Staffing up
I skipped writing about the debrief from the last convention, and there’s a lot to say about that. Right now I’m deep into the process of staffing next year’s con — talking to lots of people on staff, asking them to take various jobs on my convention, and juggling the org chart like a bowl of fruit at a clown convention.
I’ve liked the process to building a tower out of blocks. Living blocks with their own agenda who regularly decide they don’t want to be where they are any more and wander around switching places.
We’re having trouble finding staff in many areas of the con, and somewhat paradoxically, my response to this is to break a lot of jobs into smaller pieces. Smaller, more manageable pieces seem to increase the pool of people willing to tackle them and even more, increases the pool of people I’m willing to trust with them.
The downside is that I’m growing the number of conchair direct reports to a number that I definitely can’t handle on my own. I’m planning to ask my as-yet-unappointed assistant conchairs to take groups of divisions and provide oversight to them. This is adding a whole additional level of challenge as I figure out what groups logically belong together, what groups only belong together because of the personal talents of the staff members, and what people just can’t work together, sending me back to the drawing table again.