Jennifer Jarson

Questions Middle Managers Ask: Ways of Seeing Everyday Work

This past semester, I participated in a professional development program at my institution targeting middle managers. My cohort included about a dozen such folks from across the university. While the size of our respective departments as well as the nature of our work varied, our shared experience as middle managers gave us a strong foundation of common responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges from which to work.

Each session seemed to highlight the balancing act that middle managers frequently have to strike. Like in our session about management and leadership skills, for instance. A typical framing presents the roles as distinct — are you a manager or a leader? the articles ask. Often, that framing elevates leadership as the more desirable role and positions management as inferior. Yet our discussion in this session positioned the skills as complementary. Instead of distinguishing management and leadership as separate roles, our facilitator acknowledged that department heads must lead and manage at the same time and that both are essential responsibilities.

We middle managers know this. Management is about planning, organizing, and coordinating. Management means attending to workflows, staffing, training, timeline, and resources. Leadership is about creating a sense of purpose and providing direction. Leadership means attending to vision and culture. Department heads use leadership skills to shape the environment for success and management skills to execute the work.

Yet managing the work can carry a particular sense of urgency. Without management, chaos can ensue. A staffing gap or a workflow problem requires attention now. Leadership is also essential, no doubt — developing culture, creating shared understanding, envisioning the future — but it’s quieter and slower. The busy-ness of management and its many demands can crowd out opportunities for leadership, continually pushing it to the back burner. The daily work of management can make it feel like there’s no time left for the big picture thinking of leadership. If you don’t create room for leadership, our facilitator said, you’re never going to get room for non-management work. So what’s a middle manager to do?

This next bit is where I really felt the light bulb turn on. What are the questions that management asks versus the questions that leadership asks?, our facilitator posed.

Framing management and leadership as questions to ask offered a simple yet significant shift for my thinking. It helped me see them as lenses to apply to any situation, habits of inquiry to bring to any opportunity or challenge. If my department is overwhelmed, a management lens could help me ask: What resources and support do we need? What processes or workflows might we improve? What timelines or expectations can we adjust? At the same time, a leadership lens could help me ask: What needs are most important? What work has the most impact on our mission? What assumptions are we making? What can we stop doing? How can we acclimate and support the team through changes we make?

Instead of being categories of work to carve out time for, this shift frames management and leadership as complementary ways of seeing my everyday work. This makes leadership feel less abstract and more actionable, positions them both as routine practice, and enhances their complementary nature, too. In fact, it’s helped me recognize the ways I already employ both regularly, and often in the same moments, with different lines of inquiry. This strikes me as an effective and sustainable way to carve out a bit more space for leadership practice, to strike a better balance between management and leadership.

What lenses do you apply to your everyday work? What questions do your lenses help you ask?

In Search of Serendipity

Wow, this year has been a lot. In every conversation with a colleague, it seems we’re talking about workload, institutional turbulence, the roller coaster of extreme weather, and/or the state of the world. I feel like I’m alternating between a head-down-and-muscle-through mindset and a frazzled lack of focus edging on burnout. Seeking some kind of mental reset, I’m thinking back on a conversation I had a few weeks ago.

I’ve mentioned before (like here and here) that my colleague and I co-host a podcast, “From Concept to Creation: Uncovering the Making of Scholarly and Creative Accomplishments.” The idea of the podcast is that we talk with folks from our institution about the process of their research and inquiry experiences — the steps they took in a research project or on a professional path and the practices, attitudes, and skills they used or developed along the way. The goal is to peek behind the curtain to reveal the parts of this work that are so often invisible (and undervalued), to increase the transparency and therefore the accessibility of these experiences, and to normalize the challenges and roadblocks that we inevitably encounter along the way. (You can check it out on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, if you’re so inclined.)

We’re putting together the lineup for season 4 this summer so we’ve been having exploratory conversations with potential guests. We use these meetings to get to know folks and their work and to brainstorm if and how we might structure an episode around their experiences. It’s a thread from one such conversation that keeps coming to mind for me. In reflecting on his professional progression, one potential guest commented on the social and societal pressures to define life paths from an early age. He characterized his own journey as loose and amorphous, encouraged by his parents to live in the moment rather than establish a clear trajectory or goal. This approach, he felt, allowed him to take advantage of the opportunities he encountered, to veer off course you might say. By contrast, he noted, the kind of pressure so many young people feel to focus early, to identify a dream job or find a passion, narrows their perspectives. Serendipity is missing from so many people’s lives, he said — being open to the world around us reaps great rewards personally and professionally.

I can see what he means. Too narrow a focus reduces opportunities for unexpected discovery. But not just the opportunity — also the attitude. When our lives are increasingly governed by algorithms, for example, not only is our exposure to unanticipated information limited but our confirmation bias is also exacerbated. And it seems to me that when the workload or the world (or both) are overwhelming, when we feel overloaded or uncertain, it’s natural to close off, to make ourselves small. With that comes a reluctance to engage with the opportunities around us, or even the inability to see them as opportunities — to see them as inconveniences or even threats instead.

My podcast work is a kind of exercise in serendipity, come to think of it. On the one hand, there’s no real external mandate for me to do this project (that adds to my workload). So by committing to it (and sometimes taxing my capacity), I’m likely limiting my ability to see and engage in the other opportunities around me. At the same time, though, the podcast creates the opportunity to participate in the types of meandering conversations I really don’t have anywhere else in my professional life and with people I wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I would have had no reason to have had this rather fun and thought provoking conversation with our potential guest, or even to explore the train of thought that led me to discover his work. Time and time again, when my collaborator and I wonder why we keep giving ourselves this work, it’s this idea that we come back to: we find so much inspiration in it.

It strikes me then that maybe serendipity isn’t actually as happenstance as it sounds. It can take intention to make it happen. Maybe we have to build a structure to create space for it, seek it out — whether that means carving out time and mental space by adding a new project to our to-do lists or just adding a regular block on our schedules to read at random or follow a meandering thought and see where it goes.

How do you search for serendipity? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The forest and / or / versus the trees

I was chatting with a friend the other day when she made a comment about an administrator at her institution with whom she’d had a difficult exchange: he was a “trees person,” not a “forest person.” As in, he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve been thinking a lot about this comment — about what it means to be one or the other, about what it means to strike a balance between both.

Since the start of my library career, my work has centered around teaching and learning. In this domain, I can see many ways that a “trees” and / or / versus a “forest” vantage point might play out. In a one-shot library instruction session, for example, a trees orientation might mean laboring over each filter, each click in a database at the expense of more forest-like work conceptualizing a research question and operationalizing it with effective keywords. A trees perspective could mean strictly adhering to every component of the lesson plan at all costs whereas a forest perspective could mean veering off-script to take advantage of a student’s unexpected question and have a meaningful conversation about the research process. Yet ignoring the trees altogether could mean that students walk out of class without the practical means to apply the important concepts under discussion to their own next steps. A skilled instructor aims to strike a balance, no? And that balance is ever-shifting, requiring an instructor to zoom in on technical details and zoom out to big picture concepts, to be attuned to the needs of individual students while also moving the class as a whole forward, to be responsive in the moment yet not lose sight of the process and the larger goals.

In more recent years, my library work has included a healthy dose of middle-manager administrative responsibilities, too. In this domain, I can also see the trees and / or / versus forest metaphor playing out. We middle managers are at the intersection of our communities: providing direct service to our users while supervising, supporting, and advocating for our colleagues on the teams we lead while receiving, interpreting, and implementing directives from higher level leaders. Every day, in ways small and large, we need to zoom in and zoom out, be attuned to our users and our colleagues while moving our teams forward, be responsive in the moment yet not lose sight of larger organizational goals.

It’s no secret that my institution is going through some pretty serious turmoil, as are most higher ed institutions right now and for multiple reasons–maybe yours, too. I started this post with the hope of arriving at some larger realization to help me navigate this tumultuous moment, to guide me through these intersections and balance my thinking and my approach. Because, with significant change already underway at my institution and still more serious change expected in the near future, it feels like the stakes are higher than ever, that my ability to see both the forest and the trees at the same time is all the more important.

In many ways, I would say that I approach my day-to-day life with a trees perspective. My focus on getting through my to-do list can sometimes mean that I forget to look up, to widen my gaze, to think big. I work to make space for forest thinking but that vantage point sometimes doesn’t come easily. So I find myself wanting to try to articulate items I can add to my to-do list, steps I can practice — the trees, if you will — to cultivate my forest perspective in this uncertain landscape. It strikes me now that by reflecting on my work in the teaching and learning domain over all these years, I can indeed see how my ability to navigate between a trees and a forest mindset and praxis has grown, how I’ve been able to strike a careful balance, usually to good effect. And when I think about my daily practice, I recognize skills, habits, and attitudes that have been essential to that growth and the balance in and out of the classroom, especially those related to supporting communication, promoting transparency, and employing emotional intelligence. It’s not quite the lightning bolt, a-ha moment I was hoping for perhaps, but it is a reminder about the relevant skills and attitudes already available to me — to us — and the habits to practice. I feel bolstered by their broader relevance and their transferability to the here and now.

How do you cultivate a balance between “forest” and “trees” thinking? What does your experience in teaching and learning (or your domain of choice) teach you about middle management? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

On being open to being open

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about mindset and attitude. For starters, I’ve taken on an interim position at another campus within my institution this year while continuing to manage my ongoing position. So I’ve had one foot in that “new job” space, more or less, working in a new context and getting to know a range of new colleagues. This means I’ve been trying to ask a lot of questions, offer fresh eyes on continuing challenges, and consider new opportunities. It’s been a chance to practice an open mind and cultivate an inquiry attitude anew. I’d like to think that it’s easy to maintain such perspective at all times, but let’s be honest — it’s actually quite easy to lose that kind of openness, especially once you’re several years into a job. It takes effort and intention, practice and repetition to stay curious, to be open.

This makes me think, too, about the podcast that my colleague and I co-host. “From Concept to Creation: Uncovering the Making of Scholarly and Creative Accomplishments” is about making research accessible by pulling back the curtain on the research paths and processes that are so often opaque and confusing. Our guests are students, faculty, staff, and alumni from across subjects and experience levels. They share stories that give insight into process, not just product — the inner workings and rough edges of their research and inquiry experiences. We get to learn not just about the what of our guests’ work, but also about the hows and the whys of their work as well as their challenges and accomplishments along the way. In so doing, we aim to address the questions people have about research… and the questions they didn’t know they had because they couldn’t think to ask about what’s invisible. At the same time, we try to challenge stereotypes and assumptions related to research. Our guests show how much fun it is to be curious, and how normal it is to encounter roadblocks in this kind of work. (Shameless plug: the podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! The season 1 and season 2 archive is available, and season 3 episodes are dropping monthly through April.)

In these conversations, I find myself again and again asking our guests questions about their mindsets and attitudes. And it strikes me again and again how their paths and processes are shaped by their curiosity, their perseverance and their ability to navigate uncertainty, their capacity for reflection, and the way they conceptualize their processes. While some of our guests seem to suggest they have an inherent inclination for at least some of these habits of mind, they by and large reflect on the milestones and developmental trajectories that led them to practice, cultivate, and achieve (and continue to practice) these dispositions. These are muscles that they are continually training.

I guess I’m partly reflecting on this all because we’re about halfway through the semester — and it hasn’t been an easy one. The truth is that adding interim responsibilities to an already full plate means it sometimes feels like there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it. Which can mean that it can feel hard to stay open, to stay curious. So I guess I’m giving myself a bit of a pep talk here — maybe you need one, too? — to just remember that the mindsets that we practice, the attitudes that we cultivate shape the paths that we navigate or create. If I were a person inclined toward mantras or slogans, I’d offer us both one here. But an image, at least, does come to mind for me: Shel Silverstein’s “The Thinker of Tender Thoughts.” Do you know it? I’ll spare you my paltry description of its essential truths and offer it to you straight.

How do you stay open to being open? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Achilles’ Heel?, or Coping Strategies Turned Strengths

I stumbled across this article the other day. The gist is that leaders can and should embrace their confusion when confronted with illogical situations. Whereas some might see confusion as a liability to be concealed or let confusion debilitate them, strong leaders embrace their confusion as a productive tool. The author suggests that the Reflective Inquiry and Action (RIA) framework can help folks negotiate and use confusion effectively. The five steps outlined in the RIA framework — “embrace your confusion,” “assert your need to make sense,” “structure the conversation,” “listen reflectively and learn,” and “process your response aloud” — feel like common sense really. Looking back, I can recognize some of my own attempts to navigate these steps and can see how productive they were for not only overcoming confusion, but for building relationships with colleagues, too.

It makes me think about other techniques I’ve embraced — the organizational approaches I use, for example, to help me grab hold and make sense of the thoughts buzzing around in my brain. The reflective techniques I practice when I feel muddled. They’re coping strategies, really, that I’ve adopted to help navigate my work, my thinking, my overwhelm. They’re born out of a need to manage what have definitely felt like long-time weaknesses. But I can also see now that using and refining these organizational and metacognitive techniques over the years has actually turned them into strengths. These have become ways of working, ways of thinking that are powerful and constructive.

I’ve often heard colleagues both in and out of the library describe how little formal education or training they had to prepare them for their teaching responsibilities. While I had the benefit of a bit of educational theory as an undergrad and a grad school class that gave a nod to teaching, I would largely characterize my own teaching preparation the same way — it’s been a learn-as-you-go situation. I can see how the organizational and metacognitive skills I’ve been developing have also served me well here, giving me a lens through which to examine and reflect on the why, how, and what of teaching and a foundation from which to develop pedagogical approaches. What started as experimentation with personal note taking techniques, for example, has evolved into strategies for working with students to grow their own brainstorming and organizational techniques as they develop topics, consider the different angles embedded in their questions, and manage the sources they’re using to explore those perspectives. The reflective techniques I use to process my own work have helped me introduce metacognitive practices into my teaching — to talk with students about why and how to use those brainstorming and organizational techniques, for example, or as a tool to direct students’ attention and reflection.

I came to administrative and supervisory positions with little formal training either. And here, too, I’ve been able to translate and further grow these coping strategies turned skills, whether for facilitating collaborative decision-making processes or mentoring a colleague or setting priorities. It turns out these skills — skills for sense-making, really — can be cultivated to be a productive foundation across domains.

I’m about to take on some additional administrative responsibilities so it’s no surprise that my thoughts are lingering around questions of weakness and strength, questions of preparedness. I’ve reflected before on how truly powerful these kinds of “soft” skills are. It strikes me anew how important perception and attitude are in making good use of those soft skills. I feel I’m venturing into Pollyanna, let’s-make-lemonade-out-of-our-lemons territory here and that’s not my intention or not exactly. I just mean that frame of mind and point of view can make all the difference in setting the tone for how we approach a problem or a weakness, how we make use of what we’ve got.

This all made me think of that statistic I’ve seen cited so often — the one about how women are less likely to apply for jobs than men if they feel they don’t meet 100% of the qualifications. Looking for that source just now, I came across this Harvard Business Review article. While the author doesn’t deny that women may need to build more confidence, which is how I’ve often heard that statistic interpreted, she layers on some additional dimensions. She contends that it’s not just a lack of confidence, but also too strict an adherence to what women see as the rules of hiring. “They thought that the required qualifications were…well, required qualifications. They didn’t see the hiring process as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications.” I think it’s that “creative approach to framing one’s expertise” bit that really applies here. We might already be cultivating the skills we need. We might be more ready than we think we are. We just have to recognize our strengths and put them to use.