Everything I need to know I learned from eavesdropping on my boss

I learned a tremendous amount from overhearing my boss’s phone conversations at my first “real” (post-college) job. Tone, style, vocabulary, phrasing. How to cold-call a researcher, how to finesse a funding relationship, how to dance backwards from committing yourself to an undesired collaboration.

All of which is to say, I’m in general agreement with Megan Hustad:

The office phone call, properly overheard, is really the cheapest, easiest way to transmit institutional knowledge.

Which is why, these days, I try to make sure my younger collegues can overhear my most important conversations. They’ll learn more from that than almost anything I can teach them directly.

posted by Sra. Bibliotecaria ⋅ tagged culture, productivity, random thinking

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