Head Tale

In my interview for my first librarian job, I was asked that all-time favourite interview question, “Where do you see yourself going in ten years?”  I replied “I'd like to be a director someday” but to this day, I honestly don't know how much of that answer was me being honest and how much was me saying what I thought the person wanted to hear.

Joke's on me – the person who interviewed me (who happened to be the current Library Director at that library) later said, “That was a bad answer – you were basically saying you wanted my job.”  (“Well, I didn't say I want it tomorrow!” I remember replying…silently in my head, that is!)  But that interaction has stuck with me having just passed my third anniversary as a professional librarian.  Do I still want to be a Director someday? 

Honestly, there are days when I don't even think I'd want to move up to management when I see the hours some managers put in and the stresses they deal with from above, below and the side.  (I recently talked to a classmate who, as I think I was, seen by the rest of our class as the “future library directory” type – very involved in school activities, also won the school's “Spirit of Librarianship” award, etc.  So I was a bit surprised to learn that she'd also had come to an “I'm very happy where I am now, thank-you very much!” position which I thought was revealing since I'd say she was very goal driven compared to myself.)

One other thing that's got this at the front of my brain – I recently went through some leadership/management training sessions and one of the things that stood out in the section we covered on personality types was that the type of folks who take up 90% of high level management jobs in any company tend to be the exact opposite personality type of myself, at least on the Myers-Briggs scale.  (This reminded me that the Director who I mentioned in that first anecdote had told me something similar – and also happened to have that personality type – and was indeed a very good director.) 

So is there any hope if I still *do* want to be a Director someday (other than the fact that by the time all the boomers retire, people in my generation might have no choice? )   

Well, I just recently finished reading a book called “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving The Future of Business” and it's an early contender for The Hammy Award, the unofficial prize I give each year to the best book I've read in the last 12 months. 

I'm going to quote one section near the end of the book on the future of work…

“What happens when the kids attending Adelphi [an American cybercamp for teens] enter the workforce?  For starters, they'll accelerate the obsolescence of such standard corporate fixtures as the management hierarchy and the nine-to-five workday.  As Thomas Malone, an MIT professor and author of “The Future of Work” points out, these conventions are artifacts of an earlier age when information was scarce and all decisions, for the sake of efficiency, trickled down from on high.  Information is now available to anyone with an Internet connection.  The result, Malone says, is that decision making has been decentralized.” 

And maybe, just maybe, the type of personality type best suited to managing this emerging workforce isn't the traditional one either but the exact opposite one – more social, more open to experimentation, less concerned with hierarchy, rules and details.  Maybe?