man • age • ment
"controlling Instructional Technology through planning, organizing, coordinating, and supervising" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 49)
"controlling Instructional Technology through planning, organizing, coordinating, and supervising" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 49)
As a teacher
The main way I managed as a teacher was through classroom management. I ran a project-based, collaborative classroom where students worked in groups on real-life tasks. It could get rowdy, but it also needs to be lively in order to work! By explicitly discussing classroom expectations and setting those norms alongside my students on a class-by-class basis, I got their buy-in and was able to manage the classroom effectively.
Additionally, twice-weekly faculty meetings would be held to coordinate school-wide initiatives, allocate teaching resources, and disseminate information to faculty. I participated as a teacher in those meetings and took notes for the group so that others could review what was discussed later.
Oftentimes the faculty meetings would feel needlessly long or not relevant to the whole faculty. Discussing upcoming calendar dates, for example, would have been better addressed in an email than a faculty-wide meeting sometimes. We resolved this by asking the administration to put these dates in a shared faculty calendar. We also asked the administrators to send out an agenda before each meeting with a list of topics they planned to cover to help keep us on track during each meeting.
As a product manager
At Redshift, each team member would complete a weekly report with their priorities, plans, progress, and problems for the week. As the manager I would review and leave comments on those reports as a means of keeping up with what everyone needed.
Trying to find the balance between giving enough support to a remote team but also not micromanaging remote team members was tough. To solve this, I ended up asking in one-on-ones what types of support they each felt was most helpful for them as an individual.
Another challenge was that I often wondered how I could build team camaraderie in a virtual-team setting in a way that also felt organic. By way of solution, I invited the casual sharing of life updates at the start of each weekly team meeting where we could hear from everyone about their lives outside of work.
Managing myself as a business owner in my current work at Redshift is very challenging. I wear lots of different hats, from financial officer to designer to researcher to developer, and each of these roles and priorities must be managed so that the organization’s most important goals are met at any given time while also not burning myself out.
Identifying the most important tasks is often difficult for me, as when resources are tight, lots of tasks feel “high priority.” But unfortunately if everything is labeled as high priority, nothing truly emerges as most important.
It helps my current management practice to set aside time to intentionally think long-term about the business, and other times to narrow in on specific day-to-day tasks. That way I can set long-term priorities in one sitting, and then when it is time to execute on tasks later, I can trust that I have already reasoned through which tasks are highest priority and can focus less on management and more on completing the tasks.
Managing my time and priorities in my Project & Report thesis project was a major success. I had to find a way to balance learning lots of new skills in Unity, gathering user feedback from students, creating art assets for a new Redshift game, and communicating with other stakeholders. There were a lot of moving parts to this project that I was responsible for, and I was able to track all the different elements and manage which “hat” I was wearing at different times throughout the semester.
In the past I was managing a team of people, so I was used to wearing the manager “hat” more or less all the time. However, now that I am the solo developer of Redshift, I have to learn when to think as a manager and then when to stop thinking as a manager so that I can give myself space to execute on the tasks/priorities “delegated” to me. This is a major change in perspective because it reminds me not to overthink the “What is the most important thing to be doing right now?” question.
