Management at The University of Melbourne

My experiences with my managers have been very positive. I have received great development opportunities and regular feedback on my performance.

The performance feedback could probably be done better, particularly during my first rotation

In general this has been abysmal. The graduate managers themselves are wonderful, but rotation managers are often absent, confused about the program and unaware of the purpose of the rotation. I have not experienced praise or recognition during my time here. You have to be self-motivated as in some teams morale is poor and acknowledgement is only made of errors, never successes.

Again, it really varies from team to team. The beauty of the University having SUCH a hierarchical structure is that almost everyone is a manager. You will always be sitting near someone who is, in which case you do have a lot of access to managers. That being said, your manager might be too low-level to answer/assist in your question, in which case you need to find THEIR manager, which can be harder if they don't even sit in the same office or are always running off to meetings. My last supervisor was great for providing praise/recognition, but was not a good mentor/role model. However, while HER supervisor wasn't great with praise/recognition, he was a good mentor/role model. Sometimes you can't get what you need from one manager, but take a bit from multiple managers. The problem exists when you have to worry about going over one manager's head, or if you only have one manager...

Line managers are very accessible and make good mentors, but there are also several separate mentoring programs. It can be difficult to reward performance for professional staff members (despite a desire to).

Obviously, some managers are better than others at being mentors to early career employees. There are great internal processes in place though to ensure we are getting feedback

It really depends on what team you work with. I have had exposure to managers whom I want to emulate and managers who I realise are not having a positive effect on their team. You get more good than bad. Most managers and senior leaders I've dealt with help you learn and behave professionally. One manager, in particular, was a great mentor.

From my experience I have had two incredible leaders as managers so far