliberately acting contrarian or in bad faith.) The training still hasn't happened, and we still don't have any specific reassurances past that point. But it's been in place long enough, with enough things having happened, that there's a vague sense of competence that comes with the territory, and the axe hasn't fallen on anyone (that we know of) yet for how they've handled things when they came up. And we're still not actually endowed with any supervisory powers or responsibilities.
As a way of making us learn the ways of the manager, it's a pretty good sneak tactic. We have days as the designated person in charge, where if things go pear-shaped and the manager's not here, it's our thing to deal with. And there's usually a debrief after a thing happens on what we could have done better or alternate ways of approaching the situation. It is not for nothing that I will refer to myself as the "Poor Sucker In Charge" when I've got that particular potato to hold. Because someone who's already gone through a "you've fucked up, here's your disciplinary probation" on the matter of a wrong application of policy (as well as the aforementioned rumor mill and manager interpreting things negatively) is not going to react well to being given responsibilities backed by promises that things won't go badly if things go badly. Because someone has already broken those promises to me once, and it nearly cost me my job when they did it.
Library students now might have a mandatory management course or two to get through, because more and more the library degree is also coming with various levels of managerial responsibility at any given organization. The recession crisis impacted budgets and staffing levels pretty heavily, and so a lot of places are working on a crew that's less than full capacity. And so more responsibilities devolve to the people who may or may not have wanted them in the first place.
And the most insidious part is that if I get to the top of my current payscale and want more money than what I will get through cost-of-living adjustments and the occasional classification study that will reveal we're underpaid compared to the richer county nearby, I'm going to have to learn how to be a manager, because the only way up from here is by becoming a supervisor. Or by finding work in a place that's not where I am right now. I can't say that I'm really all that thrilled about the prospect of any of this. And that's before we talk about things like communication disconnects, the insulated space that's away from public service (and how decisions coming from that space can be clueless), and all of the other fun difficulties that come from having an organization with several layers of management.
I still think I'd be a terrible manager. I don't have the right skill set for it, I think I don't have the temperament for it, and I doubt my record of work as an employee is going to recommend me much to the higher levels. Yet, here I am, gathering experience in doing just that, because my organization decided that everyone at my level should unofficially become managers. It would be like telling all the Adult Services librarians they're responsible for at least one story time a week and then not providing any training on how to do story times the way we want them to.
If I'm doing the work, though, they should pay me for the work that I'm doing. Starting with the training that they still haven't provided.
