Are you a management problem?

I mean, to yourself.

For forty years, running small companies, I was boss, with twenty, thirty, forty folks looking to me for guidance. I didn’t want to be a boss, I wanted to be a success, but enterprises require participants, so I had to learn to manage to maximize my chance. I enjoyed sharing our adventure and hated supervising performance. Bosses and workers are doomed to a love/hate relationship, eager as they may be to disguise it. To bend another to your will, however gently, is to violate their independence. The best teachers are willing to be loathed – for a time – so their charges learn. Teachers too forgiving I resent in hindsight for wasting those precious hours. With a fiercer music teacher in prep school, I might be composing notes now, not syllables. Strange thought.

Every employee is a handful if a boss is paying attention. Some overwork, some slack off, some are candid, some lie, many deceive themselves. Some say yes when they mean no and vice versa. You cherish some teammates despite their flaws and recoil from others despite their strengths. Some are grateful, others doctor your online photo with red eyes and horns (yes, that was me). On one occasion, I had to fire half our crew to prevent us all going under. For a guy who likes being liked, that’s hell.

Those days everybody came to the office with some regularity (yes, I’m that old). Email, smart phones, texting, Zoom were all glimmers in some dreamers’ eyes (alas, not mine). The closest analogy to my job was nautical. I was captain of a sailing ship on a long voyage. I reported to owners and directors, but they were ashore. Aboard we were bound to each other, our vessel, our purpose and the ominous sea. We were never safe. Enough was never enough.

I miss the camaraderie of those days. Relations were real and fraught. Now I have nobody to manage but myself. (Jane and I are one, and Henry is our boss.)

Managing oneself resembles managing a crew. I and I share a purpose. I, the captain, must encourage my subordinate to perform. Though we frustrate one another, we must get along – or drown. We both have salty words to say about each other (mostly out of the other’s hearing).

In my career years, my most valuable collaborators consumed the most attention. I feared they’d decamp for other opportunities. They had ideas that differed from mine, which was annoying, especially when they were better. They critiqued my performance. They enraged me when they were wrong and more when they were right. They lived in my head.

Now I’m my MVP, since I’m my one and only – but what a pain! I’ll never get anywhere without me – I’d be becalmed mid-ocean – we both know this – but why must my deputy take advantage? Why can’t we collaborate graciously and seamlessly like pair figure skaters or duo pianists? Why must my talent show up for work ornery and obnoxious or drag me off course? As my kids used to grump when they were small, “Aren’t I the boss of me?”

I wonder how many wrestle the same problem. It’s humiliating, therefore seldom discussed, except with one’s shrink or – a new profession in my lifetime – one’s life coach. My journal is my life coach. I spill my guts into it, it listens closely and offers good advice, which I ignore. I trace my resistance to self-direction to my dad’s authoritarian ways, but who knows.

I hate being me! Then I make something pretty and grin.