'I Was So Ignorant!' Top 6 Ways I Was Wrong About My Boss Now That I Got A Fat Raise
As I continue to progress my career, I have sensed a burgeoning maturity in how I evaluate what makes an effective leader. If I am being completely honest, before I got my raise, I was immeasurably ignorant about my boss' behavior.
He didn’t mean for me to take the fall for the Johnson account’s budgeting snafu, he was simply trying to signal to upper management that I was being given real responsibility. Sure, they thought I was an incompetent jackass that let our biggest client’s budget bust, but my boss knew that it wasn’t my fault. When pitching my raise to the powers that be, he put more emphasis on the “responsibility” aspect of that story than the “total failure,” so it’s all good!
Withholding my invitation to the annual golf tournament wasn’t him excluding me from the most important networking event of the year, but rather a forward-looking gift. He knew that I had only been at the company for three years and was still making my first impression. Attending a boozy affair like our company’s title-sponsored golf tournament would put me in danger of saying or doing something in front of important senior leaders and clients that I might later regret. Fortunately, I would have no such opportunity, and—voilà—I got the raise. I'm glad he said to me: "you're not invited, you shit stain."
There’s no doubt he loves his kids. No doubt! When he comes into the office every Monday and brags about having five days until he has to see his "god awful" kids again, I can read between the lines to know he’s just happy they are at school where they can learn and grow. After all, it’s the best private school in town. He’s made that very clear. LeBron’s son goes there. It’s a great school, and he loves that his kids go there. I realized how nuanced his love for his kids is when I saw my bank account last night.
Yelling at the hourly wage accounts payable assistant is akin to the homophobic slurs my 8th-grade baseball coach used to hurl at me—that is to say: he yells because he cares. He wants the entry-level accountants to recognize when they need to correct his expense reports that he’s turned in late because what if someone with less patience than he does the same thing down the road? You’ve got to learn to hit the curveballs sometime! You’re not going to grow from a pat on the butt. I love having money now.
(Speaking of, his obsession with the female Asian-American interns has nothing to do with his annual bro trip to Bangkok. He’s championing representation in the workplace and wants her to feel seen. He wants her to feel more seen than any other intern, it seems. Very seen.)
He totally knows where I went to college. He keeps asking so I can get extra practice with my elevator pitch for when I introduce myself to non-golfing clients. The same goes for my repeated reminders of where I grew up, that I don’t carry cigarettes on me, and that I don’t want to fuck the Asian-American intern. I can afford a trip to Bangkok now, though!
