MadMup.com

Today is New Boss Day at work. The boss that hired me retired last October, and we’ve had an interim boss since then. Today’s the first day for the new fellow.

I can’t speak for the rest of the people in my department, but I’m a little nervous. I like things to stay the same, and it’s pretty much a sure thing that they won’t. There’s been rampant speculation on what might change, but no one knows exactly what will happen until it happens. We’re meeting as a department tomorrow, so I imagine we’ll at least get a partial picture of things to come.

Getting a new boss is trickier business than getting a new job, I think. When you get a new job, you know things will be different. With a new boss, you’re more in limbo, unsure of what’s going to happen next.

When I was the Director of Student Activities at the college I worked, I made a pretty big change my second year, one that required meeting with the President of the college several times, along with a few other higher-ups. It took a lot of convincing, but they eventually let me implement my ideas. What was the main impetus behind the change? My getting hazed seven years prior as a freshman in that same college. When students joined a society (kind of the small Baptist college version of fraternities and sororities, sorta…), there was one big night where the new members were inducted. Whereas it had once been a fancy affair with dinners and whatnot, by the time I was in college it had become a “throw eggs at the new person and yell at them” kind of thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and for the next seven years I noticed every bad thing about the current society set up that there was, and used them as my supporting arguments for change. I got the Dean of Men on my side and let him run with a lot of the details, and together we put together an alternative that focused more on helping people than throwing eggs at them and making them do push-ups.

You never know how something like that will work out, but they’re still using that system now, almost ten years later. My brother works at that college, and tells me that there’s good and bad with the system, and there’ve been some tweaks to it here and there, but it still seems to be working fairly well. I know that’s got nothing to do with me, but it does serve as a reminder that sometimes change is okay.

I’ll let you know in ten years how this one ended up.