Bah! I say that's bunk. I'm proud to say I just recently I asked my boss for a demotion.
And the good news is...he gave it to me.
On August 15, 2001, I became the manager (chair) of an academic department of college science teachers for two quarters. At least, that's how long I was told it would be. A Vice President decided she had spruced up her resume enough to leave for a better job. The dean filled her spot as interim VP and then my chair became the interim dean. He told me he would just be gone for a couple of quarters and that being an interim chair might be good experience. What he never told me was that the interim VP would become the permanent VP and that he would apply for the dean job and become the permanent dean and then everyone would twist my arm and tell me I absolutely had to apply for the chair job on a permanent basis.
And he sure as hell didn't tell me I 'd be gullible enough to do just that. And do it for 5 more years.
Actually, I can't be too hard on myself. I didn't have tenure at the time and it seemed like a fun job. And for a while, it was.
But being a chairperson of an academic department isn't like being an ordinary manager. If I was an ordinary manager of say, a product line where people made "widgets", things would be much more defined. You would be able to see if people were making the widgets correctly and enough of them. And if not, you could call a widget maker over, point out a defective widget and say something like "see how this widget is defective? We've got to get better at limiting these widget defects.".
But we don't make widgets, we make people. Actually, we don't make people, we improve people. Do you know how ambiguous a task that is? First of all, people are more complicated than widgets. They think in all sorts of different ways. They come into our "widget factory" with all sorts of varying potential and all sorts of varying attitudes. The potential ranges from those who have the potential to be the president of the United States (o.k. maybe I should give them more credit than that) to those who really might be better off entering the work force now. Their attitudes range from those who bake you cookies to those who will yell at you because you replaced their widget maker (instructor) with one they don't like because the one they had before suddenly died from lung disease in the middle of the quarter. I can't make this stuff up folks...
What's really a challenge is managing the widget makers. These people are tough to deal with at times. That's because they are the best damn widget makers in the world...and they know it. If they were bad widget makers, they would have to be really really bad widget makers in order to raise any red flags because most of the widgets don't complain when you give them good grades. But some of them do complain about everything else.
Now let's say you had a bad widget maker. Welp, you'd have to document their performance, wait a year and then document it again. It takes more than a year to fire a bad widget maker. If the widget maker has widget making tenure...forget it.
Widget making causes a lot of conflict. A lot of times the widget makers don't play nice with each other. So, the widget maker manager is only a good one if he/she has an open door policy to listen to all the tales about how one widget maker made a mess and another widget maker did something wrong and another widget maker whatever...It's also hard to control widget makers because of the diversity of the widget making job. Try running a department meeting for an hour. It's like herding cats...
Then, and this is the clincher, there's the high level bosses of the widget making institution. And because this blog seems to be dragging on, let me just say...some of them can be major-league poo-poo heads.
I have mixed feelings about stepping down and going back to widget making. On September 15th, I'll look at my paycheck and there will be a few less digits staring back at me. But, I honestly don't give a damn about that. What I'll miss is working in the same way with some of the special members of the widget makers and the widget making support staff.
Fortunately, these same folks are the ones who really know me. And they know that I need a break.
They also know that I'm an ok widget maker myself. And maybe I missed making widgets for the past 6 years.
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