So I'm encountering some drama at my campus. It's elections season, include election of the student rep to the Board of Trustees at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and the Hobart side of the vote has experienced some irregularities. I won't go into more details, they're not really necessary. But one of my student DJ's interviewed one of the student candidates on the air about it, and I never knew about it until another group of students got annoyed and wants copies of the airchecks.
I must say that of all the things that could concern me here...it concerns me the most that I got blindsided by this. I'm starting to understand that what the worst thing that any boss ever wants is to have some random person walk into their office saying something to the effect of "What the hell is going on here?!?"...and you have no idea exactly the what the hell really is going on because one of your employees said/did something "wrong" and you didn't know about it.
I'm not upset that one of my students did something that someone else thinks is "wrong", mind you. A measure of trust is required to run a station and it's inevitable that mistakes will be made. And for the record, I do think this student mildly screwed up...but nowhere near as badly as some other people think.
What I am upset about is that it feels like I'm not doing enough as a manager to keep an eye on these situations. To provide teaching and guidance for my students. And that I can't do that because there's just too much else going on that's demanding my attention.
I suspect I'm having "new manager jitters" here. After all, I have 25-30 students going on the air every week, unsupervised (recorded, but unsupervised) and at least 95% of the time they're either doing a good job, or at least they're not screwing up. That's a pretty good ratio, all things considered.
But still I feel like I need to be doing something more here. Hmph.
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