Being the boss -- I mean at work, functioning as a manager -- is hard for me. And it was hard for my dad.
That's it, the insight: the conjunction of those two statements. I have long known each of them in isolation. But that they fit together so neatly is at once obvious, and totally natural, and really interesting.
For me the problem had a couple of sources. One was my natural shyness. Another was my overcompensating for what I knew to be my own brilliance. I didn't want to look arrogant, or like I had a "swelled head," or anything like that. So I spent a huge amount of effort beating down my own ego and undercutting my own self-assurance, trying to fade into the woodwork, so that I couldn't be accused of being a glory-hog. And it was an absolutely consistent strategy ... right up until I was 33, and my boss suddenly quit from the small start-up where I was working, and I was offered his position. And accepted it. It was a very disorienting experience. Suddenly I couldn't undercut my own status or position because I damned well needed that position to be able to do my job!
I really didn't know how to do this, and for a long time I struggled at it. Fortunately the work my department did was controlled by a number of well-defined procedures; so when I didn't know how to manage the people, I compensated by managing the procedure. Instead of "Go do this today" I could say "We've just finished stage 3 so now we have to do stage 4 (where the employee I'm talking to is the only one who can do stage 4), and it has to be done by the end of the day." It wasn't perfect, but it was something I could hang onto until I got my feet under me. The first time I had to write annual reviews I had huge trouble because I had spent so many years forcing myself not to judge other people -- because I thought it would be unfair to hold someone else to the standards I set for myself, because they couldn't help not being brilliant, don't you see? (Yes, I recognize that beneath the showy humility that attitude is tremendously arrogant, patronizing, condescending ... call it what you will. It also didn't serve me very well, especially when I extended it from intellectual standards to moral ones. That didn't stop me from holding it.) I discussed the problem with a mentor at work who talked me out of it, but I sweated for hours over those reviews!
My dad was just as bad.
As a father he sometimes said that he didn't want to "lay some big authority trip on you," which I think means that he hated and feared authority and couldn't bear to be seen as one. Or, in other words, that he wanted to undercut his own natural authority as my father -- and, like it or not, there is a certain natural authority which comes with that role if you are present in your children's lives, and even regardless whether you are biologically their father -- in the same way that I spent so many years trying to undercut my natural authority as a Smart Person.
As a business owner he was a catastrophe. Partly this is because he made bad decisions. A lot of bad decisions. Partly it's because he was playing the role of a business owner rather than understanding that it was Real Life. And in the very first years he wasn't even playing that role, but actively undercutting it!
He had inherited the business from his parents, when they retired. They had run it for twenty years as thrifty, conscientious business-people, conservative Republicans in the mold of the 1930's or the 1950's. (Think of Alf Landon -- whom his mother voted for in 1936 -- and definitively not Donald Trump.) During all that time, as he finished out his late teens and his twenties and into his mid-thirties, my dad defined himself oppositionally, in rebellion against them, as the liberal Democratic Ph.D. college professor, who stood in line for hours at the American consulate one night in 1972 so he could cast a ballot for George McGovern. (We lived abroad at the time.) And when he inherited the business, he didn't know how to switch it off. He was only a few years older than I was when faced with the same challenge -- 37 or 38, instead of 33 -- but he tried to run the business as President and Owner without being an authority. I never learned many of the stories, but one I remember him telling me (one night years later, when he was really drunk) was that when he discovered that a few of his employees smoked pot (which was of course illegal everywhere in the country at that point), he would get together with them after work and they'd all toke up together. So naturally his employees didn't take him seriously as a boss, and figured they could goof off on the job. Who cares, right? Besides, was he seriously going to risk firing any of them, when the disgruntled employee could turn him in for drug offenses?
As I say, as a business owner he was a catastrophe.
Of course in the end all these guys had to be fired anyway. And he had to stop lighting up with employees. And my mother had to come in and rescue him (so far as she could) from many of the messes he had made. He was angry at having to make the change, bitterly hurt that the Real World didn't turn out the way he had fantasized it, and resented the whole ball of wax: the business, and his own failures in it. What is more, I think this anger and resentment fueled his self-redefinition from Liberal Intellectual to Dittohead. I remember many, many arguments between him and my mom while I was a teenager, that always followed the exact same script. (Usually these came at the end of dinner, after they had both had something to drink -- in my dad's case usually more than just "something." Brother and I would clear our dishes silently and disappear back to our rooms to do our homework, but could still hear every word.)
Mother: You need to spend more time at the office -or- take the business more seriously -or- focus more on these problems we are having (-or- whatever it was that time).
Father: But I hate it! Why do I have to do this? You're always nagging me about this, but why do I have to?
Mother: Because if you don't we will go broke and could lose everything.
Father: But why does it have to be me? You're better at all this stuff than I am. You do it! [Note that my mom didn't start off being better at running a business. But unlike my dad, she worked hard at it and learned on the job.]
Mother: You are the Owner. You have to show up.
Father: I have to? What if I died? Then I couldn't show up! What would you do then? And whatever you'd do then, why can't you do it now without me?
Mother: Then at least I'd be in charge. But for a lot of these issues, only the Owner can solve them. Our creditors don't want to talk to me, they want to talk to you.
Father: You want to be in charge? Fine! I'll sell it to you for a dollar! Then you'll be in charge and can do whatever you want, and I'll be free of it.
Mother: I don't want to buy the goddamned business from you. I don't want it either. I just want you to own up to your goddamned responsibilities!
Father: I can't keep hearing this! If I keep hearing this I'll just ...!
My father never had a good way to end the sentence. I don't believe he ever threatened to kill himself. But he dearly wished for the whole problem to go away by magic, so he didn't have to grow up and deal with it. (Oh dear, did I say that part out loud? Sorry. Please forgive the editorializing.)
It is true that this specific argument repeated itself, almost word for word, over many nights for years.
__________
Gosh, what was my point in all of this? Just that Father and I have a lot in common. We both struggled very hard with Being the Boss. We both spent many years of our lives acting in a way designed to undercut any authority we might ever have accrued. To the extent that I didn't end up the same way, it was by watching and learning from his example, ... and from trying hard to be more like my mother: to plug away at it, day in and day out, and try to learn.
It's an interesting thought.
What about Brother? Same thing, I think, although the details and flavor are different. He's the rock musician in the family, the one who actually got together with a group and produced a couple of CDs. They sank like a stone, of course. He makes his living as a temporary worker, proofreading for companies in the advertising business. And I suspect (though I'm not certain) that he gets handouts from my mom, from time to time. But an authority? A boss? Someone who can tell others what to do -- and that also means someone strong enough to stand as a barrier that shelters his employees when storms sweep through the organization? Not a chance. (He also has no kids, for whatever that is worth.)
__________
And all this makes me wonder, ... what about Son 1 and Son 2? There, actually, I am hopeful. In one way or another, I think they each have a strong sense of self and also an ability to lead. Maybe it's because they went away to boarding school in their high-school years. Maybe they are just naturally more gifted along those lines than I am. Or maybe they have learned from my failures and deficiencies the way I learned (something, at least) from Father's.
It would be nice to think I'd been useful to them in that way.
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