Criticism, Negativity, and all those Blues (includes That Tag Wrangler Letter)

[ira_gladkova]

(Apologies about the lack of Minutes Monday this week -- there were no new minutes to discuss, but lots of interesting stuff next week!)

Recently some tag wranglers were talking publicly about a letter the staff had sent to them about negativity and criticism. Separately but contemporaneously, one of my closest friends, seventhe posted about her ambivalence towards the OTW.

So! Let's talk about that.

Criticizing the OTW, Inside and Out

First up, I hope it's clear from clear from my history that I have no problem with criticizing the OTW.

Here's the thing. I think criticism is healthy. I think it's necessary. Feeling like you're in a place where you can't even criticize your experience? Where it feels like your experience is being erased? That's terrible. That's about the worst working environment possible. Leaving people in a place where they feel they can't criticize or recount negative experiences is the worst thing the OTW can do to itself and others.

But many of us have seen that there are a lot of issues around criticism of the OTW. I think this comes back to the basic tension inherent in the OTW: fannish project vs. nonprofit organization.

Fandom in general has a complex relationship with criticism: hesitance to criticize labours of love; cultures centered around improvement and constructive criticism; cultures centered around positivity and protection from crit; harshing people's buzz; different attitudes towards critical analysis of canon and fan works; pleas for honest reviews.

On the nonprofit org side is an expectation of professionalism and of a culture of service. This includes being open to and prepared to deal with criticism, up to and including anger and undiluted negativity, all in the name of improving something in service of the mission. However, not even this is without complexity: nonprofit orgs are often run in part or entirely by volunteers, or have limited resources in other ways. This impacts the ability to deal with criticism efficiently.

The OTW lands in the morass in between.

The path to sustainability lies on the nonprofit end of the scale — we cannot forget our fannish cultural roots, but to persist in our mission, we must adopt structures and practices suitable to nonprofit organizations. And here is where criticism comes in:

If you expect us to act like a nonprofit org, you have to treat us as a nonprofit org.

So here are some things I think are useful to keep in mind vis-à-vis criticizing the OTW to make criticism maximally effective:

• Be aware of the space and audience when you criticize.
  
  Venting wherever you feel the need is great; please keep doing that! Posting in your own spaces about org feels is great. Do it! However, while complaining in your own spaces is valid, it is not a path to action.
  
  We're embedded in fannish communities, and news tends to travel; fannish projects often change in response to indirect criticism and commentary. It's not unreasonable to suppose something similar of the the OTW: we're pretty much trained to this by how fandom functions. And it's true that sometimes, this does work.
  
  But we can't expect it to.
  
  It really saddens me to know that a lot of valid and valuable critique of the org is expressed where the very people who can do something about it are less likely to see it. This includes people who aren't volunteers posting in various private spaces as well as volunteers voicing complaints in org spaces that aren't optimized to get those complaints to where they need to be heard.
  
  Let me be clear: no one is obligated to give their opinion to the OTW or anyone in it. But if you want us to take action on something that's bothering you, it's most effective to come tell us about it.
  
  Crit is most effective when given to the right audience. While the OTW still suffers from transparency issues, there is quite a bit of information out there about what our various parts do and how to contact us. If you're not sure where to address a particular complaint, ask! This will help you be heard where it matters most.
  


• Keep in mind our limited resources.
  
  This is related to the "but it's volunteer work" idea that often gets deployed in conversations about org crit. The fact that we're all volunteers doesn't make us or our work immune to criticism; let's just dispense with that right away. However, it does mean that we have limited resources for dealing with criticism, both material and psychological.
  
  This is not at all particular to the OTW. All nonprofits run on limited resources. In our case, this is not only time taken out of the rest of our lives, but time taken out of our fannish lives as well: limited time taken out of limited time.
  
  In terms of material limits, this means that we often run slower than anyone — including us! — wants us to in addressing criticism. We're not paid professionals, and our turnaround time is the intersection of many people's limited availability. So when a complaint comes to us and nothing seems to happen, this doesn't mean that we aren't listening or that it doesn't matter to us: much more likely it's a combination of limited resources and poor transparency. We definitely need to work on letting people know that we're working on something and giving updates.
  
  We also have psychological and emotional limits, and that's where the tricky thing about "tone" or "attitude" comes in. I can't say "don't be angry at us" — that's a load of crock. I can't even tell people they "shouldn't" be "mean" to us. What I can say, though, is that it's counterproductive.
  
  I'm deeply allergic to forced positivity, but at the same time, it's vital to recognize that an encouraging working environment is essential to volunteer work. And feeling able to voice criticism is an essential part of an encouraging working environment. The opposite is toxic. But there's a definite balance between freedom to criticize and respect for others and the work they do. Negative feelings happen, and if you need to express them, you should do it! But see above about spaces/audience. Our work is not sacred. But I do think it's valuable and should be treated as if it has value. Aggressiveness and antagonism damage the work environment and make it less likely that your problem will be addressed. We all want to make things better, but it's harder to do that from under a pile of bad feelings, and eventually we run out of the psychological resources to do so.
  
  The bottom line: If you value the OW and its projects as a part of your community — and if you're criticizing the org in an effort to make it better, I assume that you do — then value us as part of the same.

So I think criticism is great, but I want it to work. I want criticism to be effective and to lead to change. How you criticize and why is your business, but if your goal is the same as mine, then I think these points are essential to keep in mind.

---

Now then, about a particular recent incident centered around criticism.

The Letter to Tag Wranglers

In this context, I need a disclaimer: I am also staff on the Tag Wrangling Committee. All the usual caveats apply: one out of many, working as a team, no magic wand. But I want to be clear that this is how I have access to this information. I try not to conflate my Board and TW staffer roles, but in this case, I'm speaking about general org matters using information obtained through the lens of a TW staffer.

That said: recently, the TW chairs sent a letter to the TW volunteer mailing list about expressing negativity and criticism on the list. This letter was written in part because of some wranglers' reactions to the on-list announcement of the Category Change Workgroup (post on that later). There have been a lot of misconceptions about this letter floating around so, with the permission of the TW chairs, here is the full text of the letter, so that we are all operating on full and accurate information (emphasis mine; links redacted but noted):

In the recent discussion concerning the Category Change workgroup, some questions were raised concerning criticizing the Org and the Archive, and antagonism and potential hostility on the wrangling mailing list.

To begin with: it is entirely fine to be angry or frustrated. Every one of us in the OTW has some criticisms we can make about the Org; there's probably not a single person up and down the volunteer line who is 100% satisfied with it (it's a major motivation for why many of us volunteer, to help improve things!) And raising and openly discussing these issues is the only way to fix many of them.

However, when you are criticizing aspects of the org on the internal wrangling mailing list, we ask that you keep in mind two things:


First off, the wrangler mailing list is a closed list, only visible to wranglers. If you are criticizing aspects of the Archive/Org beyond the immediate scope of tags and wrangling, the people who most need to hear your criticisms are not here to hear them. Even if some of them are present (we have wranglers from nearly all the committees and workgroups) they may not feel comfortable responding to such criticisms on a closed list, without discussing them with the rest of their committee/workgroup (and therefore having to share internal wrangler discussion).

This does not mean you cannot discuss the work of other parts of the Org on the wrangling mlist, as much of it directly or indirectly impacts what wranglers do (though we ask, for the sake of reducing off-topic list traffic, that you keep such discussions focused on how they pertain to tags/wrangling. If you'd like to participate in more wide-ranging discussions, the OTW forums [link] are a better place.) However, when you do bring up criticisms, avoid being openly antagonistic or challenging, and try to keep to constructive and productive discussions centered on specific issues, rather than general subjective opinions. (e.g. "My friend's Support ticket about xxx was never answered" is okay; "Support is totally falling down on the job" is not. Likewise, "the Archive's search sucks" isn't helpful, while as "search would be more useful if it included wrangling relationships" is constructive.)

If there is an issue you feel the tag wrangling committee should be dealing with, you are encouraged to email the staff [link] or chairs [link] about it, as well as bringing it up on the wrangler mailing list. You can see current issues under discussion in our meeting minutes [link] (pages for future meetings list the upcoming agenda); past minutes are also linked from the newsletter [link] (which is required reading for all wranglers.) Meetings are held in the wrangling chatroom, so all wranglers can read the full transcripts [link] if you want more detail than what's in the minutes; you are also welcome to lurk in the meetings themselves (and bring up any questions in chat after the meetings; usually some staff stick around.) If there is an important issue that hasn't been raised in these venues, please feel free to go ahead and email the staff about it; we will add items to the agenda on wrangler request.

If you have an issue with the tag wrangling committee itself (either a specific conflict or in a broader sense) and you do not feel comfortable bringing your concerns to the general staff, you can email the wrangling chairs directly at [link]. Or, if you'd like to keep your concern confidential from the wrangling committee, you can contact the Volunteers Committee at [link]. You can also contact the wrangler OTW Board liaison directly; our liaison this year is Sanders [link].

If there is an issue in another part of the Org that you feel needs to be addressed, you have several options for getting in touch with the actual committee/workgroup in question. You can always email the wrangling staff list or the wrangling chairs; we coordinate with other committees, and can pass concerns on (at least if they're tag/wrangling related; otherwise we can put you in touch with people in a better position to handle them.) If your issue is outside the scope of tags and wrangling there are other options. Non-tag-related AO3 feature requests and bug reports should be submitted to Support (tag and wrangling related features and bug reports as always should be submitted directly to the wrangling staff.) Some of the org-wide chat meetings have open floors where cross-committee issues can be raised. The forums are open to all volunteers in the org, so any posts there can be seen by all committee staff and volunteers. Many of the committees/workgroups have mailing lists listed on the OTW internal wiki through which you can contact them directly (especially if a matter seems particularly urgent); many of them also make public posts allowing comments.

And of course, if you have the time, you always have the option to volunteer for other volunteer pools, committees and workgroups. Sometimes the best way to effect change is to work from a position which is responsible for that change.


The second thing to keep in mind when raising criticism on the mailing list (or anywhere else in the Org) is that every single person, on every committee and workgroup and any other part of the OTW, is a volunteer, just as you are; they are freely donating their time and effort to the Archive and the Org to try to make them the best they can be. Even if you do not approve of or agree with the work they are doing, please respect them, and the effort they are putting into that work. 'Respect' obviously does not mean 'do not criticize'; but when you do, keep it constructive, and try not to take out your frustrations on them. Assume they are acting in good faith, and be understanding that their own perspective on the issue may not agree with yours (or even if they do agree, your suggestions may not all be feasible or immediately possible; we simply do not have the time or resources to do everything all at once, frustrating as that is.) This includes every member of the tag wrangling committee staff, all of whom started out as regular wrangling volunteers, and are still active wranglers, in addition to our other committee duties; we strive to do as best by wranglers as we can, because we are all wranglers as well.

So, while it can be tempting to let off steam, remember there are over 150 people on the wrangler mailing list, and the odds are some of them are personally involved in whatever aspect of the Org you are criticizing. Openly antagonistic complaints can make the whole list feel hostile, and discourage some people from offering their own perspectives and criticism, if they feel that they might be attacked for it. Whenever you post on the mailing list, keep in mind that while we all have our own personal vision for what we want the OTW to be, ultimately we are all in this together, and the only way we'll get anywhere is if we cooperate, support, and respect one another in our work with the Org.

Thank you,
Emilie & Alison
Tag Wrangling chairs

I hope it's clear where my bolding relates to the points I made earlier in this post.

Before I get into discussing the letter, a little background on the tag wrangling list. The Tag Wrangling Committee consists of the staff and a volunteer pool. The staff is responsible for managing the volunteer pool, managing tag wrangling policies, and representing the interests of tag wranglers and tagging interests to the wider org. Tag wranglers are a very diverse group, including in terms of org involvement: many have positions elsewhere in the org, while for many others tag wrangling is their sole volunteer involvement in the org. This leads to a very wide array of depth and type of connection to the org. In addition, the TW committee had a rocky start with confusion over purview and communication leading to several incidents where wranglers at large felt unheard by the rest on the org. On average then, a lot of tag wranglers feel a bit left out of org doings, disconnected from structures of authority and yet expected to "play the game" in terms of following wrangling rules, filing complaints in proper places, etc. This puts a lot of wranglers in a frustrating bind: actively invested in org work yet feeling unable to affect it much. There are wranglers who do not feel like this, but I think that overarching average is important to keep in mind about the list.

What's been very frustrating for a lot of TW staff is that a lot of wranglers have been representing this letter publicly as forbidding wranglers to criticize. While there are many factors in play — wording of the letter, history of the wrangling committee and volunteer pool, larger org issues — that can ease a jump to that conclusion, I hope that looking at the full text of the letter makes clear the intent: to show wranglers the best ways to get their criticism heard. A sort of "how-to" on criticism, the same intent as my post here. This is furthermore aimed at people the OTW considers "internal" — we're expecting people to not only treat us as professionals, but also to behave like professionals.

Now, that's less simple than it sounds, because of the trickiness I mentioned above. In theory, wranglers are part of the org, and one of the functions of the TW committee is to make sure wranglers are heard. However, the OTW in general is struggling with professionalism, communication, and structure, and TW committee is no exception. I think the TW committee has made huge progress in this vein, but wranglers still have to operate on a lot of good faith before they can treat the rest of the org like professionals in turn.

From the staffer perspective, I think this, from a comment by cypher on seventhe's entry, puts it very well:

I've been staff on the Wrangling Committee for a long time now, until I had to take a hiatus this year because the stress of it was so unpleasant -- it's a very rock-and-hard-place position, where we have very little ability to effect change without going through other committees for help, and there have been a lot of instances in the past few years where we didn't get a chance to offer input on changes that would affect us, or where things our volunteers really wanted just didn't make it to the top of the too-long list of things for the coders to do. So there's a huge feeling of frustration and powerlessness sitting there like a big unfriendly rock on one side.

And then on the other side is the hard place of the volunteers who see us as the authorities/insiders and hold us accountable for everything that doesn't get done (or done fast enough) and every communication failure -- it's certainly not all the volunteers, but it happens often enough that a big unofficial part of being on the committee is honestly "be someone to blame."

Wranglers can themselves often feel stuck in a similar situation: accountable to users for a huge part of their archive experience (as well as being users themselves) yet caught against the large, slow machinery of the org as it grinds away beyond their direct control.

So I can understand where the frustration and negative interpretation comes from. But I continue to think that the key lies in treating the OTW as, well, an organization.

---

At this point, I must address a likely concern: how can I expect people to treat the OTW professionally when the OTW doesn't behave professionally?

To that I say: It's symbiotic. We need both sides of that equation to make it work. We are working hard on being more professional, and it will help us immensely to achieve that goal if people treat us as such. It's a good faith thing, I know — but for all that I love and approve of criticism, I think good faith from both sides is absolutely essential to the enterprise.

Given this, there's understandable difficulty in treating the org like a nonprofit with a hierarchy and proper channels of communication. For one, our hierarchy is poorly-understood both within the org and inside it: this is something we're actively working on. On the flip side, however, points of contact are not hard to find for anyone who goes looking for them. It's all about reciprocity: our nascent hierarchy can only be fully effective if people respect it and behave as if it is real.

This includes waiting while the machinery grinds along (or pitching in to push further up the chain) — and in the reciprocal direction, it involves communication and updates on the status of the grind. Hierarchy must be respected reciprocally. This is where the org is struggling, and I am going to be honest here. I keep saying it has to be symbiotic, and I mean it. We need all the help we can get: please help us.

So. People have criticism and negative feelings, not necessarily at the same time but not mutually exclusive either. It's up to each individual what they do with those, but if the goal is to help the OTW change for the better, I hope this gives a little insight into how we work and what the most effective ways to talk to us are.

I do feel that the OTW has at least one good thing going for it in this context: there are a ton of ways and venues to reach us, and overall there's much more availability of direct and personal connection with our personnel. That's pretty awesome — but it's also something that has to be treated carefully. That sense of personal connection can make it a lot easier to interact with us — the org as a whole or individual personnel — as if we're only fellow fans on a fannish project, rather than part of a nonprofit organization. We're both, and negotiating that line continues to be tricky.

As always, thank you all for your thoughts! I hope this helps.

(I also wanted to talk a bit about ambivalence towards the OTW, but this post is long enough already. So chucking that in the pile of to-do tl;dr.)

Comments

[synecdochic]

This post, and the contents of the email that was sent to the tag wrangling committee, has some things in it that deeply concern me. I'm seeing *many* of the hallmarks of people who are inexperienced with people management (not process management, but people management) who have been thrust into a managerial role and are trying to figure out the rules for how to manage people as they go along.

And the thing is, when you say "if you expect us to act like a nonprofit org, you have to treat us as a nonprofit org" -- that works both ways, and I would indeed argue that you've got the causality reversed. You've already lost a lot of good faith from many people; a lot of people have gotten burned and a lot of people are going to be negative (not just critical, *negative*) no matter what you do. Waiting for those people to change the way they interact with the OTW before making changes in both process management and people management is only going to make the problem worse.

There's a point (and, sadly, I think y'all have crossed it with many people) where you will be unable to convince your critics that you're achieving measurable, positive change until a *lot* of time has passed. (A *lot*. I'm talking years, in some cases.) Expecting anyone to change how they present their negative opinions, or broadly chastising people without any specifics for not expressing feedback in the most constructive way possible, really does nothing but reinforce the negative perceptions people have.

(it also does, unfortunately, tend to push people who are neutral further into the negative end of the scale. a few years ago I touched on this in part 3 of my "Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure" essay, under the heading 'the long dark road to cat macros', There are four stages of reaction to a property or an organization doing something that has the potential to piss people off, and those stages aren't just applicable to advertising; they can be generalized. The OTW is on the line between a stage 3 and a stage 4 on more than one of the challenges facing the org, i think, and the thing about stage 4 is, once a specific individual has kicked over into stage 4 reaction on *anything*, the chances of you winning them back are not only next to nonexistent, any attempt to do so has a much greater chance of kicking stage 2 and stage 3 people over into stage 4.)

look, i'll be blunt: the org has a very bad PR problem right now, over and above the organizational and technical problems y'all are trying so hard to solve. And the thing is, everything you guys have done lately shows that you *know* you have these problems. You're taking a number of very badly needed steps to fix those problems; from the outside it definitely seems like you're getting a good sense of the scope of the problem. Everybody knows that change is not going to happen overnight -- even your worst and most negative critics know that, even if they gripe loudly about the problems not being solved yet. And it's very clear (also from outside) that you're taking those problems seriously and working on things that will solve them; even if you aren't 100% sure of the best ways to solve the problems, you're trying things and hoping they'll have a positive effect.

But telling people how to express criticism -- even if that's addressing people entirely internally, like the email to the wrangling committee -- *never, ever works*. Ever. I have never, not once in oh-god-12+-years of managing people and longer than that watching others manage people and being managed by people myself, seen a manager be successful in trying to dictate to people the manner in which they should provide critical feedback (as opposed to the process by which they should provide feedback in general). All it does, *especially* when the attempt is as vague and free of concrete details and specific examples as both the wrangling committee email and this post is, is make people even more frustrated, resentful, and -- and this gets worse the more vague the communication is -- paranoid about what is and isn't appropriate to say.

Part of being a manager, and it's definitely the sucky part, is to listen to people yelling at you -- at *you* personally, often in ways that are emotional, deeply personal, and incredibly hurtful -- and sift through the yelling for the underlying cause of their hurt and anger, then fix that underlying cause. (Or, at the very least, listen to their perspective and do what you can to find workarounds for the underlying cause.) It sucks. I won't deny that it sucks. It is deeply stressful, harrowing, emotional, and painful. But it's part of being a manager, and if someone is so conflict-avoidant or so emotionally vulnerable that listening to that kind of vitriol would be damaging to their health and stability, they should not be in a role that requires them to be responsible for managing people.

I'm not saying that people on a team *should* abuse their managers, or that people on the outside *should* be vituperative when offering criticism or negative opinions. It's definitely not a nice thing to do. But it happens -- especially when people feel like their more reasonable feedback has been ignored and they feel like they *have* to be nasty in order to be heard -- and it's the role of the people-manager to abosorb, *privately*, the negativity coming from their team members and to shield their team from the negativity of outside voices. Whether that involves pulling someone on the team aside for a confidential one-to-one chat and getting cried on or yelled at for four hours, or involves taking someone out of the way on the 'front lines' of customer interaction to handle an angry and abusive customer yourself, I'd argue that it's the #1 job task a manager should and must do in order for a team to be successful. And sadly, I really don't see a lot of that happening, from the bits that we see from the outside here. It may be happening -- the nature of good management is that it is, sadly, best when it is invisible -- but its lack shows in a lot of ways that can be measured from the outside and i'm seeing a lot of them lately.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have posted this, or that the tag wrangling chairs shouldn't have written the email that they did, but going forward I do think you (you = "collectively, as an organization, anyone who is in any position of authority") have to be *super* careful to avoid anything *at all* that looks like vague chastising or an attempt to police people's emotions and reactions, whether sent internally or posted externally. I know how frustrating it is to feel like you're amking a lot of headway on tough problems (which I definitely think you guys are, don't get me wrong) and people aren't giving you any credit, just continuing to holler at you -- believe me, I worked for LJ for six years, I know *exactly* how that feels. but it takes a long, long, *long* time for negative experiences or interactions to fade from people's minds, and at this point, y'all are just going to have to put up with being shouted at and snarked about for a while until the effects of those organizational changes start to be felt.

facetofcathy is absolutely correct when she says above: There's a point at which requests for us all to step up and be respectful and constructive and to use the official channels in professional ways sounds uncomfortably like half of a good cop/bad cop routine. there are a lot of people out there who have used those official channels and tried to be respectful and constructive and have gotten burned. it's going to take a while to get those people's goodwill back, and it sucks for those OTW staff who are new to their roles and feeling as though they're being punished for things that other people have done, but the org as a whole needs to make up a lot of ground to get back to 'neutral' in a lot of cases.

and in the meantime, people are going to yell. and it's the job of a manager to listen to the yelling, maintain composure in the face of the yelling, and do something productive with the underlying problems that are motivating the yelling. not to chastise people for yelling (even, and probably *especially*, if they're also doing something about the underlying cause of the yelling). doing that burns goodwill faster than just about anything else, and overshadows the very real efforts being made to address the organizational shortcomings people are yelling about in the first place.

(apologies for any typos/unclear bits, i'm four days post-hand-surgery and have one hand mostly bound up right now. Once i'm closer to recovered, though, i'm yet again repeating the offer i've made multiple times before: if you have people who need information on people management, or if you've got specific questions about how to improve people management skills or how to handle a situation or specific problem, i'm still happy to help.)

[synecdochic]

two other quick (ha!) points i realized, reading this over, that i forgot to make:

1) the OTW, as an organization, needs to take dramatic steps around disconnecting "the work of the committee" from "the work of the commitee chair/manager". from the outside, it's pretty obvious y'all are having a severe peter principle problem: people get put in roles of authority, org-wide, based on their success in doing the work, not their success in facilitating others to do the work. from out here, it looks as though you are selecting people for roles of authority based on their success in doing work that is not at all predictive of success in management. i may be off, but i don't think i am.

the head of any project team, committee, area of operations, etc, should *never* be the person who's best at doing the day-to-day work of the workgroup. that person should, at most, be in a technical leader/chief-operating-officer/team-specialist sort of role. the person in authority needs to be the person who's best at management, both people management and process management, not the person who's best at the workgroup's work. that role should never, ever, ever be a reward for work excellence.

2) good people management skills are exceedingly rare. i don't mean to discourage you, but it's *not* something you can pick up easily on-the-fly. you can become a relatively competent manager-of-people on the fly, but the skills to be truly good at it take a long time to train. (i started managing people in 2000. at the rate i'm going, I'd say I'll probably progress past "reasonably competent" by 2021 or so.)

again, i say this not to be discouraging, but to reinforce part 1. managing people well is a *very* specialized skill set and it takes a fuckton of practice. and not everyone is suited for the role. it takes someone with a fairly extroverted personality, the ability to shrug off things that would leave other people fuming, and interpersonal skills like whoa. it's not something just anybody can pick up from reading a book or attending a training course. you have to love doing it, and if you don't love doing it, you will not only do it badly, but you will do significant organizational damage in the process -- but more importantly, you will do significant emotional damage *to yourself*. (and i see the signs of that emotional damage in a lot of departing or departed committee chairs' posts -- i'm not saying they did the job badly, but it's clear to me, from the outside, that no matter how well or badly they handled being a manager, they hated the experience and hated what it did to them.)

too many organizations, and too many people within organizations, view management roles as a reward for doing work well or as a place to put people who are doing the work badly ("failing upward"). too many individuals think that management roles are status symbols or a validation/affirmation of their worth or the worth of their work. that's not fair to the org and it's not fair to the person.

if i were you guys, i'd start to think very, very carefully about the story the org tells rank-and-file volunteers about management roles, from committee chairs all the way up to board members, and start being crystal clear on how it's *not* the expected 'career path' inside the org for absolutely everyone. there's a tendency in NFP work, especially in orgs that are short on people, to expect that everyone will wind up in people-management (as opposed to process management or technical management) roles eventually. don't do that. i'm begging you, for the future of the organization and for the well-being of everyone inside the organization, to make it dead flat clear that not everyone will eventually be promoted into roles with heavy people management duties. (and i'm begging you to structure the org so that your 'advanced' roles for people who *have* been with the org for a long time do *not* involve people management unless the individual in question loves doing it and is good at it. if the only way to advance is to take a role where people management is a sine qua non, people will take those roles anyway, they will do it badly, they will be miserable, and the org will suffer. you've already set things up dangerously with requiring people to serve as a committee chair before being able to stand for board.)

of course, this requires that there be good people managers, or people with the capacity to become good people managers, on the board and in positions of org-wide authority. and given the nature of the board as an entirely-elected entity, elected by the membership at large, that's not a guarantee -- this is why most NFPs have an executive director who's hired, not elected, and who does not change with the board. changing that, sadly, would be much, much more involved.

still, even though good people management skills are rare and many aspects of them are innate/personality-based, there are definitely things board members can do to exercise their people management skills even if they don't have those skills already and are not the type of personality who picks them up quickly or easily. again, if the existing board -- individually or as a collective -- would like help or resources, let me know.

[highlander_ii]

iirc (and someone will ttly correct me if i'm wrong on this) - you only have to serve on the committee *staff* to stand for election to the board, not necessarily be a *chair*.

[synecdochic]

ah! thank you, and i apologize for the error (i'm still incredibly confused on the differences between volunteer, staff, and chair, and the processes by which people are selected for/wind up as any of the above!) that's definitely less dangerous, although in that case I'd still urge people to look carefully at the question of how people are selected for/wind up as 'staff' and what the 'staff' role includes.

[skaredykat]

Amen to 1) and 2). I can be competent at people-managing, but it is hard and took a while to get there, and I've worked with and worked to support quite a few people who were truly not good at it. Trying to be managed by poor people managers is a very common accelerant to burnout.

(I also still would very much like to see/hear about the elections committee and DevMem working hard to get additional great spokespeople -- for the org and for various values of Fandom -- as (Advisory) Board candidates, as that's also not quick-learn skill, and is IMO very much needed for the foreseeable future from at least one or two people with exective-sounding titles on or near the board.)

[synecdochic]

Trying to be managed by poor people managers is a very common accelerant to burnout.

I'd actually call it the #1 cause of burnout by far, if not the cause of about, oh, 80% of burnout cases in general. people can have the most ideal workplace in the world, but if their manager isn't any good -- or isn't any good *for them*, since there are tons of different management styles and needs for being-managed -- they will burn out very quickly and the only way to get them back is to find them a different team under a different manager and hope for the best. conversely, of course, people can -- and *will* -- put up with a *shitload* of poor process, inadequate tools, complex and fiddly work, demanding customers both internal and external, inadequate organizational vision, etc ad nauseam, as long as their direct manager is good at managing people and willing to devote time to the problem.

case in point: i managed the livejournal abuse team from 2002-2007 as one part of my (many) duties while working for LJ. the LJAT was perhaps the most universally-reviled collective i've ever been a part of. even the other support volunteers who thought the team were awesome people individually, and who understood that things were way more complex than they appeared and whatever controversy was making the rounds about an abuse team decision was being told by someone (the offender) who had every motive to paint the team in a bad light, would occasionally say awful things about them, and i know (for instance) a few abuse team members who wouldn't even confess to their friends that they worked on the team because they were sick of hearing the tirades against them. at varying times during my tenure, there was little or no organization-wide support for the team, the development time needed for producing necessary tools would be postponed and reassigned again and again, the work was incredibly stressful and emotionally draining, even people inside the company but outside the team would hear the outside story about an incident that had happened and flip out before even asking the team what had *really* happened, the workload went beyond "gruelling" and into "flat-out masochistic", and the average time between "shit's on fire" incidents was usually measurable in days, not weeks or months. a few of us did one of those "rate your workplace stress" type tests once for shits and giggles; the score was literally off the scale of the test. the test makers didn't think anybody would say 'yes' to all the questions on the list. we didn't think the list had enough questions to cover the deeply dysfunctional circumstances we found ourselves in.

and yet: the average length of tenure on the team was between 1.5 and 2 times the industry standard burnout time for front-line customer service people, and around four times the industry standard burnout time for high-stress, high-responsibility customer service people. today, five years after i quit livejournal, i still have people who served under my tenure coming to me and saying how much they enjoyed working on the team and how much they miss it. i'm still close friends with multiple people from the team, and they're still close friends with each other. (i was hanging out with someone i met through managing the team last week. many of the people who were part of the team still vacation with each other every year. there were even a few weddings.) when we started dreamwidth, about half of the first wave of volunteers came from people who'd worked on the abuse team (or the more general support team).

i'm not saying this to brag, not at all (and there were, of course, people who weren't suited for the work and left more quickly or were asked to leave, and people who looked like they'd be suited for the work and turned out to not be, and people whose being-managed needs didn't mesh with my management style at all; it took me a while to get anywhere approaching decent at spotting them ahead of time). it is, however, an excellent example of how reasonably good people management skills can shield a particular team inside what was (at varying times more or less) a deeply unhealthy, toxic organization, with zero support from higher-level management and while being denigrated by, oh, pretty much everybody, both inside the company and out. it's entirely possible, and it can be done in just about any team environment, no matter how distrustful or once-bitten-twice-shy or negative the team is at first, if the manager's willing to bite the bullet and earn the team's trust and confidence.

it's hard. it takes a *ton* of work. even now on DW, where i have the authority to do anything i need to fix a problem and the circumstances and company-wide environment are so much more pleasant there is literally no way to compare the two, i fuck up a bunch. it takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy; i spend at least 25-30 hours out of my 60-hour workweek doing one-on-one people management for the 75-100 people we're dealing with. in deeply unhealthy orgs, it takes an immense personal toll on the manager in question: to this day I twitch when I hear people referencing certain incidents, it took nine months after I quit for the physical effects of the stress it caused me to do it by the end to subside, and i *know* that it's had lasting long-term physical effects on me.

but it's possible.

there's a pretty common division of managers into "seagull managers" and "umbrella managers": a seagull manager is the one who swoops in, shrieks loudly, dumps a whole bunch of shit on the people below them, and then swoops out again. an umbrella manager is the person who holds the umbrella over the team's head to shelter them from the shit raining down from above. there are seven basic rules for being a good umbrella manager; once i have some more energy (and can type without looking like an emo kid with no spellcheck who's allergic to capital letters) i'll write them up.

[skaredykat]

Very much yes to all of this, and I would love to read your seven basic rules once you've energy to type them up! :)

[jennyst]

Once i'm closer to recovered, though, i'm yet again repeating the offer i've made multiple times before: if you have people who need information on people management, or if you've got specific questions about how to improve people management skills or how to handle a situation or specific problem, i'm still happy to help.

I've tried a couple of times to contact you since our last discussion and got no response. Would you mind replying to my email, please, or adding me back on AIM as we discussed?

[synecdochic]

oh dear, i didn't get any reply-to-my-reply to your email and i haven't gotten any aim contacts from you (and I did add the aim account you mentioned in the first email to my auth list, so you should be able to ping me!) and the few times i've tried contacting you there's been no reply. some aim clients have problems with those of us who run stealth all the time; yours and mine might be interacting badly. i'll definitely doublecheck that i have the account entered the way you had it in your email to me, and i'll try pinging you again once i'm recovered a bit more. (or try to catch you in irc.)