Being a leader is not an easy thing. People often take it as a nice title and fail to recognize the pressure, responsibilities and accountability that come with the nice title. There is a recent drama at work. My team leader just disappeared completely since last Tuesday and he is still MIA. From the experience we had with him, we do not believe that he was hit by a car or anything. He just vanished because he could no longer deal with all the stress and pressure.
I also contributed some pressure on him. I work 4 days a week for a full-time position. So someone always has to fill my gap. Since he was a team leader, he was responsible for filling that gap. But there were always problems and mistakes whenever I was off. I hate fixing stupid mistakes because they are waste of my time as I could be doing something more rewarding. I hate even more when mistakes don't get fixed right away. He did offer to help fixing them but from the experience, I learned that it could take him days to fix them while I could fix them in a few hours.
When I get irritated, I can't pretend and sugarcoat. I really showed how disappointed I was with him not being able to be accountable. Although he's my supervisor and I'd been a bitch and control freak, he couldn't do anything with me. Although I work there part-time, I give 100% there when I'm at work. I always offer help to my other coworkers when they are overloaded. I care more about overall outcome and look at the bigger picture. So everybody else really like me - from the owners to team members and other people from other departments.
Once I got a text at 10 pm on Friday night.I had to log in from home and fixed a big problem at midnight. After the damage control, I got grumpy and emailed the owner, manager including him. No one even bothered to ask him to fix that because they knew he couldn't. Difference between him and me, I expressed my emotions ( I know it's not very nice) but he hid all those. He would always respond ''Don't worry, Moe- everything is fine."
He never expressed that he had been overloaded and over-stressed. But the problem is that things didn't get done. He did not delegate nor seek help. A leader can't do everything in his/her own and a leader is not even supposed to do everything. But a leader needs to make sure things get done in most efficient manner by delegating the right assignments to the right people and managing the team workflow. When things don't get done in his team, the leader needs to recognize and address the problems and seek outside support and help. I think some leaders are afraid to admit that they are having problems because it will make them look bad.
Burmese junta regime has been always like that for 50 years. Unlike most Burmese inside and outside the country, I do not believe that Burmese regime is cruel and intentionally doing bad things to the country. The problem is that the members of that military organization are incompetent in managing the economy and the whole country. And their ego did not let them to admit it. It's quite understandable for them to be incompetent because they are just soldiers. They try to rule the country themselves without getting any expertise support and help with managing economy and other complex matters of ruling the country. Of course, they failed. Well I do not want to talk about the whole Burmese politics here. It will be endless....
For my team leader, the problem was not his incompetency because I understand that he is relatively new and still in the process of learning. My major disappointment was for him not overseeing to make sure things get done. The main thing I learned about leadership here is that being a good leader does not mean being competent and taking everything under his/her control. Being a good leader means recognizing the problems in good timing and seeking external support to fix the problems. Seeking external support and delegating do not make the leader look bad. The leader only looks bad when he/she fails to empower the team by delegating and to seek outside expertise support when needed.
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