At the risk of sounding controversial, one of the things a manager ought to do is manage. In my experience, some people interpret this as meaning just ordering people around, or producing lots of documentation in order to give the impression they have their finger on the pulse. Not only does thiis kind of behaviour not help, it often positively hinders.

There has been far too much emphasis on “leadership” at the expense of “management”. Yes, you definitely need vision and direction and goal-setting, but you also need to actually deal with stuff. I recall attending a talk by one of these “celebrity” education speakers — you know, one of these people who are very entertaining but who somehow manage to say nothing of any practical use. At the end of it I turned to a colleague and said:

“Do you think I’d be correct in summarising his talk as: ‘There’s a problem in education and someone needs to do something about it.’?” He thought for a few seconds and replied, “Yes, that just about covers it.”

From my experience of bad management, here are some principles of good management, which I think you should consider if you are a head of department or subject leader or something similar. You don’t have to do these things, you just have to make sure they’re done. What I mean by that is that the outcomes ought to come out of discussion rather than dictatorship in my opinion — unless you’ve inherited a situation in which people have been so poorly managed that they are under-confident and are urgently in need of someone to take the reins.

Set out a plan, with goals and milestones

Personally, I hate all that management talk, and I especially think that the concept of five year plans in the context of education technology is nonsensical. However, it’s good to have some idea of where you’re going, and what needs to be done when, and by whom, in order to arrive.

Allocate responsibilities, rather than tasks, and leave them to it

I’ve been involved in a government-funded project that was managed so badly I persuaded the local authority that hired me that they were wasting their money. The set-up was that someone in the government office issued requirements to someone in a local agency, who then issued them to the participating local authorities.

That doesn’t sound too bad, but here is how it worked in practice:

• Monday: government person issues an edict stating that each local authority must have a blog for the project.

• Monday: local agency person forwards that edict onto each local authority.

• Tuesday: government person issues an edict stating that any blogging platform would be ok, and that local authorities should decide for themselves.

• Tuesday: local agency person forwards that edict onto each local authority.

• Wednesday and Thursday: repeat above, but with different edicts.

• Friday: government person issues an edict stating that all local authorities must use the blog that the government agency person has set up.

• Friday: local agency person forwards that edict onto each local authority.

Consider what is happening here, or not happening — and by the way, this went on day after day, week after week.

• The government agency person is all over the place. This faceless and nameless person seemed to have no idea what extra work they were creating by constantly sending out emails. Did he or she actually have a plan at all?

• That same person gave people responsibility — and then took it away.

• There is no filtering. The local agency person just forwarded on emails as they came. She made no attempt to collate them by subject matter, no attempt to summarise them in a digest that she could have sent out every Friday, say, at 10 am. Had she have done so, I would not have wasted a whole day evaluating different blogging platforms and asking the teachers involved which one they liked the best. This is partly where the waste of money came into it: paying me to spend a day doing a task only to be told the decision is out of our hands showed no appreciation of budgetary or financial issues.

• Another aspect of this awful mismanagement was that I, and no doubt my counterparts in other local authorities, spent a lot of time responding to this barrage of emails. Because what I have not told you (but I am doing so now) is that the scenario outlined above occurred several times a day, every day. It was virtually impossible to just sit down and think, because of this constant stream of emails.

• An unintended consequence too was that after the blogging platform incident I stopped making any decisions in response to these edicts — because I knew that several days later they would decide what needed to be done, and how, and that would be that. There was little point in devoting time and energy to making those decisions.

In fact, after a few weeks of this, I took my line manager my timesheet spreadsheet, and showed him that hiring me to manage this project for the local authority was going to cost the authority more than they were getting from the government. So we abandoned the project, and did something more worthwhile with my time and expertise.

Don’t bombard people with stuff

There are some people who think that constantly reminding people of targets and deadlines, or requiring reports (every week or even several times a week) is a good way of getting things done. Trust me, having been on the receiving end of this kind of thing, it really isn’t. It means that instead of getting on with the work, people are reading emails telling them they should be getting on with the work, or writing reports about how they’ve been getting on with the work.

I had someone once telling me that, as I hadn’t managed to implement a particular policy (because the post for that area had not been filled yet), she would ask me for a report on progress the following week. I pointed out to her that as I wouldn’t have filled the vacancy by then, there will have been no further progress. That didn’t prevent her coming back to me every week asking for an update in the form of a report. How on earth would constant updates saying the same thing get the work done?

Looking back, I suspect that her objective wasn’t to help me get the job done, but to demonstrate to her line manager that she was on top of the situation. Accountability gone mad.

Compassionate management

I think good management is management which assists rather than hinders, which recognises obstacles as being real, rather than things which can be magicked away by issuing an update, edict, request for a report or so-called “uplifting” sales.

I’m writing this during the Covid19 pandemic, and if ever there was a time for considerate, compassionate and supportive management, it’s now.

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