Work and Life

I’ve just returned from a brief holiday on the Australian East Coast and I had a chance to think about what the new leadership role at the Uni will mean. One thing I felt I had to do, although it was honestly a tough decision to make, was tidy up the work/personal aspects of my social media. This means unfriending (what a loaded term) some people who I’ve known through work for a while. It wasn’t easy to do and I’m still thinking about it. Why did I do it?

I will have new staff who don’t really know me, in a school where half of the team also don’t really know each other that well, and we are bringing together two successful, fully-formed, and slightly different academic cultures. Bringing these groups together, meeting their needs, being focused, being present, listening… all of these things are essential and they need the best of my professional aspects. I have recently found out that I have not been listening as well as I should and that’s on me to fix, to be the person I always wanted to be and claim that I am but, obviously, sometimes fall short at. (The irony is that I consider it likely that people have given me clear indications that I haven’t been seeming to listen enough to care about their input – but I haven’t noticed. Ick. I’m striving to pay attention now.)

I need to be “work Nick” primarily, because those are the skills, the focus, and the type of presence that they need. I have many interests but bringing them into the work space is not always the best use of anyone’s time and it’s certainly not what a junior teaching team academic needs when I’m managing them. To make the dividing line really clear, both for my ease of processing and for consistency, I’ve removed a number of people from my Facebook friends who are primarily work people, so that I don’t have some weird two speed situation of “I friended this person but this other one.” I’ve also had to unfriend someone from my own town who I’ve known for years but now we have a potential conflict because of our roles. I’ve had to do this before when I realised that you couldn’t friend some students and not others, even though there may have been an existing RW connection because my home town has about 1.5 degrees of separation.

(Years ago, there was even a student group “Nick Falkner won’t friend me on Facebook” and the student laser printer was part of it. No, I never added the laser printer.)

I’m unsure if removing work people was the right decision or not, as it means I can’t see what people who I met through work, and I like, are up to – but I’ve taken this decision as a good way to make it easier for me to set things up well for my new role and do the right thing by the people I’m managing. A part of me hopes that, after a year or two, when the culture is established and I’ve got to know people better, I can go back and reconnect to the other people, if they’ll have me.

I’d be really interested to know what people think and how you handle the work/personal social separation! Feel free to tell me how wrong or right you think I got it.