In a job like mine

It has been three months, almost exactly three months in my job. It’s the kind of job that you don’t leave in the office when you go home at night. It’s the kind of job you love one day, at least as much as you hate it the other day. It’s the kind of job where most of the people you work with believe you are the kind of person who doesn’t need to have a weekend. It’s the kind of job in which you get to experience moments of total happiness about what you just achieved and can make you turn white in fear that you will not be able to deal with what’s ahead of you.

Never in my life have I had that amount of responsibility. Never before have I actually known what it is like… to be a manager.

The situation of someone telling me what to do occurs as good as never in my daily life. I might get a hint or a tip to put my mind on something that seems to get neglected at times, apart from that, I’m myself in charge of everything connected to Talent Management (TM) (for many known as HR) in the whole country. That means of course a lot of functional training and following up on the people working for TM on the local level; it means a lot of support and coaching. But that’s not the whole thing. To manage an organisation our size in a management team of 6 people also means that you work on many things not directly in connection with your function (TM). To name an example: I’m the conference manager of the upcoming conference (in 4 weeks) that brings together 300 people in 3 different tracks, plus companies and organizations as well as facilitators form different parts of the world. There are different groups and stakeholders involved, strings who are all in the end of the day, connected in my fingers, and if I lose control over one of them, the ship is about to sink.
“Next” to that I’m the coach of the local committee in Alexandria, which apart from spending a lot of my time on the train also means spending a lot of time keeping track of things and preparing what I do with them.
There are taskforces as well, that focus on the development of different elements of the organisation that I’m in charge off, which again in different ways, consume a lot of time.

In short: In a job like mine, things are happening parallel, not after each other. And the art of managing is to be able to stay on track with all of them, without losing control over any other thing.

The best thing about having been in this job for only 3 month and not for 30 years is that I can see myself improving practically on a daily basis. I have the chance to observe how I’m getting better at managing my time, how I improve at staying calm in moments of stress or desperation (I have those often), how I start to see ways to convince people (especially from a different culture) or how to plan ahead (ah… what a beautiful skill…).

To me, one of the beautiful things of management is to see behind the complexity of management. To realize how an organisation works, why often things don’t work, how much more difficult some things are then they seem, but also often the other way around. For a long time I saw management as something for business administration students who only care about making money. Now I discovered that it’s more than that. It’s an art and I believe that what I learned from it will be applicable to whatever I want to do.