When I was doing my MA in Hispanic Studies, my thesis adviser would come to my office looking royally peeved and say, “So, Clarissa, you are not doing anything, right? You aren’t doing any research at all, right? You are just sitting here, doing nothing?”
“Professor,” I’d reply, “I’m teaching two courses, taking three courses, writing my dissertation, preparing for two conferences, and writing a SSHRC grant proposal.”
“Yes, exactly!” he would respond. “As I said, you are doing nothing. You need to be publishing. Here is a novel. Read it and write an article. I expect the first draft in two months.”
Then he would leave the office, muttering about “those useless people who just sit there doing nothing.”
That was a leadership style I loved. I was never as productive academically as I had been during those two years in the MA program.
I really appreciate it that the administrators at my current university love and praise me. And it’s nice to go up for review and hear how amazing I am and how everything I do is great. On a personal level, it’s very gratifying.
On a professional level, though, it’s not extremely helpful. Hearing how I’m doing everything just right doesn’t really do anything for me. It isn’t like I’m getting published in the PMLA or churning out books by the year, so obviously there is vast room for improvement.
Instead of hearing, “You got 3 articles accepted for publication, that’s wonderful!”, I’d like to hear, “Three articles, that’s very good. However, one of the journals where you got accepted is not very good. Why are you even submitting to such journals? Are you applying for any grants? Why on Earth not? Why is your goal to submit just 2 articles for publication this year? Can’t you do better? Are you sure this is the best you can do?”
Yes, I am aware that this probably makes me some sort of a masochist but I need for somebody to push me and drive me through negative motivation. I have this very annoying tendency to “like myself the way I am”, and that is very self-defeating.
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t like that kind of leadership, because it’s what I was brought up with and it is already deeply ingrained to be self-critical. I like very specific, technically oriented advice. I don’t need pushing, I need information.
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Also, I am noticing that most of my writing on my blog, except for that from 2006, when I had managed to integrate more emotion, is what the myer-briggs personality styling calls “introverted thinking”. That would conform with my being “entp” — working primarily from insights based on pattern recognition, and then trying to express what I already see, in terms of language. That means I’m not thinking in language, but in terms of some sense of the structure of things which I am temporary suspending in my mind. This leads to a lot of what I write being written in a hurry, so that I can plot what I “see” before it disappears again from my mind. I envy those who can think more directly in language, as my way of thinking is an interpretation of my thoughts and I don’t always append the correct terminology to my ideas.
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A good manager knows that different people require different motivation. Some need to be challenged, others need to be nurtured. Some need to be handheld through the process, others need their own space to find solutions on their own.
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The kind of so called leadership you are describing here would either make me despair that I would never do anything well, so I would quit working so much, or else it would, if i felt I had no other choice, dramatically reduce the quality of my work, even if the output quantity increased. It is one of the worst possible forms of sadism. Only truly evil people do it.
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A previous commenter said that a good leader knows what management style suits each worker and varies the approach to each employee.
When I showed N this post, he had the exact same reaction as you. For him, this would be a horrible leadership style while I pine for it.
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(David again.) How would this be different from your boss calling you every hour on the hour all night long to make sure you are working and not doing something worthless like sleeping?
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We only have the faculty evaluation once a year, and it would be nice to get some direction and motivation out of it, not just accolades.
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Aorry, The abpve comment was from me, David Bellamy. I cannot figure out how to enter my email address from this Spanish language keyboard. The at symbol must be hidden somewhere…
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