Management Today! 01: The Prince

I have been training for my management role, 4 hours per day, 5 days a week, for two weeks now.

I'm somewhat underwhelmed.

The poor guy I'm replacing is basically immobile due to his disintegrating hip and is confined to the office.

I have no overall view of the task ahead of me.

I'm told some of the client's heads of department are dissatisfied with the service they receive and are quite hostile toward the company I represent.

I'm to meet with one of our most vociferous critics and together she and I will conduct a 'monitor' of her department, Hair & Beauty.

This has filled the current manager with lumps of fear and he has insisted on joining the inspection.

I have a feeling this is because he's worried I may get bullied into agreeing to something outside of the agreed specification.

Knowing my habit of saying 'yes' to most things, His concerns are not without foundation.

I did my first 'off the leash' monitor, attended by a senior member of college staff, yesterday.

It was a bit embarrassing.

I kept finding areas our cleaners had missed, and then pointed them out to the senior member of college staff.

This will, no doubt, make me 'very' popular with my staff, whom I haven't met because they all work nights.

It's not the rank and file cleaners I'm bothered about, where they're getting it right the standard is pretty good.

I'm looking forward to meeting them all, even though my Polish is non-existent.

I'm more interested in the supervisor.

Can't wait to meet him.

He's not Polish, he's a Brit and will therefore understand perfectly when I speak to him, at length, in the vulgar tongue.

BTW I now have an office:

It used to be the car park attendant's centre of operations until some sensible member of college accounts staff realised that car park attendants were a wasteful drain on resources more fittingly spent on teaching young people.

An added office bonus is the CCTV system.

I'm itching to turn it on.

The windows of the office are mirrored.

When the students congregate at the smoking cage they use the reflective surfaces to preen and gurn, completely unaware of the spectacle they provide for the audience within

It's frontage has been lovingly swept by me every morning.

A regime I have imposed upon myself.

It was knee deep in Autumn leaves mixed with fag-ends from the bin-less smoking cage next door.

I'm keen to see if the Broken Windows idea will work in this situation.

The fact that I'm seen sweeping the area at 7:45 am by the senior members of college staff can't hurt I suppose.

I'm still having to do a 2.5 hour clean at a school 50 miles away every evening.