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I was trained in a reserve army during my university period for a year. The discipline of the arm force is a foundation & culture that hold all other rules solid. Sometimes, I like to think that as a leader in an organization is exactly the same as a General in an army camp. We are all soldiers of each battalion or troop who reporting to the higher ranking officer.
As a General in an organization,
You must treasure your team’s combat power and energy, must not easily take action. The team is already working at a regular job everyday with workload allocation, any new tasks will make them spend more overtime, extra work situation. Well, take up any new task sometimes is another source of mistake to overload your own team. Hence, you as the leader or superior must know what kind of task & when to utilize or involve your team.
My experience taught me that as leader or superior must take up the role to do the preliminary analysis, research, planning to ensure that the result is attainable prior involve the team members to contribute. Low hanging fruits always the first to tackle in order to get a quick win that can encourage team spirits & cohesiveness. None of the superior want his or her team falling into the trap of “working for something that have little chance to achieve desirable result”. This is why as the team leader, you need to say no to your boss’s bad idea or reject those stupid assignment.
I allow my team members to say no to me, but once they accepted the assignment, they have to take the same responsibility with me. It is very common in an organization that people lack of discipline. There are so many aspects you as a leader can choose to impart the culture of discipline. However, above everything else the most important aspect is to create a team with a culture, which is discipline of taking responsibility.
The team members can constructively challenge the ideas & assignment, questioning about the rationale & impact of the assignment. It is okay to refuse at the delegation stage but not in the middle or at the end of the assignment. I learnt that from one of my boss, he taught me that as a leader you need your subordinate to remind you that you are not perfect. In fact, it is very difficult to execute even though I tried my very best to do it. The reward to the team is greater than self-advancement. The boss taught me that in order to hold the rule intact, you must not punish, hate & angry about your team members when they started to challenge your authority & decision. I still can remember vividly that several times my boss created a bad project with intention to let me challenge & reject him. The boss took it openly in order to further strengthen my trust on him. His message was clear to me that “reject the boss-HIM” is okay. Of course, there are always some bad apples in the team trying to escape from assignment & will always reject the boss. You also have to make very clear to them that their challenge or rejection must couple with solid reasoning to convince you. One day, Jason (not his real name) rejected my assignment to him with backup of fact & figure. But, I still want to do it regardless. So I instructed another team member Kent (not his real name) to execute it with full responsibility. Kent was able to get the flying colour result for me. In hindsight, the story told me that every action or judgment that we made must conduct in a very careful manner.
I met one of the head of department who have a little problem. I guess the problem is too small for him to notice but not his subordinates. His instruction to the team was so blur and vague. Nobody know what exactly he wants. His thought was so scatter, everywhere… he likes to shoot the bush, round the circle then only back to the discussion point. That one year was my most miserable moment in my whole career life ever. In one of the evening, I began to write down “One of the trait a terrible boss can destroy a team – The boss do not know what he or she want but still eagerly want to do something”. What is the impact? The impact is nobody will do the right thing right. It also make people feel suffer & painful. Now, I will never ordered, if I do not have a clear mission in my head.
You as a leader might have a lot of ideas spinning in the head, you want to achieve a lot of thing in a time. You are talking about light speed kind of velocity and you expect superb quality. As a result, you also constantly change your policy, method, instruction in every single moment in order to find the best way to achieve all at once. I constantly remind myself, it will hurt the team’s combat power & my superiority/ authority in every time I change my decision. I do not want to see my subordinates were exhausted because of my greediness.
If you are a general out there in an organization, look at those soldiers who reporting to you. Are you giving them a miserable life? If yes, please do self-reflection, acknowledge the mistake & take responsibility.
I hope you are not a leader who always evade responsibility. If you did that, I can guarantee your team will break apart, the trust between the leader & team will evaporate. Because, we as your subordinates will not give you our 100%, because, we worry about you will abandon the ship, first one escape to safe your ass, because, we know you will blame us for the bad and take credit for the good. We will not respect you as a leader. The only reason we are here is merely because of the pay check.
In a conventional organization chain of command, those top dogs are untouchable & cannot be challenged. The complaint & painful fact about “incompetent general” will only always stay in the heart of the lower ranking’s employee.
Why Jason (not his real name) were so good one year ago but today his performance no longer as good as compared to one year ago? The only answer not always the fault of the employee.
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