I’ll just drop right into this with what that “fundamental difference” is.
Among teachers, the demanding ones are often the best. Among managers, the demanding ones are usually the worst.
I don’t intend to imply a strict relationship, but there’s a strong correlation in both cases. In school, most people remember that the most effective teachers were also the hard-asses. They required that you learn the material, assigned homework every night, and wouldn’t allow bullshit to get past them. They actually read the papers submitted, and had useful comments. The weaker and lazier teachers gave easy A’s (to make their students go away) and had low expectations. Sure, there were exceptions. There were good teachers who were soft graders, and bad teachers who were tough and assigned lots of homework. On the whole, though, the correlation between difficulty and effectiveness was clearly positive. That was a classic decision for a student: do you take the course with the hard, great teacher or go for the cakewalk but learn less?
The good teachers were hard because the “pain” (which is just that of extracting discipline from the natural entropy of a young mind) truly was for our benefit, and because demanding hard work from their students also requires so much of them. Many of the best teachers in high school and college worked 55 or more hours per week. Being a tough grader and demanding teacher is, itself, demanding. Without the “stick” of a bad grade, a typical 15-year-old doesn’t have the foresight to overcome his own laziness and study enough. Good teachers knew this and pushed.
In the work world, it’s the opposite. Incompetent, failing, and otherwise bad managers tend to be the most demanding ones. Good managers, if they’re demanding, are only so in a certain way. The good demanding manager (a rarity, less than 1 in 100) wants you to reach your full potential and, while asking that you do your best, manages the situation to your benefit even if you fail. Bad managers, on the other hand, are constantly fighting to save their own asses, and will throw their reports in the line of fire to buy more time for themselves, and generally turn into hard-asses not because they expect greatness but because their ineptitude creates constant peril. For them, anyone showing less than undivided loyalty becomes, if not an enemy, a scapegoat when one is needed (and that’s often, because they keep screwing up). The bad manager is demanding and difficult because he’s constantly making mistakes and his underlings, if they are to survive, must not only fix them but do so with a smile, so as not to seem disloyal.
Where this mismatch between the two styles of relationship (teacher vs. manager) is seen most clearly is in grading. Good teachers can be harsh graders, because grades don’t matter very much except as a motivator, and because there are genuine fairness concerns around academic grades that don’t apply to workplace performance reviews (which ought to be a formality). A good teacher unapologetically gives a C for mediocre work; the message is clear, but the long-term career damage of a C is (despite what students think at the time) almost nonexistent. For a contrast, good bosses always give glowing performance reviews (to show support for the reports’ careers) and, if there are genuine performance concerns, has the discussion verbally only. I’ve known professors to give “public” (inflated) and “private” (realistic) grades, the former looking good on the transcript but the latter curved to a C for average work. This duplicitous grading system seems silly in an educational context, but it’s exactly what a good manager does: criticize and direct in private, sometimes being harsh about it, but support and praise (unconditionally) in the public.
For teachers, being demanding generally means she actually cares. She has a secure job, but still works hard in the pursuit of doing it well. That’s a really strong positive signal. On the other hand, when you face a demanding boss, you have to answer this question: is he pushing you because he genuinely wants you to become great and is showing you the way, or is it just to make you serve his own career, which may be in peril (meaning that yours is, as well)? If it’s the latter, find a way out.
