RW5 Finding the management sweet spot

I hadn’t thought before about the fact that under managing could be just as harmful if not more than micromanaging. Finding the sweet spot is my challenge moving forward. These reflections are triggered by an experience this last semester, where I realised in trying not to micro manage I hadn’t set up the team for success. The challenging part of this was learning to step back from pointing the finger at the ‘others’ and to ask how I was complicit in creating this situation as a manager and what I could learn from this to do differently next time. “How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” [Jerry Colonna]Related Work: Jerry Colonna https://www.reboot.io/team/jerry-colonna/ Deci and Ryan (various) Self Determination Theory – mini theory of ‘Basic psychological needs’ -autonomy, competence, relatedness https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/ Victor Lipman, 2018, Under-Management Is the Flip Side of Micromanagement — and It’s a Problem Too, Harvard Business Review, Nov 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/11/under-management-is-the-flip-side-of-micromanagement-and-its-a-problem-too Don’t be a conflict avoiderView goal-setting as mission criticalIs this the absolute best work you can do [GF: not sure I agree with this last one]TranscriptAutomated transcript via Temi.com so may be some inaccuracies. (00:05):Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better.(00:25):In this short podcast, I'd like to share some of my own reflections on trying to find that sweet spot between micro-managing and under managing. And this has been triggered by a particular experience in this last semester, brought to light, I think because of the circumstances of COVID and being remote. But before getting to there, it's useful for me to start back to when I first started being responsible for research projects and a bunch of researchers, and I inherited a large number of projects and people, and this was in the early two thousands. And I felt really out of my depth and really insecure. And I think, you know, the imposter syndrome would have, would be a definite definition for what was going on then. And I know that at times this led me to slip into micromanager mode, which isn't a very helpful mode to be in because it can really undermine the people that you're working with and good people. And there was a particular incident incidents where without going into details, the researchers should have walked away from a day of running a study, celebrating a great success. Yes, we could reflect on lessons learned and what we could take forward to our next study, but they actually had really done a great job. But they walked away feeling really de-motivated and deflated because of some of my unnecessary interventions that day, and this isn't the sort of leader that I want to be.(02:08):And I I'm grateful for people who've put up with me on my own learning journey that hopefully I have a much better sense now that it's not my role. I don't need to control, but I should enable and empower people. And that, especially in academia where we're working with really clever people, how can we trust people that we're working with and provide the enabling and supportive structures and create more...

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