Thursday, November 17, 2005

The Stings of Leadership

You know... sometimes leadership stings and sometimes it hurts like !#$@#$! Sometimes, things don't go that great and being in charge isn't a lot of fun.

I don't write much about my day job, but if you know me, you know that I've been at odds with it for a little while. Most of the time I wish I could be doing something else. My attitude and the attention I have not given to my career has both come back to haunt me.

I'm a leader at work (a manager) but I'm also a follower. I am a supervisor, but I also have a supervisor. And after our 30 hour marathon, which was mostly my team's responsibility, I was in a bit of trouble. There were some things my boss felt like I had not done correctly. Not just not executed correctly, but ignored in an attitude of apathy. And I got called out on these issues.

I thought I was in a huge amount of trouble. But we had a great conversation about how things went and how things can progress moving forward. Very interesting, something totally unexpected, God chose to bless.

Its been a very tangible reminder of a few things for me:
- If we want people to do the right things, they must care about the right things. My problem was I didn't care about the right things.
- Don't always think that the people know that you value them. My boss communicated value in my contributions, which in turn made me decide to care about the right things again. It took about 10 minutes and resulted in a huge attitude change for me. (I hope for my sake it lasts.)
- Sometimes, people need to work through their own issues not matter what you do. There was an underlying context of some other stuff that I just had to let go of.

I think some of these points need to translate into other areas of my life.

I know this post may seem to have a lot of obscure, 'talking in code' stuff. But thats okay. The gist is - leadership is difficult, both when you are a leader and for the person leading you.

No comments:

Post a Comment