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
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻
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.

I just want to add a little here, which is the only one that comes from my own personal experience. Part of the issue was that there were multiple people, off the top of my head I want to say it was three, who were asking this same question. So it wasn’t like one person was hammering me over and over. Another issue was with this one was actually another example of what you’re talking about. I had the expectation that an FComm’s initial communication with me would not be asking me to change something on my ship. There’s nothing written down that says an FComm has to begin communication with their CO’s with an introductory message that covers what the FComm’s expectations are and so on. It came off as rude that someone didn’t do something that perhaps they were never told to do. Maybe it was never modeled for them when they were a CO either.

Probably not.

1. “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.

I have two different cases of this sort of thing in mind, but I’m guessing it has happened without me being aware of it as well. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there were those initial attempts and they didn’t work. To me this is still an unreasonable demand, but I’d curious to hear your thoughts. I say it’s unreasonable because I did a study of this one in June 2019. At that time, using the strictest definition of AWOL, ten CO’s were currently AWOL. And only one (Travis Good) had not been AWOL at any point in the previous 30 days.

See, I think this actually highlights that we’ve completely missed the point of why we even talk about AWOL.

Nobody joined this club to look at timestamps on messages posted on a website and compare whether or not the difference is more than one millisecond over 3 days. We joined this club because we want to role play as characters in the Star Trek universe, with other people who also want to do that. We want to enjoy that experience, and part of what makes that enjoyable is a regular cadence to people’s participation.

AWOL is merely a tool to help us achieve the goal of having an enjoyable experience, not the goal itself.

We’re not really supposed to debate whether “the strictest definition of AWOL” is the one we apply or some other one that’s less strict. AWOL is a tool that is supposed to prompt us to investigate whether people are actually enjoying a ship. If people are AWOL, we should be asking why that has happened before we even debate whether we should reasonably expect them to be Never AWOL Ever. If we keep that as the goal in mind, we can maybe find what the real problem is instead of simply trying to make a metric look good. If we really think the problem with a ship is merely the CO’s posting rate, then yeah maybe it is somewhat reasonable to say “you should just stop being AWOL, please.” But if we’re just complaining that “there are reds on the master roster” and nobody bothered to actually read the ship or ask people if they’re enjoying themselves, then we’re trying to optimize the wrong thing and likely are just stressing ourselves out for no good reason.

1. “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.

I think it gets especially confusing when we have this with FComms. Sometimes two CO’s will be performing similarly and one will be on the hot seat and the other won’t have a thing said to them.

Adam W.

Yeah, I never get anything said to me at all, no matter what state my ship is in, no matter who the FComm is. I hate it for several reasons. I hate it because I need support (including prodding about AWOL) just like any other CO, and I basically don’t seem to ever get it, even when I ask for it directly. I usually chalk this up to FComms being completely absent, and the President doing nothing to keep them focused on things. I also hate it because people who are talked to by their FComms see that nothing happens to similar people who are not talked to by absent FComms, and assume the disparity is an unfairness that must be malicious. So there’s quite a few people who just hate me for no good reason, because they assume I have some sort of secret sweetheart deal with my FComm while they’re getting bullied to death by theirs.

This is why I think getting everyone on the same page about expectations is important. Letting it sit like this just results in creepy paranoia that overshadows everything and reduces trust. When trust is low it’s not fun to be here.

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