SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/506886
18 SportsTurf | May 2015 www.sportsturfonline.com L ike most of you, I love what I do for a living. I love the excite- ment of game day when all of the hard work, effort, stress, and preparation come together to be successful. I love the sports turf industry, working with playing surfaces, and learn- ing everything I can about how to make them more successful. I feel supported by our industry groups where ideas are shared and people are always just a phone call away to help guide or just lend an ear. I tell people all the time that if I could just do what I was trained to do and focus on that I'd have the best job in the world. But as any sports turf managers know, it's not that simple. Even though my degree, my experience, and my knowledge is in athletic turfs, probably only 40% of my time is actually spent in doing the part of the job I love. The majority of my time is spent stuck in the middle of this place known as "manager." When I think of managing in today's industry, it's honestly like being stuck "between a rock and a hard place." The rock is the staff we manage. Our staffs are the heart and soul of our departments and in order for me to be successful in my job, I need to get them motivated, moving, and "rolling" in the right direc- tion to get the job done. The hard place is upper management; the ones who determine if I am being successful as I try to meet their expectations, goals, budgets and timelines, while simultane- ously trying to keep them educated/ understanding the basic properties of agronomics and why my staff and I do what we do. Between these two groups you find me, sometimes feeling like both sides are closing in tighter and tighter. This middle ground is not exclusive to sports turf managers; it spans all industries and shares a lot of the same stressors and frustrations. I read an article that highlighted a 2009 study performed by Randstad, an international staffing company, which stated more than half of employees say they had no desire to move into management roles. They cited one organization where more than one-third of its engineers promoted to management jobs went back to their old roles in less than 6 months. The study found "stress" was given as the number one reason for managers' not enjoying their jobs or for simply leaving BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE FACILITY & OPERATIONS ■ BY DARIAN DAILY Darian Daily, left, discussing a point with an attendee at the STMA Regional Conference in Cincinnati in 2012.