A Learning Curve

I keep thinking I should document everything I have been doing throughout setting up Express LD, as sort of a diary of my progress. I knew from the offset that there was a lot to learn, some was obvious, for example I have no idea how to set up a website or blog (hence my little practice arena over here on Oh For The Love). Some things were not so obvious, being 'managed' for instance. It sounds easy, and being naive, I thought it was something I was quite good at. In the past, I got on really well with teachers, managers, supervisors and in the other extreme for the brief time I was a supervisor in a bar I think/hope it went really well!

 So being a little smug I thought I had it covered. However, everyone does things differently. Again, duh Becca why did it take until 4^th year to realise that? I guess I’ve just been lucky in the past my working style hasn’t ever massively clashed with a colleague before, or what I’ve been doing hasn’t been intense enough for the small niggles you have with someone to be brought to head and dealt with.

Amongst everything I’ve been getting to grips with; recruitment, organising myself to deal with ten emails a day, keeping track of a billion ‘to do’ lists, writing up volunteer contracts, mission statements, updates, financial reports etc. In amongst all that, undoubtedly the most valuable learning curve has been how to deal with clashing with your boss. See, I manage the project, but the president of the society manages me; she is the ‘strategic manager’. Whilst we essentially want the same things out of Express LD, it was how we wanted to go about it that rapidly became a source of tension.

On a day to day basis I was getting riled that she relentlessly asked what I was doing and emailed me with another ‘to do’ every ten minutes when I’d probably already done it in my own way. Equally, she was getting riled at me for going on a massive ‘I will be productive and I can do everything all by myself’ spree. It looked for a minute there like it was all over, a very tense phone call and a rant to one of my friends later, I went to meet her already in the mind-set that I was about to walk away from it all (yes I’m dramatic, I’ve been told).

But of course we got there in the end. We talked it out, stopped tip-toeing around what we’d been bothered by and came up with such a mightily simple solution: I send her a weekly update on Fridays with the same template of information each time and any additional notes she may find of interest or that I need to ask her about. So simple! Moreover, I imagine that most companies, projects, charities in the world use a similar system, nothing ground breaking about it, but it was the two of us getting there and coming to this agreement by ourselves that made it a lesson I believe will be valuable to me one day. I came away from that meeting with a new lease of life, absolutely buzzing and believing that the two of us and this project could change our little piece of the world for the better, Starbucks would be proud.