Expectation management: do you have a terrible boss?

My daughter has a wonderful job teaching music to babies and toddlers. She taught herself to play 7 instruments to get the job, so plays 10 total. The job is the perfect day job for her, a professional singer songwriter because she loves music and babies. She is insanely good at it, I know because I have sat in on her classes and my face hurt afterwards from grinning like an idiot. Her babies absolutely adore her, and you can see how much they learn over time. The moms and nannies love her and sign up for more classes because of her.

The catch? She has a terrible boss. Lets call him Max. How is Max terrible?

1. Max never gives positive feedback. The only feedback he gives is negative and he makes it mean and personal. There are no systems in place for his teachers to continue to develop themselves or incentive for them to seek feedback.

2. The policy is that if a baby is clearly sick the baby should not come to class, and of course the same goes for teachers. The whole class session is filled with passing out instruments; no one wants the teacher spreading a vile cold or strep throat. But when my daughter has to call in sick her boss is mean about it. He has no back up systems for substitutes so every time someone is sick he has a crisis on his hands.

3. Every single one of his teachers works for his business as a day job to support themselves as they pursue dreams of making a living as professional musicians or getting graduate degrees. Instead of facing this reality, Max tells his teachers that he wants them to work only for him. When his teachers get great opportunities to have a gig or a tour he holds it against them instead of building the right network of teachers and leveraging the reality.

Do you hear the theme? It isnt so much that Max is a jerk, even though that is kind of true. It is that he has not set up the right systems for his business to run easily. Everything is a drag, a crisis, a misfortune. My daughter is a bright kid, the thing that drives her crazy isnt that Max isnt very nice; it is that he isnt very smart. She tells me how she would solve Maxs business problems and in the process is acquiring quite the business mind.

But ultimately what I know for sure is that she is learning at least as much from having a not nice, not smart boss as she would having a great boss.