Would the opposite of a meltdown be a freezeup? (It's not quite the same, is it?) In any case, it was only a teeny meltdown and I thought I should check in and let people know that I'm ok. Had a bad day, had to make a difficult choice and have a difficult conversation and then felt guilty about it (which I knew I would), feeling better now.
Just as a measure of how I'm doing - my sense of humor is intact. When I was feeling like a shitty human being (which is not to say that I'm not), I kinda talked myself down. My starting phrase in my head was "I'm the worst person EVER". Then I had to amend it to "...ok, except for Hitler." And then to "...ok, except for dictators in general". From thence to "...ok, I'm not even as bad as my shitty director at work, so I'm obviously a rank amateur at this being a shitty person thing." Which made me laugh and realize that all is not lost if I can still laugh at myself.
more...
Oh, and I thought about a comment that kwc made the other night, the gist of which is that I keep having shitty managers where I work. (Other conversation went on about my company having shitty managers in general - again based on anecdotes from some folks in our crowd.) And I realized that that may be true in *his* experience of knowing about my work environment, but that that's not true overall. Basically, I think his sample of people at my company and their perceptions of their bosses is skewed.
So just to prove that I'm not ONLY a grumpy bitch, I have to give credit where it's due and say that while my 2 most recent bosses at my company have sucked ass, I have actually been lucky in my 7 year career with this company to have had mostly cool bosses. People rarely talk about their cool bosses (because bitching is so much more fun than praising), so I'll take a minute to do so. My last boss before the two bosses from hell was the only female boss I had at this company. I liked her enough to basically choose to be her employee (i.e. she wasn't a people manager before I joined her "group"). Things weren't always peachy between us, we'd have our disagreements, but we are still friends, and I think our working relationship was strong because of our many similarities (both driven to do the right thing, both smart and semi-technical, etc.), but also made stronger by our differences as well (she was more steady, I was more fire/brimstone/let's go kick some ass). So she was a kick ass boss.
The boss before that I sorta chose to go work for. Basically my job as it stood was going to go away (they no longer needed a project manager when the technical person who got hired could both project manage and do the technical stuff that I didn't know how to do specific to that function), so I had to find another situation. We were both wary at first of taking each other on, but he was a great boss - shielded me from shit, took my feedback seriously and acted on it when he felt he should, told me when I was being full of shit and wouldn't let me get away with laziness, but was also indulgent of how I did things (i.e. going to beer bashes at 4:00 on Fridays). I was bummed when he left the company, but I still see him occasionally socially. Besides, you gotta love a boss who gets drunk with the gang on a group offsite and tries to open the valve on the beer tanks on the brewery tour.
The cool boss before that (there was one in between that was ok - not great, not horrible, mostly let me do what I wanted and my management of him consisted mostly of talking him down - for whatever reason that was my designated task in the group) is one that I still see at least once per month for poker (even though he left a few years ago). When we first started working together I'd have thought you were smoking crack if you'd have said we'd become friends because we butted heads over so much stuff. But it turned out that we butted heads because we were both trying to do the right thing (protect our people), and because we were so much alike. I later chose to go work for him in a group we formed that hadn't existed before in our company (essentially IT functions within CS because IT wasn't cutting it for us). He was awesome because he'd give me honest feedback with enough sensitivity for me to hear it and act on it (i.e instead of telling me that I was being too strident about something, he'd take me aside and give me hints about other ways that I could approach the issue). He was also cool because I could go toe to toe with him and argue about stuff and that was both cool to be able to do, but also that even if things got heated, we'd both walk away with no hard feelings.
Ok, so out of all this, what makes for me (what do you guys think?) a cool boss:
-someone who shields me from crap - both from above and from below
-someone who tells me what I need to hear - both positive and negative
-someone who listens to me
-someone who is willing to work with me on communication issues (both mine and theirs)
-someone who appreciates that being fiery and passionate can be a good thing as well as a bad thing, and helps me channel that
-someone who doesn't micro manage (who trusts me to do my job and to tell him/her when I need help)
-someone willing to let me try things my way, even if it turns out to be a mistake
-someone who takes my side or champions me when I need it
-someone who is good at being a manager - having a vision and communicating it, leading, dealing with escalations, etc.
Was I a good boss when I was a people manager? No. One of my ex-employees (actually two now that I think about it) tells me I was a great boss, but I think that is just ass kissing and not entirely true. (Probably not entirely false to him - I let him have pretty free rein because he delivered.) Was I the worst boss ever? No. Was I a *good* boss? No. Could I be if I were a manager now? Probably. I'd at least be better (I've learned a lot since then).
I chose to get out of management because I recognized that I wasn't good at it at that point. To be fair - I was in over my head. I had too many direct reports, we were doing too much hiring and I didn't have time to do the things I needed to do for my people. Mentoring, one on ones, shielding them from crap and knowing what was really going on (who was shirking, etc.) all took a backseat to interviewing, escalations, meetings with other groups, planning hardware stuff, etc. While I take some of the responsibility, I can't take all of it because in hindsight, I'm surprised they let me become a manager because of my lack of experience. Also, my co-manager sucked worse than I did and didn't do his share (or even pretend to). The fact that I became a manager just goes to prove that willingness to work like a dog and attitude will take you a long way in this world.
**Is it a bad thing if one of the defining characteristics I have liked about most of the previous managers that I've liked has been that I've been able to go out drinking with them? (I suppose it's better than having to take up drinking because of them...)**
Posted by cshell at August 25, 2004 11:11 PM