Rule #1 of Rocking the Boat: Know Thyself

For many Americans, gainful employment is done as corporate work. While working for a corporation sounds like it would have additional job security, sometimes the hierarchical power-structures of American society also eases life inside a corporation. Therefore, if you do not fit the traditional mode of "Moderate-conservative, white, male, with a wife and children," life inside that corporate world becomes complicated and constraining.

Meme image based off of the webcomic Hyperbole and a Half

Debra Meyerson, a professor and radical at Stanford, wrote Rocking the Boat for this particular worklife situation. Gathering data from hundreds of people, Meyerson carefully constructed a book that speaks to the people in the middle of corporate life that do not fit the heternormative, white, male expectations. This book is entirely for people who wish to change things, but have no desire to leave the organization that they are in.

In Chapter Three, Meyerson outlines the ways that people did not sacrifice their identity to conform with the corporate culture. A gay man did not bring a beard, but instead brought his partner of many years to the corporate dinner party. A woman giving an important presentation bought a fancy new suit, but refused to take out her cornrows. In each of these examples, I was struck by the fact that the people knew what their boundaries were. The corporation would explicitly or subtly pressure the individuals to conform, and to a certain extent they were willing and happy to do so; yet, they also recognized when conforming would overwhelm a critical part of their identity. There were lines that they simply would not allow corporate culture to cross.

A classmate of mine, Lorraine Ceniceros, suggests that the most important part of religious leadership is that we need to "know ourselves." We need to have self-awareness of our own triggers, passions, and growing edges. To me, Rocking the Boat, gives examples of where that self-awareness is not just preventative, but also constructive. This is eye-opening and world changing. (More on this in the next blog).

Skills for Effective Administration

On Being a High Quality Underling
I spent seven years as a data entry person for a leasing company. Other than a few theological qualms about working for a company that lent money at exorbitant interest rates (and then my utter shock to realize that they were actually a relatively cheap source of cash for small businesses), I was a very good underling. I learned skills quickly, I was accurate in my work, and I was good at reporting back problems in an efficient and comprehensible manner for my supervisor to be able to make decisions. In fact it was a matter of pride at how high quality of an underling that I was able to make myself integrated into the work of the company seemlessly.

Then I saw Katz’s model of the Skills of an Effective Administrator. Northouse shows the graph like this:

On Top Management’s Lack of Technical Know-How:
Now at first I disagreed with this model. Working with top managers who had such little understanding of the technical skills (for example, how to put together an effective and balanced spread sheet), that their choices suffered and the organization was harmed by their lack of knowledge. Additionally, the disdain that some Top Management had for the tediousness and grueling character sometimes required in technical work led them to incorrect assumptions about the speed at which projects could be accomplished. I thought that their lack of technical skills automatically made the Top Management less competent and certainly less compassionate leaders. Katz’s model just struck me as a description of how the management was and not how it should be.

How Experience Makes me Reevaluate my Prejudices (again).
And now I’m Top Management. I have hired two people and now I’m learning how to supervise them in ways that hold to my democratic values and respect for the intelligence and creativity for the individuals who work yet still giving them enough direction to get the work that needs to be accomplished done.

Last week I asked for a poster to be made. I did not have enough time to make the poster myself, and it was a project that I know that they could easily accomplish. What my coordinator made was not at all what I envisioned, yet was a fantastic and creative way to advertise our series of programs.

I realize now that I do not need to know how the poster was made. I do not need to know what programs were used, where the picture was found, what kind of font was used. Instead, I needed to know when the poster was done and appreciate the final project. My technical knowledge was largely unnecessary for my assignment of the job and for the person to carry it out.

Appreciation of Human Skills
What the technical knowledge did help me with was appreciate the hard work that went into the poster. I knew how much time that it took to make that poster. Technical knowledge then becomes something that keeps me grounded in recognizing how much effort my workers are putting forward.

What I missed in Katz’s model my first time around is that Human Skills are absolutely necessary for each level of worker/management. Empathy becomes never becomes unnecessary. The ability to communicate appreciation and hear advice from their workers remains a skill that is needed the most. While I do still think that having technical skills helps one be grounded in the human appreciation of the work done, having the human skills to convey it becomes absolutely important.