Everyone is NOT a Leader, and Other Obvious Employment Truths

If there is one thing working at a law firm has taught me, it is that everyone is not management material. The skills that you need to be a very good attorney are not the same skills that you need to be a very good supervisor, and, if my experience is any indicator, there is very little overlap.

But law, and other careers, force people who grow to be supervisors who probably would rather not. I don't understand this, or some other aspects of our culture that don't allow people to be very good at what they do but rather mediocre in search of being very good at something they aren't very good at. 

Let me explain by example:

I happen to think that I am a pretty good lawyer. But you know what I am naturally really really good at? Cleaning. Yep! Everything about my personality makes the act of cleaning something I both enjoy and am spectacularly good at. I realized this the other day as I enjoyed scrubbing the kitchen floor in my boyfriend's apartment, and sweeping the bathroom. Gross? Not to me. Because I get an immense pleasure out of seeing it clean and sparkling, and if I want that feeling again, I just wait, and a few days later it will again need cleaning. In fact, I enjoy few things better than seeing things clean. It's my personality: perfectionist, detail oriented, a little OCD. I know that if being a cleaning person wasn't a bad thing, and if people wouldn't consider my education wasted, and if society wouldn't be so hard on me and tell me that I could do better, I would be a professional cleaner. And I would love it. I do it for fun. Why not pay me?

And a variation of my "deferred" cleaning dream happens to very good lawyers; the higher you go the less real lawyering you do. And the more supervisor you become. In most professions, the higher up you get the more your job evolves. And we are told this should happen. But should it really happen? Why can't we find something we are really good at, and that gives us joy, and do it to the fullness of our potential? Why must it be complicated by forcing elements and job requirements that are unrelated and that alter our function? Why it is assumed that if you are good at your job you will be a good teacher/leader/supervisor? The skill set for one is not equal to the other. 

This, along with the fact that prestige eliminates certain career choices, really gets to me. Because I believe that human beings are happier if they can incorporate things that make them happy into things that make them money. So work will be a career instead of a job. 

By the way, I could never fulfill my thwarted cleaning desires as a stay at home mom. Too political. So I feel I will just fulfill them once a week, when I clean and sanitize my entire kitchen and dining room area. There is nothing like a spotless kitchen (and I do mean spotless)!