I was just promoted to manager.

Now, celebrate with that one decadent item you've always wanted;>

This just happened to me yesterday. Although it's the kind of promotion that doesn't involve me getting a pay rise, although I'll push for that so long as I don't fuck it all up between now and next year.

Advice/warnings etc here, please.

I can already see the tempting ball of cuntishness that I need to avoid to stop me going power-mad.

If you want to do things differently then fine, but don't feel you have to come up with a New Initiative.

Hardest thing is when there's someone you know's shit but who you like. Suddenly their shitness starts to matter to you more than your liking them.

Can never see or hear about "manager" without thinking of

http://media.80stees.com/images/products/Arrested_Development_Bluths_Original_Frozen_Banana-T.jpg

xp I've tried to bear in mind that I don't need to go jumping in and swap things around straight away. I'm taking a month or so to get my head round everything before fiddling too much,.

There is one shit guy on the team, but I don't like him very much so it there won't be much conflict of interest.

It's an odd one tho - going from analyst/process manager to people manager. DOne right I suppose I've got the best of both world (skills AND influence) but I can see already how it might well turn into a double-edged sword.

you've changed

Have you told the mirror he's fired yet?

think I'm at the cusp of this too.....at least it's 90 per cent certain.

90% congrats!

should hear monday but it's pretty much a done deal, nobody else in running and recruiter is really confident about it. "editor", lol.

is it the news of the world job?

have you hacked my phone??

i can't have done, i'm on holiday. good luck anyway!!

If you want to do things differently then fine, but don't feel you have to come up with a New Initiative.

along the same lines, don't be one of those managers who feels like they have to make a change to a document in order to show that they reviewed it. it's cool to just approve it as is, every once in a while. fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-

ronan congrats at having a job again tbh, i'm behind on stuff

thanks dude, only in a tempish one right now but as i say, close to something v good, and got some good other options if that falls through (tho most likely it won't)

ok

if you get one and have to turn down any others gplus me ok, i could prob use an 'in'

haha...will do!

With a decent team, management can be fun. I only do content management at the moment, but I've had several people management jobs, and there's a real sense of achievement in taking someone who's not up to scratch and getting them productive, or helping someone young and inexperienced grow into a strong team member. Sorry if that sounds like management bollocks, but those are among the proudest things in my career.

Urgh, I've had to learn everything on the hoof. My boss has screwed up Q2 and Q3 targets for the team then fucked off on holiday for a fortnight leaving me holding the creaming, demotivated baby. Nobody is here to support me despite me asking for it repeatedly. I'm stressed and tired and don't want to play any more.

Well fuck it, I'm making some decisions and sorting things out, then when big boss comes back I can tell him he needs to sort out targets BEFORE he goes on holiday and not after otherwise that's not playing with a straight bat. I probably wanted to avoid making an enemy of my boss for a little longer, but needs must.

screaming rather than creaming. That's just horrible.

The lower reaches of management can be pure hell, if you are caught between callous demands for more profit coming from above, making you the person who is actually expected to wring the work out of the workers and keep the best workers from walking out and the worst from dragging everyone else down.

It sounds like you're already being squeezed. In which case, good luck, and start thinking about how to accrue a decent CV and jump to a place where you'll be better off.

a real sense of achievement in taking someone who's not up to scratch and getting them productive

Hm. How do you do this? I feel not up to scratch and could do with getting myself productive before I am FOUND OUT.

I have good weeks where I feel efficient like a proper grown-up, and then I slide into bad weeks/months/years where I can't concentrate at all, and unfortunately I haven't worked out exactly what comes together in the good weeks and falls apart in the bad weeks.

PS congrats Ronan, good luck NotEnough.

I was just thinking my job is too easy for the amount i make - but maybe that because I'm so awesome

Or maybe you are embedded in an organization that is functional and provides you with reasonable goals and adequate resources.

I was just thinking my job is too easy for the amount i make - but maybe that because I'm so awesome

Lucky you--I've always had it the other way around.

my job is too easy but i make pittance, but i cant complain about the tradeoff at least

"If you can dream it you can do it!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I dreamed last night I could fly a helicopter, also made a dead tree come back to life and had sex with my ex. Guessing I won't be testing this theory any time soon.

You are only holding your self back with that attitude!

You made the tree have sex with your ex?

Had 1-2-1s with each of my team today, and I think I got them onside by playing the "I'm a new manager and according to how you're supposed to managed I'm not supposed to tell you this but..." card, and then telling them something inconsequential and obvious. I also told them each that they are a key team member and that I need them all to develop and become better, which I don't feel too bad cos its kinda true. Also sorted out Excel training for the team (they badly need it, they keep asking me things like filtering and vlookups, and they wouldn't know a pivottable if it hit them in the A1) and that seems to have cheered them up.

I think I'm getting the hang of this, even though I just know that there's a nasty surprise of some description lurking round the corner.

still getting my confirmation but got told an offer is definitely coming this week. recruiter is suggesting wild sums of money i never dreamed i'd earn but realistically i expect a bit less but still a nice jump. should hear finally on weds/thurs. think the one area of uncertainty is if i'll be permanent or get a contract of some kind.

that's good news LG.

finally starting my new job next week (probably no daytime posts from me thereafter...for the first week at least...).

yeh, being made manager has really impacted me hanging around on ILF

having a manager really impacted on me for a while

i started on tuesday, kinda weird starting at a level where i'll be in charge of some stuff, people are a bit more wary and less friendly but they also listen a lot more to what i say at meetings, that normally takes a while in writing/media jobs. my boss is basically going to be passing a lot of his duties onto me as he concentrates on future planning and stuff, bit daunted by the fact i'll be responsible for a lot but it's also cool.

now to just get fully over that uncomfortable in your own skin feeling of a new place.

use your power now! power up! give people really mean glares! tell then you have had it with them!!

i suggested a way to do a story today as the writers were pitching stuff in a meeting and later my boss was like "he's not included your idea in his final pitch" with an air of annoyance. i was like thinking "ah you know, live and let live"...thankfully boss has the sense to sort of ease me into directly managing the team.

I'll be finished my management job in just three (!) more days. It hasn't properly sunk in yet but I keep doing a countdown each day anyway. I'm pretty nervous about leaving a job I'm fairly good at that has a nice salary in an industry where there are actually jobs and opportunities for career progression ('social media'), esp since I'm leaving it to go back to uni to get a degree in something where jobs don't really exist atm... but on the other hand: no more dealing with clients! no more having to cover/clean up people's moderation errors! no more having to train people! no more horrible call of duty fans! Having done a couple years of this, I don't think I really like being in charge of other people.

I have assiduously avoided any possibility of promotion in my 'career'

i'm well on my way as well.

that is if, by "assiduously", you mean being abrasive and hyper-opinionated with occasional naps at your desk.

I mostly mean that if I was required to think any more about this stuff than I do now, I'd ship out on a tramp steamer instead.

oh i was recently promoted to managerial level as well

congrats ronan!

the individual habits of people really fucking grate more when you have to make decisions, like the whole sense of filtering all of people's work into one thing means you come to know their unique traits so much more as far as their work goes.

it's so frustrating sometimes, like:

-person A can never organise their stories in any order or pitch them in enough detail, then complains (politely) if you don't use the picture they didn't tell you to use, and thus time is wasted. no amount of polite cajoling about this will change things.

-person B is fucking lazy, and it's not a culture of people getting slated for this.

-person C always wants to have a long discussion about something that could be dealt with in a 2 min email, and picks a time when you're busy to do this.

it's extremely weird being the last line of defence... simultaneously in charge but actually it can feel just as if everyone else is in charge of you!

it's extremely weird being the last line of defence... simultaneously in charge but actually it can feel just as if everyone else is in charge of you!

Gosh, this might be the most OTM sentence I read all year! It aptly describes how I am left feeling at the end of the day as an editor-in-chief most days. I'm in charge, yet there are so many individuals with so many traits and specific personal manuals to them, that it is a struggle sometimes to get everyone in the same line, focus on the same thing (making a good newspaper). And I am not insensitive to every person's traits, quite the contrary actually.
I suppose it is about weaving all individual persons into a pattern that benefits the "greater good", that which we are all there for. God I sound like a CEO of the specific type that I hate so much... people managing, give me a break, right? But yes, it is key to do so.

Basically, the "weakest" person (I don't mean this in a bad way, purely in a personality in contrast to our objective goal) decides the quality of the shared outcome. Your most "unhappy" employee is in charge of you, in charge of how your goal turns out. Which means you have to keep everyone happy. A great goal, but indeed a task on such a personal level that it can make you question sometimes what you are doing, in my case: am I trying to keep people happy or are we trying to make a newspaper?

No time to respond properly so will come back to whinge (about my own failings at this), but both of you enormously otm. LBI, an entire newspaper's worth of this - I salute you!

Aw Ljubljana, thank you! I'm looking forward to hearing about your 'failures' in this field, I experience them every day!

Most 'difficult' people to deal with in this regard are the ones that aren't the actual journalists or writers. With them, they at least realise that for them it is about writing, about newss, about the newspaper. They are educated that way. Rather it's the cross-platform people, the tech and website people, who have less heart for the paper and can feel undervalued in their job having to use their skills for a newspaper. They can feel their specialism (tech/photography/dtp/) isn't acknowledged, so they can feel they aren't an essential part of a newspaper staff. Which they are, but the primary idea is a newspaper is about writing articles. Which isn't true anymore, not solely, but it can be hard to get them on board.

Fortunately I get along with the owner/director really well, so he serves as a natural 'wall' between sales and content. Meaning, I am in the position to put content over commerce. Not always easy, and forever it will remain a constant struggle, but still. If I had to deal with sales people too I'd go screamingly mad I'm afraid.

OK, back (from a failed attempt to get somewhere on time, thank you bus detours - turned around and headed home). My failings are:

1. failure to delegate. I always think I've delegated enough and the people I manage should have loads to do. Then I begin to suspect they're doing it all at a leisurely pace and won't speed up unless I pile more work on them, forcing them to get a move on. Now, at the moment they are are *telling* me to delegate more to them, so I guess I really have got the balance wrong. But if they've got so much capacity to take on more, why are they so slow with what they've already got? It will be interesting to see whether they manage to get everything done in the time available.

2. I try to multi-task too much. It is not efficient, it's chaos, priority things get left to one side, and it's the opposite of 'leadership'.

3. I don't spend enough time catching up with people and going over priorities.

Those are just my top three. I am not a born manager.

I suppose it is about weaving all individual persons into a pattern that benefits the "greater good", that which we are all there for. God I sound like a CEO of the specific type that I hate so much... people managing, give me a break, right? But yes, it is key to do so.

having a pretty frustrating time of reconciling this at the moment. i've had 2 straight weeks of things fucking up on the website, health problems flaring up, and i dunno, a sense of people not working very hard which may or may not be my own perception.

the net result is that a little bit of irritation has just ramped up into forcing myself to be engaged each day, for about a week now.

the work volume is huge and it makes it incredibly hard to actually give any real direction or do any creative thinking. i'm basically doing grammatically correct and occasionally pithy data entry.

it's a pretty solitary job, being editor, i'm having to fight feelings of resentment towards people on the team and though i'm encouraged by the managing ed to run things i feel the environment is too friendly/slack to really tell people who need telling to raise their game.

i don't even mean bollocking them either, just saying "please don't let this happen again, here's why".

little things which are genuine mistakes have really started to get to me, eg someone forgetting to put a picture in with their pitch, or a weekend story being sent through late (we preschedule the weekend)

feel like i'm becoming a total nazi about the team depending on me to editorialise their content, it just fucking infuriates me when people slop me up a story with no suggested headlines, no slug, nothing, just links.

i feel like being ed should be them pushing their stuff at me in as concentrated a form as possible, and me trying to meld all the different styles together, even for the sort of light content we do.

being sick undoubtedly making it worse as i'm not working as quickly as i do when healthy, and hence every delay is more infuriating, but am under massive stress with it all......GAH.

thankfully it's the weekend, even hate saying that, i'm 28 ffs.

and worse again...i'm at the cusp of really fucking slating somebody, but so far just been critical towards the ones who are genuinely trying but maybe deficient in confidence, cos at least i know they'll listen.

But if they've got so much capacity to take on more, why are they so slow with what they've already got?

This is just me, but boredom makes me really, really, really slow. Note workday appearances on ILX as Exhibit A.

the work volume is huge and it makes it incredibly hard to actually give any real direction or do any creative thinking

Oh man, tell me about it... Your whole post is so how I feel sometimes. Are you an editor-in-chief as well btw?

I mean:

feel like i'm becoming a total nazi about the team depending on me to editorialise their content, it just fucking infuriates me when people slop me up a story with no suggested headlines, no slug, nothing, just links.

i feel like being ed should be them pushing their stuff at me in as concentrated a form as possible, and me trying to meld all the different styles together

Fuck. Yes. I don't want to go all Lex on here and shout in caps but this is OTM for me as well.

Those little things you speak of, mistakes that are seemingly only made by slacking behaviour, are doing my head in sometimes. And it has made me wonder, big time, like you: am I indeed a nazi? I know I am not. Rather I think it is a matter of reliabilty. The people who work for me have learned to rely on me to think about a thousand things I really should not be engaged in, nor am getting paid for.
The excruciating minutiae, tiny details, worrying about if a photo-credit is right, if the right InDesign style is applied to copy they hand in, if they deliver a good headline suggestion, or at the vert least apply the tag they learn here on day one ("if there are quotes that need to be translated from one language to another, STATE IT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TEXT"). Me telling them two or three times already obviously hasn't changed their behaviour or made them pay more attention to this.
They are all wonderful people, but this got me thinking: is because I care so much about details - just because I want to do my job as best as I can and make the best possible newspaper - that that attitude has become a safety-net for them? In that they can rely on me smoothening out all these little things? It is not how it is supposed to be, they should do their job properly, but maybe they know I will worry and go over it another time, that they take on an attitude that if they make mistakes like this, I will be there who sorts it out? In other words: is my perfectionism making them worry less about doing their job properly?

One thing I have noticed, is that for my staff having someone above them - me - makes them take less initiative, whereas they should take more initiative, be more independent, care more about things, care about the final product, the newspaper.

But yeah, if anyone is reading this and is thinking "what a dick" I can understand that. Reading this I hate how I sound, as in a way I don't recognize myself in this at all. I'm a journalist, a writer, turned editor-in-chief: I hadn't ever dealt with "people management" before that (still loathe that term). If this was a post by my boss I would frown, probably, but this is how it is.
Not to pride myself but I think I am very understanding, emphatic, forgiving and caring about my staff and how they do. Dealing with one person who is battling depressing, with another who has a daughter that is very ill: all these shades and specific circumstances of people; I think I allow all of them to do their best, understanding each individuals circumstances and acknowledging their qualities.
Perhaps, deep down, I care more about the goal, the paper, than anyone else involved. Can't say I blame them, but it is making it more difficult for me, so I will have to act on that.

fuck, sorry for tl;dr

i have a managing editor, i guess he's ed-in-chief, though all actual day to day work and running of the site is me, we talk stuff through or occasionally have planning chats but he is more in charge of the overall direction of the site, rather than daily editorial.

so today... i'm sitting at my desk and the head of design comes over and proceeds to tell me that he disgrees with the way i've written one of the headlines. it was about the pirates! and had "hugh grant plays a cartoon" as part of it.

he made a big loud show of correcting this. i largely agreed, it was a decision made very quickly, which i thought about at the time, and googled a bit before making, but for the sake of clarity i changed it.

but i am fucking raging that someone way senior to me on a different team which isn't even to do with editorial publicly had this conversation, in front of the entire team whose work i have to marshall.

i don't mind being corrected, it's inevitable every now and again you make a mistake, it's an old cms and there's a v v large volume of work, but to me it should be done by email, and in his case especially so since he's not even my boss and i barely know him.

i took it all on the chin at the time tho my boss sort of backed me afterwards and tried to make light of it.

now i'm sort of thinking about mailing my boss to register the fact that i'm unhappy about this and ensure it doesn't happen again.

is that a really dumb idea? i think she prob thinks it shouldn't have happened already, and i might be just venting... but i also feel she could have taken it a bit more seriously.

to clarify, he said i should say "cartoon character"... which i hold my hands up, is better.

nobody point out i spelled "marshall" wrong i'm on my phone...

"marshal" grr, i'm not helping myself here

mail her

^^^

id say let it slide if its just a one time thing

if its a pattern of abuse then by al means try to work it out

btw congrats chris!

xxxp ^^^

Having it in some kind of non-verbal and dated form will be necessary if it keeps happening.

yeah i barely know the guy, though the fact i find him generally one of those "i don't say hello to you if you aren't management" type people kinda makes me a bit more irritated by it as it feeds into general lack of respect in my view.

but leaning towards letting it slide.

xpost i don't think it's a bullying thing or whatever, and i know my boss would definitely be on my side and probably is already, i just think her view of dealing with it was to kind of mock him and say "why don't i start telling you how to design the site" etc when to me it's a bit more serious than that.

I had a similar situation happen to me a few years ago. My boss was the Operations Manager, but a higher up I will just call TINY WIENER kept telling me to do stuff for him. Luckily my boss had my side on it, otherwise it could have been problematic.

as of the afternoon I apparently marshal over 30 grown up ppl well this should be hilarious

I was fairly fuckin premature on the "grown up" part tbh

Ha!

beautiful