Throughout the course of this semester, I took an Information Professions class that has covered quite a bit of ground. However, one portion of it stuck under my skin: how will I manage? This is not only a question from someone who frequently struggles to find a balance between work, life, and creation, but also functions in the most basic terms: I have never managed a group of people in a supervisory role before. I don’t have any experience with this thing that will become a huge part of my career in the library sciences. How will I do it?

To that end, I interviewed ten people, spanning a range of ages, positions, and stages in their various careers. In this list, I have an entry-level barista, a member of a co-op, an artist and historian who was once the evening and weekend supervisor at an academic library, a current Library Service Assistant, a small business owner, an assistant bar manager at a restaurant chain, a self-employed artist who works as an independent contractor, a stage crew manager, a parent, and a retired Executive Director of Treasury from a local telecom company. I asked a similar set of questions to each one, always beginning with, “What makes a good manager?” Obviously, those who had more experience with supervising groups of people provided more full answers, but all of my interviewees contributed to furthering my understanding.

Each of the people I interviewed began with the same basic idea: good managers “understand what their employees need and what motivates them” (J. Beauchamp, personal communication, May 9, 2016). In some cases, this means that they’ve had to work their way up in order to empathize with people across all levels in the company.

“People want to be paid a decent wage, they want to have work that they like, and they want you to be nice to them” (K. Hughes, personal communication, May 9, 2016). Kelly Hughes would tailor his positions to the people who worked for him, because he wanted to retain his employees. “You don’t want to have someone doing something that they don’t like, or that they’re not good at” (K. Hughes, personal communication, May 9, 2016). Tim Harding also had the same idea in the separate context of having more temporary workers – it’s a bit of a balancing act to figure out what someone’s good at and how that fits into the project (T. Harding, personal communication, May 9, 2016). “Some companies believe that staff are just cogs in a wheel, and… I was always just interested in helping people reach their potential” (K. Hughes, personal communication, May 9, 2016). This fits well with the discussion of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchal order of needs in Evans and Alire’s (2013) Management Basics for Information Professionals: “the highest level of need is self-actualization or self-fulfillment – the need for self-development, creativity, and job satisfaction” (p. 213, 2013).

Tammy Junghans stated that the best managers she had “empowered me, … and felt really strong about my leadership; … I’ve had bosses that said that you are extremely valuable … not just for your education, but for who you are” including interpersonal skills, personality, and other abilities (T. Junghans, personal communication, May 9, 2016). A common characteristic described by both Tammy and Danielle Bitz of their worst employers was insecurity: managers who needed to be validated by others, exert control, and attempted to prove their own merit by devaluing their employees’ performance (D. Bitz, personal communication, May 9, 2016, T. Junghans, personal communication, May 9, 2016). Likewise, Wally Hassenrueck emphasized the importance of “self confidence: don’t be threatened by staff that shows initiative and performs well: if your staff looks good, you look good” (W. Hassenrueck, personal communication, May 13, 2016).

I decided to photograph the participants in order to put a face to some of these experiences and to create a visual record for myself of what I’ve learned. Using a digital single-lens reflex camera, I created on-location portraits of each of them, including a detail shot to give context to their postures – a visual pun, in some cases, on the phrase ‘the work of their hands.’ The images were then edited to create a sense of cohesion throughout the collection, and organized by the first initials of the interviewees.

I have learned through these conversations that good management is recognizable by everyone, from those at the very beginning of the hierarchy to those who have practiced it on a large scale for most of their working lives. Personal rapport; creating a safe space for employees to be themselves; a sense of humour to be able to roll with the punches; open, consistent, and clear communication about expectations and criticism; encouragement and support for staff along with instruction if necessary – this is an incomplete list of factors in good management practices.  It is clear to me, however, that management is indeed something that specifically requires practice in order to continually improve.