Where Personal Meets Professional: A Public Management Framework

Being a manager in a large public library system is a strange job and one that I still haven't gotten completely used to after almost three years in the position. The degree to which my job requires interaction with multiple library departments really exceeds anything required of the folks I supervise: the branch managers. Virtually everything I work on requires coordination with some combination of Finance, Facilities, IT, Communications, Collection Management, Human Resources, Community Services, the Foundation, Youth Services, and/or my two Branch Services peers. Learning to operate in this team-based environment is not necessarily something one learns working in branches. Of course it is true that branch staff are teams unto themselves; however, the level of complexity in management often feels several orders of magnitude higher due to dealing with personalities from such diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

Lately, I've felt this realization starkly. As I mentioned in a previous post, I experience cycles wherein my personal feeling of effectiveness waxes and wanes; I've felt myself on the downside of the cycle recently. Trying to understand what might be the environmental factors leading to my feeling less than effective lately has led me to make some personal connections with some professional reading I've been doing. Currently on my nightstand, among others, is a book titled, "Government Performance: Why Management Matters" by Ingraham, Joyce, and Donahue. In short, the book seeks to provide a model for the "black box" of management that exists between public resources and policy results. Taking a look at the model proffered by the authors and applying that framework to my personal actions, it follows, may be a step towards feeling a more positive energy about my workplace.

According to Ingraham, effective organizational management "is fundamentally dependent on the nature of its administrative infrastructure" (2003, 16). This is not revelatory. However, sketching the outline of a capable management system model and enumerating the characteristics of the structural components is useful. Management capacity, the authors assert, is highest when the system is fully integrated and operating with a results orientation.

Characteristics of integrative management activities include:

• Operational coherence
  
• Free communication
  
• Allocation of resources that fosters mutual support among departments
  

Managing with a results orientation requires:

• Clear identification of organizational objectives
  
• Performance measurement (short-term progress toward objectives)
  
• Performance monitoring (long-term progress toward objectives)
  

The management team that successfully embodies the characteristics above demonstrates:

1. The ability to understand progress and change course when required
   
2. The ability to strike the necessary balances in resource allocation
   

My view, personally, is that the management team of which I am a part has in place the basic systems to succeed; we have a solid administrative infrastructure. Where we've not succeeded thus far is in achieving truly integrative activities or in agreeing upon a clear "end state". In other words, what does success look like and how do we work together to get there?

Which leads me back to me. As I'm fond of saying, there is no such thing as "the organization" but only the people who comprise it. If I want to feel effective in my work, I need to be doing my part to foster an integrative and results oriented management team. That means approaching each project with an unambiguous definition of what we want to achieve, an open dialog about what each department brings to the project and how we can support one another in the challenges we each face, the establishment of clear measures by which to track our progress, and a long-term commitment to program evaluation.