William Reardon’s Blog

Obviously in the last few weeks I’ve been spending time thinking about my career. One factor I’ve learned that greatly influences happiness at work is the boss. And one factor that made it hard to walk away from TM was I had a pretty good one. Which lead me to recall one one at the other end of the spectrum.

At one of my first jobs, whenever I had something I thought we should do, my boss would ask me to write up a proposal. Not a big deal, but as I was fresh from academia, I would put a lot of effort in making sure it was correct. All of it — the write-up, the spelling, the details, big & small.

This wasn’t for a grade after all, this was The Real World. Things Mattered Now.

But even though grades weren’t issued, I still thought of things that way. So if my boss changed 10% of it, I saw myself as getting a 90%, a “B.”

(Side rant: those of you would consider 90% an “A” are WEAK and were coddled as children. As is grading on a curve. An “A” is 93%-100%, end of story.)

Anyway, each time he’d change it, I’d head back to my desk & attempt to figure out why. He was the boss after all. And the only way you get to be the boss, is you know better, right? In a lot of cases I was confused by the changes, as they looked really wrong, but again, he was boss. My professors knew better, so too must the boss.

Right?

At that point I didn’t really stop to consider his background, or that he wasn’t really technical. He was a nice guy, and liked geek chatter, but his background was HR & finance. I reported to him because it was a small organization, and there really wasn’t a better option.

So this goes on for about six months. Not only does he continue to changes things (which was driving me nuts), but with time, the changes he made proved to bad. Every time.

And finally, I’m starting to catch on. It dawns on me. His background, the geek chatter that often didn’t really make sense, the constant changes regardless of my effort, and so on… he didn’t change things to correct them… he changed things so he’d feel involved!

If you know me well, you’ll know how much the thought of that annoys me. But now knowing the reason, at least I could figure out a way to control it.

I’d complete my proposal to what I thought was perfect. Then I’d find a few small details I didn’t really care about & change them to something completely retarded. I’d take that version to my boss, call his attention to the retarded areas, and ask what he thought. As I left I’d throw out a few ideas, always being sure to close with the ones I’d thought was right.

Invariably, he’d give me back the proposal as expected: the retarded areas changed to what I more or less had in the original & the the rest of the proposal unmolested. The first time it worked I was elated! He was happy, I was happy.

That was my first experience in managing upwards, and for the rest of my tenure we had an excellent working relationship.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 7:02 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.