And I'm never going back To my old school
Donald Jay Fagen / Walter Carl Becker
My old school was tiny. Classes could be just ten people sitting around a table, and I will forever be grateful to my parents, federal financial aid, the student loan system (at 9% interest!), and a steady stretch of year-round employment for the opportunity to attend such a college.
I was an English major and had to take a course my first semester in reading poetry. The instructor, Professor Clark, was a crotchety cuss right out of central casting. Hell, he was bearded and even smoked a pipe! He was probably only about forty, but acted like a world-weary codger with little patience for the ignorant teenagers who disrupted his pipe-puffing ruminations by showing up to his seminar room for regularly scheduled classes.
Professor Clark lorded it over his, maybe, dozen students in the room. A few pretended to be inspired and challenged by his diatribes about how we were so incapable, and they found his favor and some success. The rest of us were just intimidated. He could be a mean son-of-a-bitch both in and out of the classroom. I remember receiving my first graded paper, unhelpfully marked up with baffling red marks and rude notations. The final comment all-but declared me a hopeless idiot.
The fact was, although I had taken Honors and AP English in high school, those classes rarely covered poetry, which did not help much with the AP exam. Like so many others I found poetry confounding and mystifying and had little sense of how to even approach it let alone interpret it.
Professor Clark was to be my first guide on my journey through what I perceived as the foreboding and treacherous terrain of poesy. I remember bungling through Donne and Keats and Shakespeare, unable to touch the invisible and impossibly high bar set by Professor Clark. Yet I worked hard and applied myself, took his advice, and plowed on. For. Three. Semesters.
My college had and still has a requirement called “Moderation” in which a committee of professors reviews students’ work during sophomore year to see if they have what it takes to continue in their majors. During my Moderation, one of my reviewers remarked with wonder that I had taken Professor Clark three times in a row and had earned only a B-minus for each of those semesters. “Why,” she asked, “did you keep taking him if your grade was not improving?”
I responded without any forethought and with all sincerity, “because I am not in college for grades. I am here to learn.” (Insert knowing laughter here.)
They were impressed by my answer, which was chock full of all the idealistic naïveté a nineteen year old could exude and, sad to say, absolutely no guile. They quickly approved my continuation as an English major. What choice did they have at that point, disarmed by my callow candor as they were?
By then, I had moved on from Professor Clark’s toxic salon and was thriving in other classes with other professors but for one thing. I still could not read poetry. All that work, all that abuse, all that humiliation, and all those B-minuses, and poems still perplexed me.
It was then I realized. Professor Clark was tough. Professor Clark had high and exacting standards. Professor Clark knew his stuff. But Professor Clark was a truly shitty teacher. In my fourth semester as an English major I had to start from scratch learning to read poetry.
Years later, when it was my time to lord it over a classroom, I thought about Professor Clark, how he had terrified the students in his thrall, convincing them that he must be a brilliant teacher because he was so demanding and mean. I thought, maybe that is the way. After all, he was probably replicating the behavior of his professors. Then, I thought about how I had learned so little in his classes. I thought about how I largely taught myself to read poetry. I also thought about how horrible Professor Clark made me and everyone feel. I finally thought, nah. I then chose to be a very different teacher.
I recount this tale of woe not to elicit your sympathy for my adolescent travails but to make a point about bosses. Yup, bosses.
Bosses
Like many professors — particularly back in the day — many bosses are elevated to their positions with little or no knowledge or perspective on their new role. Worse still, they barely understand the significant difference between managing and leading let alone the fact that they have to master both. These shortcomings are only amplified by many, many so-called leadership trainings that focus primarily on management matters (budgets, HR, scheduling, etc). Even when such trainings do teach actual leadership, they frequently fail to convey how critical the ongoing development of leadership skills is to a boss’s success as well as that of their people and their organizations.
So, what is a new boss to do? Well, most often, like Professor Clark, new bosses simply fall back on the only models they have seen, which is what their own bosses had always done. Therefore the prevalence of jerks in the Kingdom of Bosses only begets more jerk bosses, full of self-importance, self-service, and gratuitous cruelty. They fail to accommodate the very individuals they are charged with guiding, leaving many good people and much productivity by the wayside while championing sycophants and fellow blowhards. They preach high standards and perpetuate mediocrity.
If most bosses view their predecessors’ behavior as the best or only model, as I believe was the case with Professor Clark, then no wonder they then mimic it. Worse still, as with any copy of a copy, the outcome deteriorates over time, so most bosses are just bad imitations of their forebears.
The trick is to break the cycle, to find a different way. What way, perhaps you are wondering? Well, to start with, not that way. In other words, you must first choose not to be like your bad bosses of yore. Don’t be like Professor Clark. If you start with that realization and commit to it, you are way ahead of the game although far from the finish.
In short, bad predecessors can still be a model, a model of how not to behave. I call this learning from the negative paradigm and wrote about it here.
You have to build the boss role for yourself. That does not mean just doing the opposite of your bad bosses, which I wrote about here.
Instead, be true to your values and to the mission of your organization. Remember that the primary purpose of any boss is to make people successful. Bosses exist to help their people deliver on the mission, whatever that be. For too many bosses, intimidation is their go-to motivator, but, as with Professor Clark, it will turn out to be a bust in the end.
The key is to focus on elevating your people, leaning into your values, and fulfilling the mission. View whatever bossing you saw before or see around you with a jaundiced eye. Maybe you had a good boss or two. If so, ask yourself what made that boss so effective. Was it just because this person made you feel good, or was there actual evidence of quality and improvement all around, not just with yourself? Importantly, how can you be even better than that good boss?
Good bossing, like anything of value, is a genuine challenge. It requires constant awareness and assessment and reassessment of yourself, of your experience, and of others. Great leadership requires much the same, but it also demands a fundamental commitment to your personal and professional values plus the wherewithal to put them into action.
I am almost certain you have had a Professor Clark in your life, perhaps several — an authority figure who attempted to cow you, probably as a cover for their own perceived and evident deficiencies. Learn from that negative paradigm. Choose to be different. Choose to be better. Don’t be like Professor Clark. Even graded on the curve and with all the extra credit points thrown in, as a teacher and as a human being, he still earned his F.
What assumptions about leadership do you make because of your bosses, past and present? What can you do to break the cycle of bad bosses?
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Professor Clark’s Lessons on Leading