Friday, March 09, 2007
The Middle Manager’s Beatific Vision
Half-way through my life’s journey, I’ve become a minor administrator, a middle-management type. If I sound a bit crest-fallen, you’ll understand. Almost no one aspires to middle management. In fact, despite the way we promote to children the thrill of achievement, hardly anyone wishes to become an institutional leader—a president or a CEO. We look on such people with equal parts awe and horror. Their singularity makes them somehow inhuman. Middle administrators are just the opposite. Only too human, we are the poster children of drudgery and despair. Better to be the all-American worker, the regular Joe. In my profession, the regular Joe is the classroom teacher, the one in blue jeans—hero of ideas and lofty ideals.
But in so many ways, I’m not unhappy about my fall from grace. Never before have I lived so close to the institution. I’m not at the molten core of it, but I am in among the machinery, the oiled, clanging, moving parts. I spend my time planning and attending meetings, taking notes, firing off emails, drafting proposals, forming subcommittees, revising documents, writing and presenting reports, and negotiating agreements. Each month I strain to push each of my dozens of projects forward one more step. But all the while, I’m learning to see in a new way.
For one thing, my administrative role at the university is a passport to numerous departments and programs I never would have known so well otherwise. My home department is excellent; but my wanderings down foreign hallways into strange meeting rooms have put me in contact with scientists, nurses, business professors, artists—people whose training and goals differ from my own, and whose particular qualities of greatness are humbling for me to contemplate. No matter how well-rounded you may feel as an individual, no matter how skilled as a professional you may be before becoming an administrator, once on that path you’re certain to come face-to-face with your inadequacies at almost every turn. But if you begin to recognize the special talents of your colleagues, you have some hope of surviving.
In the end, the best administrator, like a good parent, seems to do almost nothing. As a child, at the homes of my friends, I saw two kinds of parents. One kind lived in constant motion, running to break up a fight, turning to clean up spills, to admonish, shush, demand, and plead—while generally falling apart. The other kind of parent sat calmly reading or knitting—carrying on with life as the children peacefully pursued their own interests and duties. These parents offered a word of instruction, an observation, an encouragement; but their kids had already internalized the rules, understood their responsibilities, and found freedom within certain bounds.
I’m far from having mastered my role, but I do aspire to something magnificent: to rest poised at the very center of a mighty whirl of production, motionless on a stone chair like a monk at a Zen monastery. I like to think that in a tidy office somewhere sits an administrator of this kind. Suppose it’s you, dear listener. I picture you in the Lotus position on your carpeted floor, balancing in your mind a pure vision of organization, the complex functions extending fully from every line of responsibility. Your meditation encompasses every activity and detail. All is accomplished and will be accomplished. Your stillness is the source of all motion, around which the world unfolds petal by petal, the fire-colored rose whose stem you have been pressing, since the beginning of time, between the thumb and index finger of your left hand.