When I was at Warner Bros., I had a team of six reporting to me. We met weekly for a quick meeting. It was mostly a venting session, most of the work we handled as it came up. If you've seen Erin Brockovitch, you've seen our offices, a rich wood-paneled affair in Glendale. Irrelevant, but interesting. My boss handled all of the adminstrivia relating to time off and vacations and stuff. Each of the team handled 2-3 salespeople. Even though I led the team, I also handled several salespeople. One was in New York, but the others were local. I made a regular habit of wandering down to the salespeople's offices and just hanging out in the doorway chatting. It was a luxury. There were also a lot of meetings. For some reason, it was often me and then Middle Eastern IT team and the Russian programmers and I would kind of play referee or translate even though everyone was speaking English. I just remember some of those meeting getting heated. But at the end of the day, we had a lot more staff than work -- we often spent 1-3 hours of work time a day playing Rainbox Six with the full knowledge and blessing of our teams' supervisors.
At Lake Avenue Church, I didn't have anyone reporting to me, but for awhile there I had 2-3 regular volunteers coming in who did work on my behalf. I was responsible for the seven websites and I also helped out with helpdesk functions. Because everyone was local and almost all within the same building, and because I was larely responsible for defining and designing my work, I would occasionally make the rounds, visiting the different offices, sometimes scaring up business or discussing an idea, or just seeing how I could help people. The situation worked really well.
At my current job, I've not felt like I had that luxury. I've been swamped with email, I'm supporting a team of eight, there's a huge overhead of management, and there's a really strong tension between my customers who want stuff now and my staff whom I want to not be miserable. But apparently that balancing act is all wrong. It's suggested that I'm painting myself into a corner, that my collateral is slipping, my influence is waning. It's all very hard to hear, but it's not untrue. And so I wondered... how can I reverse this trend? When I was less busy in the good ol' days on the second floor, I did visit some of my customers regularly. It was tangentially work-related and sometimes it felt like I was being wasteful but I enjoyed it. So, apparently I need to focus less on trying to keep up with my email and do more outside of email. And apparently in the case of a few people, I should swear off responding to them by email if at all possible.
So, I gave it a shot at the end of the day. Instead of emailing or texting someone, I called them and had a frank conversation that needed to be had. Then I grabbed my coffee cup and began to wander. I got in a great conversation with a few people and was able to explain an idea to them that I had and they helped me refine it. (It requires the permission of two or three other people, but I resisted the urge to email them, I'll ask them in person tomorrow. There won't be any time lost.) And then I was able to be a listening ear to two people who were struggling with some news that weren't happy to receive. And then I was able to talk to a third person about my own rough day. And then it was time to go home. So I went back to my desk and wrote out a post-it note for someone instead of sending them an email. And then I started getting ready to go home (well, after I looked over all the email that had come in the last two hours of the day) and the person I'd left the post-it note for stopped by to talk.
So in the end, I did connect with a number of people and I got a chance to talk about an innovative idea. It was a good feeling. I have no problem wandering around with a coffee cup, I'll just need to make sure I'm a McNeal and not a Lundberg.
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