Boss

I know that you're not supposed to love your boss. Unfortunately, the first two bosses I had, I LOVED. I idolized them. Dave was a camp guy through and through. He is the reason I am a Camp Director. And then I worked for Katie, who had camp in her blood and always did everything for the good of the program and the kids. Both of them were such hard workers, willing to drop everything and help with whatever needed to be done. They were never "too important" or "too busy" for anything and they both taught me the importance of leading by example. I have tried very hard to always do everything with a "what would Katie do" style. When I first worked for her, I was young and immature but I learned a lot. Someday I would like to work for her again and show her that I was paying attention and that I have grown and that she had a profound impact on me. I feel so luck to have had both of them in my life.

I do not idolize my new boss. He's a nice person. He has a lot of good qualities. But I question his ability to supervise staff. He spends a lot of time talking about what needs to be done, but not a lot of time actually doing things. This was a recent conversation that we had:

him- "I bought some big jugs of laundry detergent. I put them in my house. We need to put two of them in your house."

me (in my head)- so walk them over there, it's like, 10 feet away.
me- "okay"

That interaction sums him up completely. He always has something better, more important to do. And he likes to say, "we need to get this done" but he's not usually the one to do it. I realize that as the boss, there's a lot to do and other, more pressing matters to attend to. But my other bosses weren't like that. They didn't try to act like they were too good to do things. And so that's what I do with my staff. Do I want to clean bathrooms and haul wood? Um, no. But I do it, because that's what Katie and Dave would have done. Because that's what it takes to lead people.

He's a good guy, don't get me wrong. I enjoy working for him most of the time. But I also want to shake him by the shoulders, well, every day. I guess that's all part of life.