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Miss Manager,
June 2001

Dear Miss Manager:

I have gotten myself into a rather sticky situation. My very good friend from library school was hired to run another department in my library, partly based on my high recommendation. She has turned out to be a disaster. The terrific, interesting, driven person I knew 10 years ago is now a bitter, complaining troublemaker. The morale in her department is rock-bottom. The formerly wonderful relationship between her department and technical services is deteriorating by the minute. I feel foolish and I feel I have betrayed my colleagues. What can I do?

Sincerely,

In the Dog House

Dear Dog House:

Since you cannot undo the actual hiring of this person, you have two options: 1) work to get the person fired; 2) work to improve this bad situation. You may have noticed that Miss Manager has given this kind of advice before, and that's because in any personnel problem those are the basic courses. The first one is extremely painful, usually bad for morale, often tangled up with legal difficulties, and hard to accomplish in many institutions. The second one is more typically the way to go, and therein lies all of the pain of managing people. How do you go about motivating an individual worker with a singular personality, filled with problems, complexities, desires, jealousies, pleasures, virtues, and vices all mixed into a formula unique to that particular piece of humanity? Your situation makes the attempt at this both more and less difficult. It is more difficult for you because you do not manage this person, and yet you seem to be blamable in some sense for the problems this person is creating. But it is easier for you because you can approach this colleague on a personal level which would probably be impossible for other people. So, you should make an appointment for lunch or an after work drink someplace away from the office. Be frank. Say that your own department isn't interacting with your colleague's department in the same way it used to do, and, honestly, the people in her department don't seem very happy. Is there something wrong? Is there something you can do to help? If this doesn't actually open the floodgates, it should at least elicit a response that you can respond to. After this your next moves will have to be based on what she says. A none-of-your-damn-business response from her may require a clear statement that this problem will have to go to the director (or whoever the next person up in the organization may be) for resolution. A what-can-you-possibly-mean? response will indicate that she wants specifics, not generalities about vague dissatisfaction, so come prepared with the details that document your problem. A thank-goodness-I-can-talk-about-this response may be the most promising, but steel yourself against excuse-making, tirades against fellow workers, or the unexpectedly awful conditions of her new workplace. Someone who can be described as "a bitter, complaining troublemaker" sounds like a tough case to work with. But I have seen people like this make improvements once they have been informed that such was the impression they were giving. If you have any indication that those higher up the ladder have noticed with disapprobation the situation with your colleague, a hint along those lines should be given. But, at least as an initial approach, you need to tell her that there is a problem and that you are willing to work with her to resolve it. You will have to adjust your course after that depending on her behavior, but come back to it. Let her know that you are concerned and prepared to help her over whatever is causing her trouble.

Dear Miss Manager:

I am having trouble getting all of my work done even though I have tried to streamline my workflow. I am not someone who avoids automating in order to become more efficient. I have a Palm Pilot, I do almost all of my communication via email or on my cell phone, I take my laptop and pager with me wherever I go, my meetings are all scheduled on a networked calendar, I can manipulate data with ease, but I seem to have more and more of it rushing in at me every minute. Back when I started, I was a cataloger and worked from 8 to 5 with an hour lunch. Now I get beeped at 5:00 a.m. and go until I collapse at midnight. How do you handle all of this influx. Gotta run,

Wired but mired

Dear Wired:

Why a manager working within a technical services area in a law library might feel the need to be quite as connected as you are is the question I find in all of this to precede the one you have asked. Don't get me wrong – I like a nice , high-tech gadget as much as the next geek; but I don't see that the existence of a particular gadget is reason enough to incorporate it into one's work life. No one will dispute the fact that word processing, email, and the web have all revolutionized the way we do our work. And it may be that 24/7 access to everything and everybody will prove to be just as necessary to our functions in the future. However, I would ask you to question whether or not you are doing less work by keeping more busy. Miss Manager has known a number of people who seem to be able to set up projects down to the smallest details and to the 15-minute increment, who are forever planning ways to move information from one place to another more efficiently, who are always at committee meetings working to create new methodologies or to implement them or to analyze them, who schedule every minute, who constantly rework the schedule when one of those minutes takes 75 seconds, who, in short, spend all of their time preparing to do substantive work that never actually seems to get done. And I don't mean the proper work of managers, the planning of work to be done by others when that is necessary, but the actual work that you, the individual manager, should be doing. Now I may have you all wrong, and in this I must admit to a prejudiced outlook. I just have trouble taking all of these overly-wired people seriously. In an airport several months ago (Miss Manager does not fly so frequently that she avoids people watching while waiting for planes) the opportunity of witnessing the contrasting styles of two business travelers presented itself. To the left was a person with a notepad (the paper kind) a pen (the ink kind) and a printed document that looked like a spreadsheet of terms and numbers. This person concentrated (wonderfully, I thought, considering the hubbub) occasionally making a check mark on the spreadsheet or a brief notation on the notepad, but clearly "poring over the data", as we used to say. To the right was another person. He at first seemed to be talking to himself, and this might explain why he alone occupied a five-seat section in the crowded area. He was in fact speaking into a hands-free cell phone which indeed seemed necessary since he was also manipulating a personal digital assistant and a pager. In a voice oblivious to the presence of other humans he was explaining to the person at the other end of the cell phone that the person at the other end of the pager was an incompetent boob and that the data concerning factory orders from his PDA contrasted with the information the pager person's predecessor had negotiated last week. He connected his PDA to a separate cell phone and then explained to some new person on the hands-free set that the latest figures from the Cleveland office "counterintuited" (would Miss Manager make up a word like that?) the figures from the Dallas office. And so on. So, it may be that Miss Manager's limited exposure has created an impression that the number of electronic do-dads in use at one time is directly proportional to the self-important pretentiousness of the user, and so no objective analysis may be offered. In the parlance of the day, Miss Manager can most succinctly suggest that you improve your efficiency by getting a life.

Dear Miss Manager:

Do you know the great hazard of working in a technical services job? Sitting! I sit at my desk 90% of the time. I sit in my car for almost an hour before and after work. Then I can't seem to get up the energy to do anything but sit when I get home. Is my job bad for my health? I've gained 20 pounds since I started here two years ago. Help!

Saddle Sore

Dear Saddle:

Alas, Miss Manager can be of little help. Most jobs in the current economy available to people who have the kinds of skills we have will land us in chairs for most of the day. From a management perspective, there does not seem to be any great motivation for insisting on changes. I don't know if there is any evidence that svelte librarians do better work than their stockier colleagues. I expect that there is no correlation. Now, as a health matter, I think managers should be as encouraging as they can to keep workers in good shape. Healthy workers obviously take fewer sick days (or, let us say, have fewer legitimate chances to take sick days). Healthy people tend to be happier and more productive, and what manager wouldn't want to encourage that? But there can't be too much insistence here. Your health, including your weight, are your concern. Your workplace already plays a large enough role in your life. Don't allow it to intrude on every area. So, if you are really concerned about this, don't think of it as a problem that your job has created for you. That will teach you to look for a solution within the job, and that is probably not going to happen unless you plan on rearranging the microform room every couple of days. Change those parts of your lifestyle over which you do have some control. How you should go about doing that, what particular exercise program or which diet you should follow is not within Miss Manager's bailiwick. My only advice would be to avoid anything that says it won't be hard work.

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