Head Tale

We didn’t see eye to eye on everything but I was very fortunate to have the first manager in libraries that I did as he was very experienced and knowledgeable (obviously people have to start somewhere but it can be a lot tougher if your manager is someone who’s newly hired or has only been doing the job for awhile.)

He happened to live in Regina but for 30 years, he had commuted over an hour one way to Weyburn where he was the Director of Southeast Regional Library.  (He laughed as he told me about one day when there was a bad blizzard and he still made it in before many of the staff who lived locally!)

His personality was very unique – he also told a story about doing the Myers-Briggs and the consultant coming up to talk to him after as most people are somewhere along a continuum in the various categories and he was so high on all four categories one way that the consultant had never seen that before – I think he was INFJ which is already the rarest Myers-Briggs type.

How did that unique personality manifest?

When I started, the guy I was replacing said that our boss drove over two hour each day to work and back and “He didn’t spend that time thinking about the movie he saw the night before or his favourite hockey team.  It was all libraries all the time.”

Another unique thing about him was that he wasn’t a fan of unions – perhaps not unique to people in senior management roles – but he had an interesting take on why they were still important.

“Every bad manager thinks they’re a good manager” he told me once.  “That’s why you need unions.”

Self-awareness of your faults and gaps is probably one of the hardest skills to develop for anyone and in my experience, the higher you move up in an organization, the more this self-awareness fades away given that you are being told that you are moving into higher levels of authority and responsibility.

That’s also why having tools like 360 feedback are important – most performance review structures are top-down – a manager or supervisor asses (typo intentional! I actually saw this instead of “assess” in a presentation once!) their subordinates.

But there are three types of dynamics in any organization – between people above you, people at the same level and people below you.  And all of those relationships are two way.   So if you’re only focusing on one relationship dynamic in your review process, you’re ignoring five others which all have an impact on your culture, your customer service and your organizational success.