Vendor relations.
Sometimes I envy my subordinates.
Back before I was a manager, it was a lot easier to socialize with my teammates. We’d have outrageous adventures together in whatever city we happened to be in (I remember an inebriated network guy sitting on top of a glass pyramid in one European town, spinning and saying, “Look, I’m a grapefruit!“), we’d have each other over to our houses, and just generally hang out together.
All that changes when you become someone’s boss. With management comes power, and with power comes ... well, fewer opportunities to have fun and more opportunities to have to be careful.
Some of the very best people I’ve known in my life have been work associates. And many of those were in a position relational to mine where purse strings were involved, so it made things awkward. Probably one of the worst times was when my husband went to work for a vendor with whom my company had a contract, for which I was one of the signatories. The vendor decided later on to start background checks, and my husband very reasonably pointed out that since background checks would involve his credit record, it would also involve MINE, and it wasn’t appropriate for a vendor to perform a credit check on one of their customers. There was no solution except for him to quit that job to avoid the conflict of interest.
But some of my favorite times in my life have been in the company of very smart people, laughing hysterically. This is what makes my work worthwhile. It’s not the pay (heaven knows), and it’s not the work itself, although that’s very interesting. No, it’s the opportunity to be with smart, talented people who have a great sense of humor (i.e. MY twisted sense of humor). Without getting too mawkish, I love these folks. I’ve spent the last 23 years or so in the company of computer geeks. They’re my tribe.
It’s a damned shame that so many of them now are people who report to me, or for whom I have some influence over paying, or for whom I could even potentially be a source of sales.
Nevertheless, I can enjoy a few moments of forgetting all that, when I’m riding in the back of a 37-year-old convertible with the top down, and the sun is shining, and I’m laughing so hard at a really obscure joke that I can’t catch my breath.
It makes the management resposibilities bearable.
See why I don’t want to be a manager for many years?
In all honesty, I think you can still have a similar relationship with subordinates, but I think it takes a special kind of respect and trust that is just more rare because of the things that can get in the way of a manager-subordinate situation. However, as long as everyone’s needs are competitively met with pay, I think there is still that hope.
Hell, in my last job my manager and I had a hell of a time and became amazing friends. Sadly, the company itself was poorly managed and we eventually left but still get together for drinks every week and shoot the shit and have fun.
But I’m with you. The pay is necessary only to be above a certain level; after that, it is not even a secondary consideration in my job happiness. Even the job itself is second to the people and team I work around and company that I work for. I simply require a fulfilling and happy work experience for my own personal happiness.
Of course, I think that is still rarer to have than it should be, but I’m pretty sure I’ll find my own. Of course…then promptly after I find it they’ll thrust me into mgmt myself so that I can start that search all over again, lol!
Anyway, I know my manager buds definitely enjoy their own little perks such as working from home more often than their subs and better pay.