And if you don’t love management now, you will never love management again

Amid the Amazon manager layoffs, I’m reminded that in higher ed, not everyone embraces the supervisory role. I once heard a colleague describe it as a “thankless task,” and while I don’t agree with that characterization, I can understand why some people feel that occupying a middle management position is like being handed a grab bag of contradictory job descriptions.

Here are just a few of the ways that middle managers are viewed in higher ed: we are agents of organizational control and agents of self-interested control; we are impediments between senior management and the workforce, but also reconcilers of top-level perspectives and lower-level implementation issues. We are repositories of organizational information, and somehow also the links between dispersed knowledge and best practices; we are implementers of the managerialist agenda, and we are champions of collaboration. We’re careerists, mentors, coaches, guides, micromanagers, developers of others; we provide stability and drive organizational change.

It’s no wonder that middle managers can sometimes feel as though they wear too many hats. Yet within the institutional baggage and jumble of misconceptions is the opportunity to have fun and to do something meaningful. Take action. If you are going to get laid off—which is as much a reality for higher ed right now as it is for big tech—chances are the decision has already been made is out of your hands. The only certainty is that if you get swallowed up in all the ambiguity, you risk doing nothing worth being proud of.