However I found that giving the mechanics a chance to tell me about their problems and difficulties in their work was the first step in gaining their confidence. This was all good management experience. If you can't, then you know all the pitfalls and messes one can get into. When managing the library budget, you will find you are a paragon of financial rectitude, because you won't make the same mistakes when it is public and your reputation is at stake. It is not, however, always all plain cataloguing, and we have to learn and adjust as we go along.
Problems can arise in organising our own time effectively.
Suddenly we have to choose a piece of equipment, and be ready to justify that choice and the cost. Now its your problem, and you who will get irritated by something that previously was not your responsibility. In short, I think we are all management material, even if we have doubts about our current skills, because as I have said we always have more skills than we actually think. If we have the skills to organise knowledge successfully then we should have the skills to organise our resources. Your predecessor, if there was one, should have left some indication of the budget, and your Accounts Department should be able to let you know how much of it has been spent.