A 45-minute introduction to people management for new media people
(Or possibly a 10-15 minute one. We'll see how much of this gets cut when the final schedule for the day is announced.)
Summary
Being young, arrogant, and occasionally slightly socially inadequate, the New Media and IT industries have been spectacularly bad at getting people ready for having to look after others. Management was either 'the enemy', 'something to be avoided' or 'easy and anyone can do it'. This isn't helped that most technical people don't respond well to some of the more traditional management 'techniques'.
In fact, management is a learned skill, and one that many people don't take the time to learn.
I've been a truly hopeless manager, and became a half-decent one - with occasional moments of actually being good. This talk covers what changed. We'll run through the bare essentials of what you are most likely to get problems with, and some strategies for coping with having to get people to do things now your Red Dwarf T-shirt has hit the bin.
A bit more detail
Hello - Where I was and how I got here
Speedreaders leave now - what we will, and *won't* be covering
What *is* management? - framing the problem.
The state you're in - how it feels when you first manage people.
Empowering Staff - I meet my first good manager and discover this isn't always bollocks
The big general cockups - mistakes I made so you don't have to. Ooh, and there are some corkers in here.
Giving Feedback - all that nasty 'conflict' stuff
Management styles - how different projects will change the way you need to manage people
Staff communication - in its many and varied forms.
Debugging your management - iterative programming for the head.
Management: TNG - breeding the next generation
Further reading - with specific page numbers for the attention deficit.
About me
I'm 35, tall, curly and slightly scruffy. I started as a Systems Analyst in industrial IT. And then in 1994 Danny bloody O'Brien changed everything with his show 'Caught In The Net'. Since then I've worked for some of the UK's biggest broadcasters on web, iTV and mobile projects. I freelance as a producer, project manager and writer through my business LeaningForward, which has my CV if you want to find out more about those 'big broadcasters', but a google search on my name is much more likely to produce my stupidly named blog.
I had also planned two other talks for NotCon. You can read about them here and here - if I get nagged enough I'll turn them into big blog posts.
Tell me stuff about this page, how you feel about being becoming a manager, or what you want to hear most about.
