Friday, April 8, 2011

Not Yet the Boss

I am sort of supposed to be in charge of some stuff and a few people at work, but the transition is a little slow going. I've spent the first month being told what to do by the people I am "in charge of," because they definitely know how to do the job way better than I do, which makes it a little tough to start telling them what to do and overriding their judgment calls from time to time. And plus the old boss is still definitely in the mix, and still definitely in charge-charge, so that is still happening.

But most of all I have been missing my chance to assert my authority, which is really hard to think about today. Today especially, since something happened at work that I didn't stomp down on immediately - it took me a little while to process what was going on and figure out how I felt about it and how to articulate it, and only now am I recognizing the exact moment that I missed to make an important point about expectations and behavior and stuff like that. It was pretty minor event-wise, but still, I'm going to have to adopt a little bit sharper of a "persona" about stuff. I don't like the idea of having to be armed and ready to shut stuff down all the time, but it's pretty interesting to see myself in this position of letting things slide by and then thinking I shouldn't have, or I should have reacted differently. Blerg, whatever.

What it really makes me think about is parenting. There are a lot of decisions that need to be made right on the spot, or the moment slips by. There is some kind of stop-gap solution sometimes, like saying, "hey, hold up a minute, this is not cool," and then just sort of using that as a place holder to pause for a bit and figure out WHY it isn't cool and what you mean to say about it. It was so different at my old job - being in charge of stuff just meant rational delegating and sensible deadlines, clear instructions and cheerful demeanors. The cooperation was pretty easy in that sense. This job is like waitressing - team effort, team dynamic, team drama. Anyway back to the parenting thing: my friend CheetahDress told me a story once about working at a day care, and having to reprimand two little girls for not including a third child in their fun. When they were instructed with the disappointing directive of including the third, one girl said to the other, "that's okay, we weren't having that much fun anyway," so that the third kid could hear it. When I heard this, it was pretty shocking to me - this comment shows a pretty sophisticated kind of malice. What the hell do you say to a kid who says something like this? Something is way wrong with that comment, but what is it exactly? And what to do about it? There's no way it would be okay to let that go without consequence. (It's like parenting or working at a day care just becomes one huge exercise in doing that thing where you think of a great comeback two days later!) So when I heard this I instantly imagined myself in that situation and tried to think about a quick way to snuff that behavior, and I couldn't think of anything to say at all. Some lame adult thing probably would have occurred to me, like "hey, play nice." Lame-o! My pal CheetahDress, on the other hand, said, "whoa now, that's a pretty sneaky way of being mean," to the little girl. This was perfect - it's fast, and identifies the problem happening, and isn't so complicated that has to be the exact thing (describing passive aggression or the whole complexity of the girl's cruelty would have been pointless), it calls the little girl out specifically on her bullshit . . . I mean, this was an A+ thing to say in the moment, in my opinion. How to stay this present and direct and crap-cutting in life? How?

So anyway not that my job is a preschool, but really life is a preschool, and I'm going to have to call people out on their sneaky ways of punishing each other or blaming each other or whatever, and I'm using this preschool example as my template.

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