Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - Good Presidents

Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - Good Presidents

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?

Perhaps I am using too narrow of a word. I meant to include when someone delegates responsibility to someone yet gets in the way of them doing their role, when four different times you’re asked to change your ship to accept new members and there’s an expectation that your voluntary choice should be used a certain way, when unreasonable expectations get put on CO’s like that they have to go an entire month without going AWOL once to retain their command or that they are expected to post at greater frequency than their posting limit. I think I’m trying to encompass all the forms of active leadership where the leader is trying to get the follower to do something in their own certain way when that goes beyond what is reasonable. It’s subjective, of course, and some of the time completely reasonable behavior gets seen as micromanaging because people aren’t used to any accountability. I’m sure not everyone will agree with all of my examples, but hopefully that helps make it more clear what I meant.

Adam W.

I’m glad you clarified what you were talking about, Adam. I think “micromanagement” is part of what you describe here, but it really isn’t the root of it. I think what you’ve described here are (by my count) four cases here where there are two parties who don’t have the same expectations going into a situation, and that leads to a confrontation of some kind:

1. “someone delegates responsibility to someone yet gets in the way of them doing their role” - These two people probably don’t have the same understanding of whatever the role is.
2. “four different times you’re asked to change your ship to accept new members and there’s an expectation that your voluntary choice should be used a certain way,” - Obnoxious browbeating behavior aside (really, is it so hard to take the first “No” as the answer?), you and the person doing the asking clearly don’t have the same expectations regarding this.
3. “when unreasonable expectations get put on CO’s like that they have to go an entire month without going AWOL once to retain their command” - I’ve only heard of things like this happening when someone has a repeated problem with being AWOL and there’s already been a few attempts to simply ask them to not be AWOL. I’m guessing those initial attempts to address the problem just by asking politely didn’t happen in this case.
4. “they are expected to post at greater frequency than their posting limit” - The limit is supposed to be a minimum, so I think everyone should be posting more than that if they’re actually enjoying themselves. But there’s a big difference between what people ideally should be doing, and what people are minimally required to do.

I could be wrong; I’m only personally familiar with the second of those, as I am a CO of a ship that doesn’t take new members either. But there’s other stuff out there which makes me think there’s little mismatches in expectations like these happening all over the place. The biggest one that struck me was during the debate to the AWOL limit bill earlier in this term; a lot of people said that they feel pressure to post, but a lot of other people (myself included) seem not to be feeling any pressure at all. I privately asked some of the people who said they felt that way why they did, and a lot of it seemed to be in how they were being asked to stay within limits, along with whatever the expectations were. So I think we’ve likely got some FComms who are really hard about AWOL limits and posting more than the minimum and riding everybody half to death, and another set of FComms who are just sort of watching stuff and not really saying anything. Replace “FComm” with whatever level of leadership is directly relevant.

That’s a part of why I came up with this whole realignment idea. We should all have the same general expectations around this sort of stuff. If two people look at the same set of facts regarding whether some CO is AWOL, they should draw very similar conclusions about what the next step to deal with should be, regardless of what their role is in the club. Having that shared understanding be clear up front would have prevented all of these sorts of conflicts, because people wouldn’t be surprised by any of it.

I want to establish understanding by talking about these sorts of things in Command on a regular basis, because the alternative to that is to sift through all of this inconsistency on an individual level. Which is how your whole list came into being in the first place. Inconsistencies have cropped up between different individuals and we don’t have a clear shared understanding to fall back on. Talking about how things should be in advance in a way everyone can participate in is the only way to deal with that proactively.

SNIP

I’ve snipped out my entire original post, because I don’t think it’s responsive to what Adam describes in his reply, but I’m still happy to talk about that stuff too if other people want me to; feel free to split the thread or insert stuff back in here. Whatever’s easiest.

Joe