01/21/2022
Just thinking: What is an A?
As my daughter continued to attend school from a distance for another year and my husband continued to telecommute for the tenth year, I decided to tie my corporate and education experience together by going to graduate school. Our dining table hosts conversations between school, work, and frustrations dealing with difficult people through technology. Having a foot in both doors, I could jump back and forth between education conversations and business conversations until the question, “So, Mom, how is your school work going?”
Not until then had I truly grasped that I was a student again. I’m not just processing through the tasks of the assignment, but I am there to learn something. I explained my successes and voiced my frustrations. I know I’m a perfectionist, and as the perfect perfectionist that I am, I do not admit to my inability to be perfect. So, when I explained that I was upset with myself for not understanding some nuance in an assignment that resulted in a B instead of an A, my daughter chimed in, “You know, Mom, it’s okay to not get an A.”
It’s okay to not get an A.
Something my husband has been gracefully trying to instill in me over the years when I am much too harsh on myself, my daughter made it stick with a short rhyme. I have seen the power of this phrase in myself, letting go of the non-essential details of school work, as long as I am confident in my ability to show what I have learned. I have seen my daughter finish a quiz, see that she got a few wrong answers, then turn around to figure out what she got wrong to learn from that. She then emails the teacher explaining that she understands what she got wrong, what she misunderstood or what mistakes she thinks she’s made, and finally, the correct answer to those questions.
It’s okay to not get an A.
Questions to consider:
What does an A mean to you, to your family, to your school?
What does an A mean in the workplace?
What information do you gain from knowing an applicant’s high school or higher education grades as a hiring manager?
As a manager, boss, owner, is it okay to not get an A and why?
I am not suggesting that we never grade, rank, or attempt to measure levels of success. Instead, I’m suggesting that if your HR practice requires transcripts, stop to consider why and what assumptions lie within “good grades.”
