Do you like your boss? Do you respect your boss, or does he/she have
an agenda all his/her own? Is he/she
considerate of his/her subordinates, or is he/she only interested in merely
stepping on them during his/her ruthless climb to the top? I’ve had bosses of all kinds during my
working life. Most of them were male
shitheads who did not have the slightest concern for anyone else, except
possibly their own bosses. However, I’d be
wrong to limit the number of shitheads out there to only men; women can be just
as ruthless.
You know that saying: “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians”? The bosses I had were only interested in
being the chief. The way I see it though,
you can act like a boss without actually being one, only, why would anyone do that?
Usually, people who apply for “boss” roles tell their colleagues that
they want the extra money that goes with the job as well as the job title. No one has ever said to me that they want the
extra job responsibility as well, though.
That part is usually specified in a contract that must be signed in an
agreement between the applicant and the organization he/she works for.
Once, about five years ago, I applied
for the headship of the computer science (CS) department of my home school at
which I worked as a full-time teacher. The
job title was better known as the Assistant Curriculum Leader (ACL) position,
which meant that the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), my employer, could
now pay less money to the ACL as head of a single department. If a teacher applied for a job to become head
of more than one department, he/she had a different and more responsible job
title: Curriculum Leader (CL) and that
translated to more money for the applicant.
You’ll never guess what happened. I was
the only one applying for this particular ACL position at our school – the same
position was open to other teachers at other schools at the same time. Even though I was a CS specialist with ten
years of documented full-time teaching experience in computer science, they
turned me down flat. That’s right - the school’s
administration team would not consider me
to become head of their computer science department. To rationalize their decision, they told me
that they wanted to interview other teachers before they made a decision, and
that’s what they did. I asked myself why
they turned me down just like that, but I could never come up with an answer
that satisfied me.
Next thing I knew, a more junior teacher
with only five years of documented full-time teaching experience in computer
science applied for and got the
job! I could not believe it! It was then that I started to seriously doubt
the school’s leadership, which happened to be a mixed-gender team headed by my male
boss, the principal. There was an
anti-discrimination policy in force at the TDSB, but apparently, this was not a
factor when it came to assessing me as a female candidate for the ACL
position. I believe that they just didn’t
like me, and that I did not have that cherished B.Sc. degree in
computer science – my own educational background consisted of a community
college diploma in computer science. It
was an advanced, three-year diploma, which I’d earned with honours, but it
wasn’t ever going to be worth as much as a bachelor’s degree to this school’s
leadership team.
How could my principal (I’ll call him Conrad)
hire a more junior teacher than me for the headship of the computer science
department? I had worked hard towards a
high level of direct teaching experience in this subject; I was a very competent
CS teacher. Other teachers I’d worked
with who were heads of CS departments in other schools would have cheerfully
vouched for me, but they weren’t part of the equation in this case. Eventually, though I remained resentful and
bitter at this turn of events, I did my very best to get along with our new ACL
(I’ll call her Paula) and continued to do the best job of teaching computer
science that I’d always been doing.
Then, in a quirk of fate a year later,
Paula who was married announced that she was pregnant and intent on going on
maternity leave close to the time of childbirth. Just before she was to go on her “mat” leave,
she was declared surplus to our school, and because of that event, discovered
she would have to leave her ACL position.
In other words, she would not
be returning here as our ACL after her maternity leave was over and that was
just fine with me.
It was at that point that I decided I
would never again apply for a headship (also known as a Position of
Responsibility) anywhere in the TDSB.
Instead, I would perform the
job of an ACL for our department voluntarily,
gaining the valuable leadership experience that I craved so much. I knew I wouldn’t be paid for doing that job
or get any recognition for it, but that didn’t matter to me. I’d done a lot of administrative jobs in the
past before I ever became a full-time teacher, so I knew that I could do the
ACL job. I told myself that I didn’t
need the extra money, which wasn’t all that much anyway, nor did I need the job
title. I only wanted the extra
responsibility and leadership experience.
There was no contract that obligated me to perform these extra duties,
but that also did not matter. Not having
the official job title meant I did not have to attend boring obligatory
leadership meetings involving all the departments’ leaders and the school’s
leadership.
So, I obtained the cooperation and
agreement of my other two colleagues in the CS department as to what I planned
to do. They wholeheartedly supported my
proposal – mostly, I think because they didn’t trust the school’s leadership
team any more than I did. From that
point on, I ordered all the department’s office and computer supplies, arranged
to fix or replace as many of the broken computers as I could in our two
computer labs, and called a few, very brief CS meetings only when the three of us
needed to communicate and exchange information. The only two things I did not
do were going to the monthly POR meetings or ordering brand new computers from time
to time when necessary. The Technology
department’s CL was now responsible for this function for the CS department;
the money for brand new computers had to come out of his budget.
Things have since changed overall, for
the better I think. Ron is our CL whose
job function includes running the CS department as well as the Technology
department. That happened due to the
TDSB’s continual efforts to cut costs and save money. I got along with Ron very well. I do know that he appreciated my efforts to
help run the CS department and, indirectly, help him too.
In my entire working life, I estimate
I’ve had maybe 40 to 50 bosses. Of
these, only a very few of them were really great – all female, as I
recall. Most of the male bosses I had were
true-to-their-name pricks that did not care at all for their subordinates. Only a couple of these male bosses were
absolutely terrific – but they were pathetically rare and very far and few
between. In this story, it is my
premise, based on my own teaching and non-teaching work experience over a 44-year
period that women usually make better bosses than men, though not always. They tend to listen better and care more, and
they usually work harder to keep their staff happy and productive. It may seem biased on my part, but real-life work
experience for me has not lied. I proved to myself that I had what it took to
do the job of a boss and did it well and if I get the chance to do the “boss”
role again, I won’t hesitate.
copyright 2016 - Anne Shier - to be published in book format in the future (hard cover, soft cover, e-book / audio book)
No comments:
Post a Comment