constructive criticism.

[from a talk with my boss, 26 April 2011.]

[So I'm learning, finally, to be an official manager, not just a manager-of-one's-boss as I've been for years and years. I'd love comments about what other people find effective - this is relationship management, self-knowledge, applicable in so many other areas of life -]

· SHOW, don’t TELL. Ask open questions; seek information through all roads to Rome.

· MESOmanage: do not interrupt the flow of an intervention or interview with comments/critiques/suggestions. Don't get in the habit of feeding leading questions, so that your colleague always turns to you for approval or permission.

· Even minor comments/critiques/suggestions should be made out of sight and earshot of your audience. Listen to yerself, Christine Murphy. You make the c/c/s in casual conversation much more often than you think.

· BE PRESENT: both mentally AND physically. SHOW people that these questions are important.

· Be mindful of the difference between LIKE and RESPECT. They are not incommensurable, but they are also NOT equivalent.

· DON’T SEND MIXED MESSAGES – e.g. inserting comments into the FO’s interview but not staying by his/her side.

· DON’T PATRONIZE. This also is flying under my radar. I thought I would try to keep out of my colleague’s hair, to let him have authority in our house-to-house checks. If I’m not in the house, what can I be doing? Why, learning words, dances, teasing… with the kids, one of my favorite intoxicants. Word choice not made lightly – I was being distracted, and delighted by this distraction. But it was distracting to my colleague, and to the women he was trying to interview. The idea of taking the kids to the side to play a game may work where there are rooms to houses, but the work changes when it’s all the same shared space. (R started asking kids about suspect cases, but after a while of my antics, they wouldn’t talk with him because they thought it was a game. Now, I don’t think that there’s no room for fun in learning. But how to address the issue of serious fun, of fun that’s important?)

· It’s such a funny thing to bring awareness to my everyday actions. I thought I received R’s criticisms well; nods and noises of assent, receptive body language, etc. But still I had to interrupt at one point, to explain that I was trying to let the FO work independently. Why that need? hmmm.

Honestly, he could have been much harsher; You Were Really Not Paying Attention To Your Job, Christine! This lump came up in my chest, a spongy clump of ego. I want to protest: I was paying attention, I was I was! And I was, a bit… but I can see that I was also distracted, and that I was enjoying myself. A job doesn’t need to be pain, but it shouldn’t be about taking the path of least resistance, hanging out with kids because it’s easy, assuming that you’ll be able to get in on adult society via child society. Westerners value their kids highly this way – kids are an entrée into adult worlds not just because you find them in the same places, but because adults theorize about child minds and hearts, imagine the child’s imaginings and in that way help show you the color of their own.

[Oh, anthropology. Never far from me now, are you?]