Board Blog: Managing Your Friends

If you were there, you know that this year’s National Student Electronic Media Convention was AWESOME. If you couldn’t make it to Seattle, start planning now to be in Minneapolis next year for NSEMC 2015. It will be well worth the trip!

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Mark Maben, CBI Development Director.

For the past several conventions, I have presented a session entitled, I’m In Charge, Now What?!? Developed in partnership with John Onderdonk at KSYM at San Antonio College, we focus on management techniques and tips than can help students, and advisers, run their media outlets more effectively. More recently, we added a student manager to the session’s leadership, an essential perspective.

This year, we were asked a question we hadn’t been asked before, which is terrific. After offering some tips about how to manage your friends, someone asked, “How do you manage someone who doesn’t like you and who you’ve had problems with before?”

It is a great question and a situation many student managers will encounter during their leadership tenures.

Fortunately, the best approach to managing a former peer, whether friend or foe, is essentially the same: set clear expectations for behavior; establish goals and deadlines; hold yourself accountable as well as others; cultivate trust with those you supervise; focus on solving problems rather than assigning blame; and avoid personal attacks.

When you keep the relationship professional and civil, it is much easier to manage a friend, former friend, or even a non-friend. (For more management ideas and tips, check out some of the PowerPoints from NSEMC 2014 at visit http://askcbi.org/seattle/presentation-materials/.)

Encountering and addressing the challenges of real-life management make student-run media so valuable for today’s students. Running a department or station and managing others provide student leaders with a hands-on learning experience that is just as practical as editing video for a newscast or DJing a music shift. It’s the type of leadership experience you cannot get from an internship or in the classroom. This experience is how students learn how to lead, to understand their roles as leaders, and to discover that being a leader means that sometimes you won’t be liked and that’s OK.

This is one reason CBI invests so much in making sure our conventions offer sessions that provide real opportunities to learn and develop new skills. Student managers, and their advisers, shouldn’t have to go it alone. From our listservs to our blog to our annual convention, CBI is here to help our members. And your questions are essential — never hesitate to ask!

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