Management Skills
The four skills I needed most when I was managing people have all turned out to be equally important in teaching:
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How to intervene when people behave badly. It doesn’t come up often, but knowing how makes you more likely to do it when you should.
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How to run a meeting. Agenda before, minutes after, manage speaking time—none of it is magic, but without it, everything else is harder than it needs to be.
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How to write a two-page memo making the case for doing something so that people have something concrete to debate (and so that there is a record later of why we did something).
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How to set priorities and re-set them when the world changes or people fall behind. (The real purpose of a schedule is to tell you when to start cutting things from your plan…)
If I was going to add a 5th, it would be “how to make things discoverable” so that people can find what they need when they need it, but I’m still trying to figure that one out…