Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - Good Presidents
These are questions for any candidates, though not all of them will apply to everybody. These questions are inspired by a post by Joe.

Joe defined “weak leadership” as leadership that doesn’t accomplish much, doesn’t hold other people accountable, and is not responsive to concerns or issues. To me, this definition of “weak leadership” misses capturing another form of poor leadership that is often seen in STF, the micromanager.

Before we start, I’m not sure if I agree with your premise here; I don’t think we “often” see the micromanager. I can think of only one person in recent memory who was described that way. I actually did a search of my STF email to see how many other times that term came up in description of other people, and I could only find it used in reference to one other person who is no longer here. I myself seem to have only used the term once, and it was in reference to someone who was not actually in charge themselves. So… maybe you and I are a little off on the terminology?

I think the questions are still valid on their own though.

How do you lead in a way that finds that balance between being too controlling and not controlling enough? Do you find yourself more likely to slip into being an idle leader or a micromanaging leader? Most seem to at least drift towards one or the other.

My personal approach is to give people just the correct amount of structure that they need, so they can go do whatever it is that needs to be done in the matter they see fit. The correct amount of structure is something you have to discover by working with the person, and tailoring your approach to them. People with more experience typically need less structure than people with very little experience. People with no experience at all usually need to be told exactly what to do for a little while, until they figure the job out. Some people actually like being exactly what they are told to do, all of the time, as a general principle; I am not like this but when I work with someone who is, I can cater to it. It’s really all about meeting people where they are, finding out how independently they’d like to be able to act, and then working with them to get to that place. Or working with them to do something else if they find out they don’t really want to do whatever it is they’re doing (which happens sometimes when you try something for the first time, and is totally OK).

I don’t slip towards micromanaging because I simply don’t have the patience to do it. It’s really draining to tell people exactly what to do, in minute detail, all of the time. Conversely, it’s really satisfying to see someone succeed when you give them a goal to achieve without telling them every step of how to do it; they usually surprise you with their ingenuity.

I am more likely to slip towards being “idle.” Usually it’s not when I’m doing nothing, but because there’s something unpleasant I need to do that I don’t want to deal with. These things happen from time to time, and I typically deal with them by trying to harness procrastination in a productive way, by doing something related that needs doing. When I knock down a bunch of small stuff, I find it becomes easier to tackle harder things.

What makes a good President a good President?

Good Presidents keep the club running normally. Good Presidents put together an effective team to help them do that, and support their team in that effort. Good Presidents make the hard choices that other people aren’t comfortable making in order to keep things working, and occasionally take the heat for that. Good Presidents listen to what people have to say, but also try to listen to people who might be speaking very quietly in addition to the people who typically speak loudly. Good Presidents have an agenda of things they want to do, but are willing to set it aside if something more important requires immediate attention. Good Presidents explain the current strategic direction clearly (if any; we don’t always need one). Good Presidents try to be the President of the entire club, even the people who they don’t particularly like or agree with completely. Good Presidents allow debate and tolerate dissent, but without tolerating bad behavior.

For those who have been an exec, how would you evaluate how you did in that role every time you were an exec? How good of a job would you say you did in each term?

The first time I was Vice President was with Lindsay Bayes during her first term. We did well. We worked well together, and we assembled a team that we worked well with also. It was something of a re-building year for the club; the previous President was AWOL for most of the term, and people were feeling negative about the overall state of things, because this was at the tail end of the post-2009 regression-to-the-mean, where the giant membership boom that happened after the first Abramsverse movie receeded, and the club went from having 212 active members (an all time high) to around 120 (lower than the previous average of 160). People didn’t know where the bottom was at that stage, and it was pretty depressing. But we stabilized things. We didn’t have big ambitious plans to do great things because the club just wasn’t ready for that when our term started; by the time our term ended, the club was ready for that.

After that term, I was elected President for my only term. Overall, I think we did a very good job. We built upon the success that Linds and I established in the previous term, where I was VP. We kept the club running well. We turned X-Fleet from an idea into a bill, got the bill passed so it became a bylaw, we implemented the bylaw, and a lot of neat stuff came out of that over the years; it also settled certain debates on whether or not we had too many rules. I started us down what would be a rocky but eventually successful road of replacing WeBBSpace, by changing our strategic direction away from just trying to update to different versions of Drupal to instead developing a custom web application for our roleplaying from scratch, which I think has paid off well for us.

I was not perfect as President. I did not manage to “keep [everyone] on the team” within the cabinet when I decided I wasn’t going to cut ships; one person in particular strongly disagreed with that. I should have dealt with that by “getting [them] back on the team” or letting them go; I tried the former and didn’t manage to succeed at it, but didn’t do the latter, and it made things needlessly difficult and confrontational for the rest of the term. That stress was something I made the mistake of not walking away from. I let some people convince me that I had to run again, that if I didn’t, a lot of the stuff done during my Presidency would have been undone by other people who were just waiting to undo it. That lead me to run a re-election campaign that, combined with other stress in my life outside STF, I quickly backed out of, and ran on the bottom half of Drew Diamond’s ticket, which I also did out of a misplaced sense of obligation.

(Pro-Tip: Never let anyone convince you that you have to run; if someone tells you that don’t believe them. If you tell yourself that, don’t believe yourself. If you still believe that after not believing yourself, ask a bunch of people you trust to tell you the unvarnished truth to check your sanity.)

The only good thing I can say about my second term as Vice President, is that I walked away from it with integrity when I knew without a doubt that Drew was going to be unusually bad as President and that I wasn’t going to be able to work with him. “Unusually bad” meaning in “morally wrong”, not the sort of mere ineffectiveness or absence that I’ve been talking about for most of this campaign (I have many criticisms of Rob; immorality is not one of them). I acted with integrity by resigning, and by doing it in less than 2 months. Some people wanted me to stay “on the inside” and basically spy on him. I am glad I did not do that, because it would have been inappropriate; Presidents are entitled to have Vice Presidents that will support what they want to do. Ultimately, it was also unnecessary, because Drew’s bad behavior rather quickly became too big to ignore, and I impeached him in what would have been successful had he not quit first. I regret that my choice to run for re-election, which turned into running with Drew, created a giant mess for the club, but I do take pride in the fact that I cleaned that mess up in a way that was totally above board.

Thank you in advance for answering.

Adam W.

Thank you for asking. Happy to elaborate in any way you like.

Joe