I don’t know what I’m doing and that’s okay: lessons learned as a manager
This past year, I gave a talk at 3 conferences and one meetup group recounting my experiences and observations during my first year as a manger. This post contains the video of that talk and the transcript.
Video
The talk is 29:16. This is the recorded version I gave at the Utterly Content conference.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Lauren Tormey. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a Senior Content Designer at the University of Edinburgh.
My session today is titled ‘I don’t know what I’m doing and that’s okay’. I’m going to be sharing with you a bit about my lessons learned stepping into a management role.
About me
Before we get into it, a bit about my background and how I came to be a manager. I’ve been working at the University of Edinburgh for my entire career. I started an Editorial Assistant right as I was finishing my undergrad. And over the years have worked my way up to becoming a Senior Content Designer.
I’ve been with two different teams at the University. My current team I’ve been with since 2019. We’re called the Prospective Student Web Content team, and we’re focused on improving digital experience for prospective students.
I started out in the team as Content Designer, became a Senior Content Designer in summer 2021, and officially started line managing my first content designer in November 2021. My content team specifically focuses on carrying out continuous improvement projects. We work with departments around the University to enhance their digital provision.
One final thing before moving on, I’m more than happy to connect with anyone at this conference. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.
Why I’m giving this talk
So why am I giving this talk?
To put it simply, I found the experience of becoming a manager nerve-wracking. Not because I didn’t think I could do it. I felt confident in my abilities to learn how to manage a team.
But it was nerve-wracking because it was new and something I hadn’t done before. It’s a big change to go from doing the work to leading the work, and change is sometimes scary.
I gave a talk at the ContentEd conference at the start of 2021 on building confidence. In it, I shared this picture of the Pit of Success diagram. It shows the sort of emotional rollercoaster we go on when taking on new challenges. We start in our comfort zone, and when faced with a new challenge, we fall into the pit — where we get stressed and overwhelmed.
But when we learn new things, we eventually improve and get happier, coming away with this new higher level of ability — and we’re out of that pit.
So I knew coming into a manager role, I’d get to that new higher level of ability. But I didn’t know all the things that were going to happen in the pit — the things that would challenge me, the lessons I had to learn.
If you’re thinking about becoming a manager one day, I hope this talk serves a heads-up about some things that might happen in the pit — the unknown challenges coming your way.
If you are already a manager, this might feel like a trip down memory lane and give you a chance to reflect.
And even if you’re not interested in management, we all experience change in our career. So regardless of where you are in your career or what your role is, I hope this talk serves as a reminder of how you’re not alone if you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing.
A couple of things
A couple of things before the lessons learned I want to share.
I’m going to use the term line managees to mean a person you manage. I don’t really like this term, but I also don’t care for any alternatives, so this is what I’ll use in this talk.
Second, I’ll sometimes to refer to my line managees by name. They are called Freya, Flo and Heike. I work with fantastic human beings who I think are awesome, and it would feel weird to refer to them any other way than their names.
What I’m going to talk about
What am I going to talk about today?
The talk is in 3 parts:
First, I’ll talk about the challenges in recruiting and building a content design team.
I’ll next move on to what I call the balancing act of transitioning from practitioner to leader. That section will really dig into the lessons I’ve learned of being a manger.
Finally, I’ll wrap up by talking about the importance of team reflection in improving ways of working, and how I think it’s so critical to being a good manger.
Recruiting a content design team
The first step in my management journey was I got to recruit the team of content designers I would be managing.
Background
A bit of background as to how this recruitment came about.
To make a long story short, content designers left our team right when the University announced a 6-month hiring freeze. Not great timing. But it did give us the opportunity to restructure our team to something that was more fit for purpose.
One of the issues when our team was set up was we inherited a lot of content operations and service management work from another team. This meant for half the year, we were focused on that more operational work, and not carrying out the continuous improvement projects we were tasked to do as a team.
So when we had the opportunity to restructure the team, we created two separate content functions: one to lead the continuous improvement projects, which I lead, and another to lead our service management and operational work.
For my continuous improvement team, we had to hire 3 content designers.
It’s difficult to recruit content designers in higher ed
The reason I wanted to talk about our recruitment was because it was my first task as a senior content designer and it was the most challenging. It’s difficult to recruit content designers in higher ed.
This comes down to a few factors:
While other companies were coming out of the pandemic saying you could work fully remote if you wanted to, we couldn’t do that. The University hadn’t confirmed a policy and it still hasn’t confirmed a policy on remote working. It’s generally expected people come into the office 2 days a week, but nothing is set in stone. Either way, we couldn’t confidently offer a fully remote position, which narrows our candidate pool.
Our pay also doesn’t compare to other employers. Yes, higher ed pays less than private sector, but our salary scales were less than other public sector orgs like the Scottish Government.
At the time we were hiring, lots of other orgs were hiring tons of content designers. It was an employee’s market.
There is also an issue with candidates not knowing or understanding what content design is. Because our jobs site is not the greatest, we write blog posts to advertise the listing and share more about our team, what content design is, and how we work. We don’t expect to hire people already in content design roles, but we do expect candidates to be interested in a content design career and tell us how this role fits in with their career goals. But getting that kind of clarity in a cover letter is a rarity.
Also, has to be said. I know this isn’t unique to higher ed, but we get lots of applications in from graphic designers who think their role is for them. It is not. I just needed to vent about that.
The difficulties in recruitment meant we had to hire my team of 3 over 2 rounds. In our first round, of the 6 people invited to interview, 4 dropped out on the day of or the day before their interview. Most of those 4 said they got another job offer elsewhere. Like I said, an employee’s market.
What we also learned from the first round of recruitment was that many candidates did not have the experience for the specification of the content designer role.
To meet the reality of the employee landscape, we ended up creating an Associate Content Designer role, which was a pay grade below the Content Designer role. The benefit of this more junior position was if we found the right candidate for it, there would be a progression path up for them to the Content Designer role once they gained more experience.
In the end, we were able to recruit 3 content designers, but most of the interviews in our second round of recruitment were for the associate role.
So an important lesson learned there in adapting your available positions to the skills market that is out there.
What candidates had to do
I want to share some lessons learned in our application process. So to do that, I first need to tell you what we asked candidates to do.
The application itself was quite standard. Yes, you had to apply through our clunky HR system, but it didn’t ask for many details. The main thing was attaching a CV (or resume) and cover letter.
If selected, the interview was in 3 parts.
First we asked candidates to prep a presentation in advance. Our prompt was: ‘Deliver a 10-minute presentation about an item of web content you have been involved in improving. Make sure you address: How did you define what the content needed to do? How did you evaluate whether these needs were met?’
So even though candidates won’t have necessarily worked as content designers before, we wanted to see their experience of working with digital content and if they approached it with a content design mindset, maybe without even realizing it.
After the presentation, we had a traditional interview asking questions on career history, experience and expertise for about 45 minutes. And of course a chance for candidates to ask us questions.
Finally, after the interview, I gave the candidates directions for an editorial task. We gave candidates up to an hour to complete it on their own and then send back to me. It was essentially a page worth of poorly written copy we asked them to catch errors in and edit into a series of webpages.
We weren’t expecting a perfect output. We wanted to see if the candidate could chunk content out into subheadings and catch errors that ranged from typos to accessibility no-nos like having ‘click here’ as link text.
Mix of methods gives candidates the chance to show where they excel
I want to share both the positive and negative lessons learned about our application process.
To start with the positive, I thought having a mix of methods at the interview stage gave candidates the chance to show where they excel. And if they underperformed in one area, they had a chance to shine in another.
For those who show their best selves when they have time to prep, the presentation let us see how well candidates could structure information about projects they had worked on and how their experience related to the skills needed for the role in our team.
The interviews gave us a chance to chat with candidates and dig more into their experience, interpersonal skills, and also how this role fit into their career aspirations.
Finally, the editorial task let us see how well they could edit copy. Out of these 3 components, I found the editorial task was most telling of whether a candidate could take on the role.
As manager, I knew I would have to do a lot of training for whoever took on the roles. But for me, the most important skill I wanted to see in candidates, was that I could trust them to edit bad content. Because there would be A LOT of bad content they would be editing in this role.
And by editing bad content, I don’t mean I was prescriptive about only hiring people who caught all the errors. In fact, 2 people I hired left the ‘click here’ link text that was in the bad copy.
But I was aware that not everyone would have had accessibility training. The most important thing to me was seeing if a candidate could make sense of bad content and try to give it structure.
But I worry about the exclusionary side effects
So that’s what I liked about our application process. But it’s also worth nothing my reflections of what was not so great.
It basically boils down to me worrying about the exclusionary side effects of our process.
The mixed methods were great, but it has to be said that it’s time demanding. However long it took to prepare a presentation and then 2 hours between presenting, the interview, and the task.
Probably the most concerning element was the time demand of the presentation, and how this can work against people with caring responsibilities. We wanted to address this issue in a subsequent round of recruitment we did for a senior content designer role. Instead of prepping something beforehand, we invited candidates 45 minutes before the interview and gave them a presentation-type task. They had the rest of that 45 minute slot to come up with their response to the task. Then at the start of the interview, they had 5 to 10 minutes to present their response, either verbally or with slides if they preferred.
I think we got as useful insights into candidates with this presentation task as we did with the traditional prep-ahead presentations. But this time, all candidates had the same time to prepare and we weren’t disadvantaging those who didn’t have that prep time before the interview.
Another thing we didn’t do at the original content designer interviews, which I since saw increasingly becoming a thing, was providing interview questions in advance. I think this is an area where we were so attached to traditional interviewing and answering on the spot, we didn’t see the barrier this creates for candidates, especially to ones with lower confidence levels. So sending out questions in advance is something we tried in our latest round of senior content designer recruitment, and I thought the results were quite positive.
Even as an interviewer, I felt much calmer knowing candidates knew what to expect. I didn’t have to see anyone struggle to think of an answer on the spot. And yes, giving them out in advance might also put people with more free time at an advantage, but I’d also say that people with less time are helped by knowing what to prepare for, instead of trying to prepare for the unknown.
Final point about those original content designer interviewers. I think we relied too much on a scoring rubric. When we interview, we put down all the essential and desirable criteria in a rubric and score candidates based on how well they meet the criteria.
I really don’t like this because I think it ignores the potential I have seen in some candidates, who maybe didn’t score well because their experience didn’t match as well to the job specification. I want to share a quote from Jack Garfinkel, content designer at the charity Scope, who tweeted about something related to this.
Jack said: “The idea of a ‘most qualified candidate’ is a fiction that excludes a lot of appointable people who would all bring something different and great to a role.”
I agree 100% with Jack, but at the University, this rubric scoring is part of HR policy. They would question why we were hiring someone who scored lower on the rubric than another candidate. But as Jack later says, maybe it’s about finding the ways this policy can be worked around. What are those ways? That’s still to be determined, but would love to hear anyone’s ideas.
Transitioning from practitioner to leader
So those were some of the recruitment lessons learned. Now I want to get into all the things I learned when transitioning from practitioner to leader. In other words, when I actually started managing people. As you’ll see from the next few slides, being a manager is all about balancing.
While becoming a leader, I have had to balance learning lots of new stuff while helping my line managees learn lots of new stuff
The first point about becoming a manager is I have had to learn how to do all the manager stuff.
But I also have had to help my team learn lots of new stuff.
So it has to be said, balancing learning lots of new stuff while helping your line managees learn lots of new stuff, it’s…a lot.
I can literally feel the weight of the extra responsibility. And it’s not a bad weight. It’s not hurting me and I don’t feel resentful of it.
But I can feel this extra thing I didn’t have when I wasn’t line managing anyone. I’m responsible for my own professional development and overseeing other people’s. There is a lot of learning to keep up with. Again, it’s not bad. It’s just an observation of something I wasn’t prepared for when I became a manager.
Something I also didn’t feel prepared for was planning projects on my own. I had the experience of leading projects or parts of projects, but not actually planning out entire content design projects from scratch. So when I first had to plan out a project for my team, it was incredibly daunting. I went to my boss and straight up said, I don’t know what to do or where to even start.
And my boss gave me the most helpful instruction that has steered me well since: to plan a project, you write out a list of all the things to do. It seems so simple looking back on it, but now whenever a new project starts and I’m daunted at the thought of what I’m going to tell my team to do, I remember I just need to write down a list of tasks. And then I prioritize when we do them. And then we do them.
So that’s one pit in the pit of success I’ve crawled out of.
That said, even if I learned everything I needed to and trained my team with everything they needed to know, I don’t think the extra weight of responsibility feeling is something that will ever go away because of this next point.
As a manager, I have to both exist in the present and in the future
Being a manager is basically like being a time traveller. I have to both exist in the present and in the future. Actually, that’s more complex than time travel. I have to exist in two time dimensions at once.
In the present, I need to be there for my line managees with the work they are doing now. Like I alluded to in my last slide, in my team of all new content designers, this has meant training them in the skills they need to carry out agile content design projects, from user research all the way through to delivering new content on websites.
It’s meant helping them with the questions they have along the way, workshopping new content ideas with them, reviewing their draft content, attending meetings with stakeholders with them, working together to publish our new content. I’m with them in the work they are presently doing.
But I also need to be balancing this with thinking a few steps ahead to what work my team will be doing in the future. And that can mean the immediate future or a couple of weeks or months down the line. If we’re wrapping up the discovery phase of a project, I need to plan when we’re going to start developing content and how we’re going to do it. If we’re done testing content, I need to plan when and how we’re going to publish it. If we’re wrapping up a project, I need to find out and plan what the next piece of work is going to be. And then I have to plan how I’m going to teach my team how to carry out that work.
My team are always very keen to know what’s coming next when we’re getting to the end of a project. And frequently my answer is, I don’t know. Or, I know we’ll be doing work in the area, but I don’t know how long it will be or what we’ll be doing day-to-day.
I don’t always know what the future will be like, and I’m here to tell you that that is okay.
If you’re also in that situation, I recommend be upfront with your line managees that you don’t know what is going to happen, or even what you’re doing, but that you will find out, and you will learn. And when you do, you’ll tell them.
So every time one of my line managees asks what’s next and I say I don’t know yet, they’re okay. They don’t freak out. They trust that I’ll tell them when I know and that I’ll get them to where they need to be.
Guilt in the job is balanced by remembering leading is doing
The next thing I need to balance is guilt. As a manger, I feel guilty. I feel guilty about something I’ve come to realize I shouldn’t feel guilty about.
When I hand over tasks to my team to do, I get this feeling like I should be assigning myself those same tasks. I’m giving them the grunt work, surely I should be doing my fair share of it.
But what I have to remind myself each time I think this, is that leading is work. Project management, people management, reviewing the content and outputs my team creates, carrying around that extra responsibility as a manager– it’s work. Leading the work may look different from doing the work, but I’m definitely putting in my fair share.
So every time I feel guilty, I balance this out by remember leading is doing.
I have needed to find the balance in onboarding new staff while line managing existing staff
One of the most challenging balance issues I came up against while managing was having to balance onboarding new staff while line managing existing staff.
I previously mentioned how we had 2 rounds of recruitment. In November, Freya started in my team. And then in March, Flo and Heike joined.
Not only was I already managing Freya in March, we were also in the middle of a sprint in an agile content design project. For anyone not familiar with agile projects, this basically means we were in the middle of a 2-week burst of work, in this case to deliver a new piece of content on a website.
And on top of this, in the middle of Flo and Heike’s first 2 weeks of working, I was going on holiday for a few days.
It felt like a lot of balancing that needed done and I was genuinely worried about how to be there for Freya in the project, while also being there for Flo and Heike to support them with their onboarding.
At the time, I was attending a University course for managers. We had regular discussion groups where we met to discuss an issue someone was having, and we’d follow a format to ask the person with the issue questions that would help them come up with a solution, as well as providing our own advice.
I brought this balancing issue to the discussion group, and they gave some really great advice for how to handle the situation.
1: they suggested job shadowing. I didn’t need to abandon Freya and the project work to run separate tasks to onboard Flo and Heike. Part of Flo and Heike’s induction would be to come along to our pre-scheduled project meetings and observe what we were doing.
2: getting feedback from Freya about her induction experience. This was a really useful chat where I learned from Freya the importance in balancing giving new starts practical work to do, but also just space to do self-study and catch up on our work in the project so far.
3: meeting other members of the team. During the days I was out, I scheduled Flo and Heike to meet with members of other subteams to get to know more about what they do.
4: delegating up to my manager: While I was away, I could delegate any management responsibilities to my boss for anything he might need to pick up on.
Unfortunately, my boss got sick during this time, so I couldn’t do that in the end, but you know what? It was all okay.
Because there’s actually another important lesson here in that I expected more from me than everyone else was.
It’s okay to let your new starts know you have project deadlines you need to meet.
It’s okay to tell someone already in post you’ll need to spend some time with the new starts.
It’s more than okay to go on holiday, even if it’s right when new team members join.
I had to learn how to be okay with not giving everyone 100% of myself and my time.
Being a boss comes with unexpected power
I was completely unprepared for this next point.
Being a boss comes with unexpected power.
I don’t think my opinions should matter more as a manager, but I think the traditional hierarchical idea of team structures contributes to the feeling of a manager having this overarching authority. So I basically feel the opposite of how Anakin Skywalker feels in this Star Wars quote [meme of Anakin Skywalker saying ‘You underestimate my power’]. I have underestimated my own power!
I want to show you the moment I learned I had this unexpected power. It was through a messaging exchange on Teams.
When I learned I had power
Flo had messaged the team to ask for feedback on a piece of content she had designed. She thought it looked bad and wanted to know if it would be worth splitting up over two pages.
Everyone immediately went to look at the content, and I could see in Teams we were all typing our feedback at the same time.
I sent my feedback through first and said it didn’t look that bad, maybe just add an extra space between two separate chunks of content.
I noticed after I sent this, I could not see anyone else typing anymore, and I got worried no one was saying anything because they thought because I gave my feedback, that’s the direction Flo should go in.
So I then typed, ‘But curious to know what everyone else thinks’. Then I could immediately see everyone writing messages again. And you know what both Freya and Heike said?
That ultimately it would look less overwhelming if the content was over 2 pages. And so Flo ultimately tried my suggestion first before breaking it up into 2 pages.
I need to balance making an executive decision with consulting my team when I don’t know the answer
The idea of this power I had was further confirmed in other interactions I had with my team. Once we were trying to decide on what to do with this piece of content — I don’t even remember the specifics of what it was.
But basically, I decided something for the team and said I was ‘making an executive decision’. And then when it came to further choices that I had to make, my team, in jest, started referring to it as my executive decision. Or, “is that an executive no, Lauren?”
And while it was a bit funny, I also found it worrying. As you’ll recall from the title of this talk, I don’t know what I’m doing. Why should my opinions matter more?
And I think the answer to that is, my opinions don’t matter more, but it’s actually sometimes okay for me to make the executive decision. Sometimes it’s not fun to make the decision. It’s stressful to make the decision. So it’s less about me exerting power and more part of that extra responsibility I carry around as a manager.
At the end of the day, it’s all about balance. Yes, I can sometimes make the decision, but if I don’t know the answer myself and I want help with it, I consult my team and ask for their opinions. I frequently do this. For example, nearer the end of our first project as a team, I didn’t know which content topics we should focus our attention to because we had already addressed the major concerns coming out of our user research.
So I met with my team to discuss what topics we felt would be best to focus our attention on. Through everyone sharing their opinions, we reached a consensus. We had a more informed direction to go in and suggest to our stakeholders.
I feel much more confident in the decisions I need to make when my team is part of the decision making process.
Being a manager is being a glorified calendar checker
Some small points to wrap up this section.
1: Being a manager is being a glorified calendar checker. I am constantly checking when people are available so I can schedule meetings.
This is definitely the standard with managers at Edinburgh and it probably is where you work too, but I cannot stress enough how important this is: put your line managees’ holiday dates in your calendar. As soon as they request it so you don’t forget. It makes it so much easier to schedule work and meetings when you can see front and center when your team is off.
I am also a glorified calculator
Second point: I am also a glorified calculator.
I manage a team of 3 content designers. I’m constantly dividing work up into 3 chunks.
How many user interviews are we conducting? Divide by 3. Not a number that’s divisible by 3? Go check that calendar you know so well to see who has the most availability.
Developing some new pages of content as a team? Divide the number of pages by 3 and distribute accordingly.
You get what I mean. I need to balance the workload. Like I said at the start of this section, it all comes back to balance.
Team reflection
The last thing I want to share with you is the importance of reflection as a team as a way to improve how you work.
Retros are the best source of new ideas to improve how you work
My main point in this section is to tell you how much I love a retro. They are the best source of new ideas to improve your ways of working.
For those of you unfamiliar with retros, this is something you do in agile projects. A retro is short for retrospective.
At the end of each iteration of work you do, called a sprint, you hold a meeting for everyone to reflect on how the sprint went.
You have a section for:
- what went well
- what could have been better
- suggestions for improvement
At the retro meeting, we each spend about 3 minutes filling in post-it notes for each of those 3 sections. When the timer goes off, we share the notes we wrote down for that section.
I encourage my team, and myself, to make a note of these reflection points while we’re working, because it’s quite easy to forget the details when you’ve come to the end of a bit of work.
At the end of the meeting, there’s then a 4th section for me to write an action list following the retro. I classify the actions into short-term and long-term — what are the changes I can make to improve how next sprint goes, and what are the things I need to improve further down the line.
I base these actions on what we write in the suggestions for improvement section, and also sometimes get some inspiration from the what could have been better section.
Retros have become my favorite part of projects. It’s really nice to hear everyone say what they really liked about the work they did in a sprint. And it’s nice to hear when people acknowledge their teammates’ work in the what we did well section.
As for what could have been improved and the suggestions, I find it a treasure trove of great ideas about how to make us better as a team. I feel incredibly grateful that my team feel comfortable to be so open in a retro because it only makes us better.
As a new manager who has felt like I don’t know what I’m doing, a retro tells me what to continue doing and what to fix.
Examples of how we improved from retros
Here are some of the ways we have improved how we work because of the retros.
As part of an agile project, we have daily check-ins where we share what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today, and any blockers to achieving our to-do list. It’s very easy to forget what you did yesterday. Especially on Mondays, it’s super easy to forget what you did the previous week. So to help with this, I set up a space in our project management platform for each of us to add a daily reflection — if we wanted to. Ultimately, I let my team decided what works best for them but the space is there if they need it. Personally, I find this space immensely helpful because I will forget what I did if I don’t write it down.
Next, we changed how we run our go live sessions for new content. Before publishing, we would conduct a quality assurance, or QA, check on our content. This was our chance to catch any last-minute errors or broken links in our content. What we found after our first go-live session, though, was that we ended up being told about broken links in the content after we went live. So ever since, I make sure to schedule in a QA both before and after publishing to double check things.
When we run usability tests to see how our new content performs, we used to just read the scenario and task out loud to the participant while running the test. But the scenarios are sometimes quite detailed and it can be a lot to keep track of. As a result of one of our retros, we made a change to our testing process where we would paste the scenario and task into Microsoft Teams, where we run our testing. We now give the participant a moment to read the scenario over and let them start the task when they feel ready to.
In the last sprint of our first project as a team, we talked about how it would have been better if pre-scheduled in meetings with the subject matter experts we were working with to review content together. Basically, the way we were working, when we had content ready to review, we set up a meeting. But this constant checking of diaries can be a bit tedious. So an action for our next project was to set up regular review sessions to review content. We could cancel them if we didn’t think we needed to meet, but the space was there when we needed it. And sure enough, we did do this in our next project, and we liked it better.
But even that improved way of working came with some more lessons learned. We had scheduled in daily 30 minute check-ins with subject matter experts. We ended that project with a retro point that it would have been better to have fewer, but longer check-ins during the week. And so the cycle of improvements continues with each retro we do.
Blogging is a good way to record what we did and what we learned
The other main way we capture our reflections as a team is through blogging. My boss has always been an ardent advocator of blogging our work, both to showcase the great work we do as individuals and as a team, to externalize our work to colleagues at the University who may work with us, and share our approaches with colleagues in higher ed and human-centered design more generally.
So blogging is important to our whole team, but for me, I also see it as almost a diary of our work. So when we encounter a similar project or onboard a new team member, we have posts to refer to remind ourselves of what we did, and more importantly, the lessons learned we want to remember going forward.
Blogging also helps with what I mentioned in the last section about balancing being in the present while planning for the future. When we come to the end of a project, there is an in-between phase where I both need to finish planning what we’re doing next, but also want my team to have a bit of a breather before we start work. This is the perfect time to come up with blog posts ideas to recap what we did in the previous project. So we capture those learnings, but also, I, as manager, have the space to plan the work my team are doing next while they are busy blogging.
Read about our work
Most importantly, as a manager, I love getting to share the posts Freya, Flo and Heike write so I can show the world how awesome my team is.
And I’m going to do that to you right now.
If you are interested in reading our posts, you can check out our blog at: blogs.ed.ac.uk/future-student-experience
If you’re specifically interested in reading our recaps of the projects we’ve done in the past year, you can go to:
Edin.ac/immigration-posts to read about work we did to improve the experience for students applying for visas to study at Edinburgh.
And go to Edin.ac/finance-posts to read about work to improve how students find out how to pay their tuition fees.
And on that promo note, I want to wrap up my lessons learned of my first year of being a manager.
I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I know a lot more than I did when I started managing
I titled this presentation I don’t know what I’m doing and that’s okay.
Now, a bit over 1 year in to being a manager, I feel like I can say to an extent, I still don’t know what I’m doing because I keep doing lots of new things in my role and I have to keep learning.
But, I do know a lot more than I did when I started managing.
There are some pits I’ve crawled out of and attained that new higher level of ability. But there are still many pits to go.
So if you take nothing else away from this talk, remember it’s okay to not know what you’re doing. It means there’s an exciting lesson for you to learn.
Thanks for listening
Thanks so much for listening.
If you do want to connect, my email is lauren.tormey@ed.ac.uk. I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter at ltormey.
And of course, don’t forget to check out our team blog to learn more about our work, and most importantly, lessons learned.
