There are many quirks of language that complicate our thinking around work. For instance, we describe hiring someone as “giving” them a job — as if we have bestowed a present or a kindness on them, when in fact all we’ve done is come to an agreement with them to trade their work for our company’s money. This simple trick of phrasing has planted more harmful ideas in managers’ heads than all the bad business consultants since the beginning of time.
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Far less dangerous, but just as pervasive, are the misconceptions that come along with having someone “work for” or “work under” you. In most cases, they really only work for the same company you work for; they simply report to you. And plenty of good employees have been driven off by managers who mistakenly believe that anyone is “under” them. No one is under you, and if you think that, then no one should be under you.
I’d take this all a bit further and suggest that you shouldn’t even think of people as working for you; at the very least you should say they work with you, and ideally you should think of yourself as working for them. After all, most of what’s accomplished at the average accounting firm or business (or magazine) is achieved by the employees, not the managers or leaders, whose primary job is to point the employees in a direction, make sure they have everything they need, and answer any questions that may come up. More broadly, maybe each of us individually should think of ourselves as working for all of our coworkers, regardless of where they are on the org chart; we all work at the same place, after all — and anything each of us can do to enable or contribute to the success of any one of us contributes to the success of us all.
I’ve been thinking of all this because of some sad news: Our longtime managing editor, Danielle Lee, has left Accounting Today to become editor-in-chief of a sister publication,
From the start, Danielle was the best kind of employee to work for: intelligent, curious, adaptable, quick to grasp the big picture as well as the little details, and capable of lots of hard, smart work. She needed very little in the way of management, and she demonstrated her skills in just about every job you can have at Accounting Today — she started as a senior editor, running our “Accounting Tomorrow” section that focused on intergenerational issues just when firms were trying to figure out how to handle the influx of millennials into the profession, and then rose to become our technology editor just as the cloud was beginning to revolutionize the way accountants do their jobs. Then, about 10 years ago, she became our managing editor, a role she has filled since, herding all of our cats on publication deadlines, abstruse questions of grammatical style, and our biggest annual project, our Top 100 People list, where she always ensured we had the right selection of candidates to pick from (and that we picked exactly 100, not 101 or 99, as the rest of our editors would happily have done many times if Danielle wasn’t watching). She also reported and wrote with style and insight, moderated webinars and live panels with wit and ease, managed us through the disruptions of COVID, and much more.
Plus she’s warm, funny and does an amazing karaoke rendition of Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush.”
All I can say is that our loss is EBN’s gain, and we’ll miss her very much — it was a pleasure working for her!
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