I had an epiphany on Father’s Day when I was talking with my son about college courses. We were talking about how some of the classes he took were supposed to be easy and they wound up being hard. I recalled having similar conversations about classes when I was still in school. The difference was generally the instructor. Some instructors created an easy classroom experience and some instructors created a hard one.
This is also true of your bosses and managers. Some of them make it easy and some of them make it hard.
This is important because there is a popular truism that “people do not leave jobs, they leave managers”. I do not know who said it, and I do not feel like Googling it.
It is just one more random thing that you learn in college that helps you professionally.
I am not going to get into a giant argument about whether or not you should go to college—it all depends on the person if you ask me. I do know that a lot of employers place significant value on elements of a college degree.
Completing my degree was initially something I was doing to prove to my father that I could finish something important. He was not a big fan of my love of computers and he was critical that I would go anywhere with it. Eventually I started doing well and he had to begrudgingly admit that he was wrong—maybe not in so many words.
My son is in college right now studying computer science. He is also a left handed pitcher and he is playing baseball as long as he is able to. We committed to supporting that as long as we can and asked him to commit to doing his best academically at the same time.
Will all of my other children attend college? I do not know. I have worked with some amazing people who did not attend college. There are valuable things you can learn from a college experience; however, I do not want to push any of my children into it if it does not make sense for their goals. I will provide them with a pretty good list of reasons why it has value for them before they make their decision about it.
Understanding the difference between college instructors and how that translates to differences between managers is yet another interesting thing that you learn while in school that I did not think about consciously before this week.
Having a great instructor for a class will inspire a love of learning for the material in question and possibly even contribute to a higher grade. Similarly, having a great boss will inspire people to do their best work and maybe even propel them forward on a higher career trajectory.
Every time I wanted to have an easy college class it was usually because it was an elective, or I needed a filler credit to get to the number of credits to graduate. Sometimes I was burned by buying into the folklore that a specific class would be easy only to find that I got “that instructor” who, for whatever reason, has ratched the difficulty knob up to eleven.
People who lead and manage are the same way. I have seen people move to different teams at their current employer in order to find a boss with whom they can work similar to the way that college kids will change classes to get different instructors.
If I uncover any other additional interesting life patterns from conversations with my son about college, I will be excited to share them here.
Thank you again for reading. I hope to keep you entertained with my random old people noises throughout the summer. I am now at a point where I have a big backlog of interesting stuff to write. I get nervous when my list of upcoming conversations drops to less than four.
I am continuing to breathe life into my interesting little DM tool over at derfdice and I will give you all updates about that through the summer. If you can spell D&D, please follow me on Twitter. If none of you do, I will be forced to return to shamelessly hawking affiliate merchandise in search of two nickels to rub together in consideration for spraying so many unrelenting letter and number combinations onto your eyeballs.
Until next week!
