The manosphere has it all wrong. If you want to be a successful man in this world, you need to learn to be a good administrator first.
The more I go on in my career the more I see this. Let me fill in some details.
I’m going to tackle the manosphere first, then I’ll come back around to science careers.
Being a successful man as defined by the manosphere requires good admin skills
The manosphere’s own goals actually require good administration skills, more than just ‘being manly’.
I’ve been watching The State of Man about the rise in the manosphere and the problems that is causing. The manosphere promotes this idea that being a man is about: being rich and muscly. It’s leading young men to believe that these things define success and that to get there you need to work out and take peptides.
But achieving these goals requires administration skills. Being muscly requires strict nutrition and a discipline about a routine for working out. Peptides or no, nutrition and working out are a given.
Unless you are lucky (born rich), being rich requires similar discipline with work and saving.
Both goals also benefit from tracking data on accounts and your own performance. Again, this is administration.
Defining and then sticking to a routine is good administration of self.
There are obviously a range of societal problems associated with the manosphere that I won’t go into here. The chief among those are issues of gender and violence against women. I recommend you watch the TV show to learn more.
Administration and career skills
Science careers also require good administration skills. You will need to prioritize different uses of your time, learn to make good decisions and manage multiple competing deadlines. These demands get increasingly complex as you go on in your career.
In my own current work day I’m flipping among teaching, research, university administration and community engagement. It occurs to me that what is holding me back currently on my own research goals is ability to organize all these competing demands.
Being an academic is a very complex job.
(Writing this realization in a blog when I should just be doing said research is somewhat ironic, but blogging is a kind of creative escape for me.)
Now I don’t want to confuse administration of your career with the kind of bureaucracy that Australian institutions force on us these days.
Utas has a graduate management system for instance. Every month I need to log onto it and tick a box for each of my PhD students saying I’ve met with them, how they are going and leave some comments. If I don’t do this pointless task I’m threatened by incessant emails and eventually, PhD applicants to my lab will be turned down by the university.
The university is adding this bureaucracy because they are concerned about graduate completion rates and want to make sure supervisors are helping their students finish.
I’d like to see the evidence that ticking a box in a web form can result in real world outcomes. Being good at ticking that box is certainly not going to make me a successful researcher.
When I say ‘administration’ a lot of what we think about might be the pointless administration that institutions have. There is some, but not complete, overlap of institutional administration with the administration we need to be successful researchers.
Going further, one mentor advised me to be bad, or at least, just good enough at the institutional administration. You need to get by, but if you are doing a good job at it you probably aren’t spending enough time on the things that matter.
So what I’m talking about here when I say administration are high level organisational skills.
Taking the graduate student example, I need to be able to manage my time across many competing demands and still find the time to guide their research and read their drafts.
Being a good administrator
Now administration isn’t sexy. I wouldn’t recommend that young researchers set out to prioritise developing administration skills or that they bother themselves too much with learning about institutional bureaucracy. Just do the bare minimum to get by.
Early in your career you want to do fun and exciting things in your research. Work with great people, develop networks, get involved in field work, engage with cutting edge research questions.
But along the pathway into your career you can also pick up soft-skills in administration. Learn how to be more organised and how to manage feedback from multiple collaborators for instance.
All it takes is a bit of thought and self-reflection. Ask questions about how to be organised from your mentors. Then you just need discipline to apply what you’ve learnt.
Back to the manosphere. It seems to me that Napoleon would be lauded in the manosphere for his bravery running headlong into battle. Well history shows that Napoleon’s success wasn’t in his battle skills. It was the administrative structures he created that allowed his rule. Napoleon was an administrator first and foremost.