ABSTRACT
All of the District Managers said that they had learned how to do their jobs primarily from an interplay of the orientation they brought to the job and their experiences gained as they went along. The interviewees were invited to choose from a number of possible terms they might use to describe themselves - local government officer, manager, social worker, team leader, and trade unionist. In response to being asked to choose one of these terms to describe how they primarily saw themselves, eleven District Managers defined themselves as managers and three District Managers defined themselves as team leaders. The dominant theme in District Managers' descriptions of their jobs, whether they saw themselves as 'managers' or 'team leaders', was facing both ways: inwards into their teams and outwards into the rest of the Social Services Department; what Irene described as 'being Janus-faced'.
