Is there really a Boss’ Day? That’s weak.

Yesterday I skimmed an article somewhere about the upcoming National Boss Day. The gist was your boss is your boss so employees have to adopt to their management styles, preferences, and idiosyncracies. On the organizational chart at my university, a department “reports” to me, but I like to think we plan and set goals together. I do have scheduled one-one meetings, but I also aim to talk to everyone at least once a day. These might be 3 minute phone calls just checking or they might be 20 minute meetings or maybe 2-3 hour sessions. They might have regarded my phone calls or visits as intrusive when I first started making them, but they don’t any more.

I don’t wait for my department/staff to initiative anything or report problems or brainstorm ideas; if I’m out of the loop, that’s my shortcoming as much as anyone else’s. My job as “boss” is to know what people are working on and with whom, what obstacles exist, what unexpected events have occurred. In an earlier posting I mentioned that our collective brainstorming and organization was very successful, but I didn’t know if that success occurred because of the process or because of the individuals involved. I still wonder – how do bosses adapt their managerial styles to the people they supervise?

Is your “life coach” 20 years younger or older than you? Opposite sex? Different background? Hmmm.

I just read an article in the New Yorker on coaching by Atul Gawande. His point was that tennis players, opera singers, and other professionals often have personal coaches. Gawande is a surgeon, and he wondered if his surgery techniques could be improved by having another experienced surgeon observe him in the operating room. So he reconnected with a surgeon who had been his teacher years before and arranged to have his surgery observed and commented on.

Without going into the details, he concluded that having a personal coach helped make him a better surgeon.

One of my projects right now is helping improve teaching at the university level. I’ve developed a new program for vetting potential faculty, certifying them to teach their 1st university courses, and then mentoring them while they teach. I think that the program is generally successful because it aims at the parts of teaching that are the most difficult to master: 1st, learning to give students individualized feedback that is meaningful, relevant, and appropriate. 2nd, leading synchronous and asynchronous discussions. 3rd, managing the workload of teaching classes with a heterogeneous mix of students. 4th, creating meaningful activities in the classroom that are tied to course objectives.

The difficulty is that incoming teachers can work on these activities while they are going through the certification process, but then when they get into a classroom they can revert to their traditional, comfortable habits of teaching. Our mentoring program is designed to support and guide them, but I’m not sure that a mentor is the same thing as a coach.

We hold our training and orientation sessions in synchronous online settings using Adobe Connect, and most of those sessions have 2 or 3 people leading them. One advantage to this system is that the 2 or 3 leaders can have private chats where they collaborate behind the scenes in order to make adjustments and more effectively lead the discussion. (I do think collaboration in the classroom is critically important.) When I participate in a session, I do view myself as a coach so that the comments I make in the private chats are intended to guide the certification leaders.

In the kind of work I’m doing right now, a mentor would be more useful than a coach because I need strategic guidance more than tips on somewhat technical issues. Nevertheless, I’ve had many conversations and meetings where I would’ve appreciated some coaching afterwards to help me in my communications.

So this reminds me of a graduate student I had in a research methods course maybe 15 years ago. She was in her early or mid 30s, very attractive and personable, smart, a background in theater, and she made her living as a life coach. She told the class that almost all of her clients were successful businessmen in their 40s and 50s who were at a “dead-end” in their lives. Her job was to help them “get their lives back on track.” I’m no longer in my 40s and 50s and I’m not a successful businessman, but I don’t think the coaching she provided is the kind that I’m looking for.

Do the executives and directors you work with have coaches? Do they have mentors? Is the idea completely foreign to them? I wonder…