Hall monitors, unite*!
(*To take down the surveillance infrastructure we helped build)
My elementary school had hall monitors. Hall monitors were the 5th grade students who “got to” walk the halls after the bell rang to make sure everyone was in class. We got a fluorescent reflective neon vest to wear (maybe even a whistle), but even better: we got to show up to class late and full of importance because of the trust the adults put it us.
I loved being a hall monitor.
If you went to a school where children were children and therefore in class, then think of Prefect Percy from Harry Potter. Less magic, but similar lack of oversight. I’m just saying, it seems easy for Voldemort to get into Hogwarts every year.
Now, as an adult, I find this structure is patently ridiculous. First, not everyone WAS in the class, because I was not in class! I was out policing my peers!
But second, and more importantly, did no one realise that between the uniform and the power trip, they were building a perfect environment for bullying and ostracism?
For the other hall monitors, I mean. Not me. I’m a triplet, so it didn’t matter that the role didn’t make me any new friends. My current, lifelong friends weren’t allowed to stop being my friend. Mom said so.
The hall monitor is a great metaphor for monitoring at work. Last week, we talked about saying less.
If you say less, you create the time and space to listen. Not just to others, but to yourself. Like this:
Monitoring is like putting a gangly pre-teen with a neon green safety vest right in the middle of that system, with a microphone and a whistle and all the power.
And what happens is your thoughts turn into this, instead:
This here? Is an elementary school crawling with hall monitors. It’s an always-on (and ringing) alarm system. It’s constant hypervigilance.
So yeah. It’s exhausting, and it drains us of knowledge (and opportunities to gain it), our confidence and our energy.
It also prevents us from rowing in the same direction - not just at work, but everywhere.
How do we monitor less? For that, we go back to elementary school again - with sentence diagrams. Fresh off recess, we’re sitting down and our teacher is at the whiteboard in front of us, and she writes down the sentence for us to diagram:
I need that done today.
Here’s what a listening diagram looks like:
Here’s what a monitoring diagram looks like:
Which one feels like a nicer human, or part of a nicer workplace?
The first step to monitoring less is seeing how unkind it is. It’s especially unkind to the subject, which is many cases is ourselves.
The second step is to realise how much it takes from us - our time and our energy.
The final step is to remember that we all do it, and we’ve all done it. If we’re not monitoring someone else, we’re monitoring ourselves.
So let’s start making work nicer for ourselves (and by example, other people) by noticing when it happens, stopping it in its tracks, learning from it, then leaving it. There’s better ways to spend our time.
So, let someone else be the hall monitor. Did you know as an adult you can buy yourself a safety reflective vest and a whistle at ANY time? No child labour required.
xRachel