Control from bottom

Thank you for coming to my blog. I'd like to begin this post by asking you one simple question.


Are leaders superior to other members?

Of course leaders have to do many things you their teams; assigning a task to each member, leading members to the goal, representing their own teams, and so forth. Many know this phrase: great power has great responsibility. Leaders have to be worthy and responsible for others. Thus, probably from members' position, leaders are superior to them.


Having said that, when you, as a leader, see what you have to practically do, you might think those tasks are usually plain, unsophisticated works. You always have to care about what your members think about you, get on members thier side, and cleaning up the mess after their mistakes to prevent future conflicts. Moreover, if conflicts happen among menbers, cannot be relax anymore. Take extra care not to get on thier nerves, and at the same time, place your team in orbit.


Let me introduce one of my personal experiences, connecting it to the phrase, "Engage Dissidents".
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"Engage Dissidents" is done for preventing potential collision among team members and turning it into good collaboration. As Schacht propose a management partneship with McGinn, it is not necessarily effective way to control members in team hierarchy. 

Acutually, I did the same thing a week ago. I am the project manager of a business contest held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia this summer vacation. It is various prepations and as time passed, it is getting difficult to cover all tasks simultaneously. Once, a member who is charge of preparation for a study meeting, complained that he was extremely beaing the expense. At the time, I thought of  two possible choices. 

First, I could reduce his burden by setting another member to those tasks. It is the most realistic way to deal with it, but there are some problems in there. No.1 is that everyone has own task, and I'm afraid of the same thing would happen. No.2 is that he has own unique idea about his task, I thought it was interesting, and maybe he prefered to be followed him. No.3 is that there are both members who complain easily and keep stress in, and it's is hard to a choice equally to each member. However, I was urged to do something.

So, I did the other thing: I assigned him to another leader of the new established project, which is about tasks he had had. Now, he is on equal position to me, so I can manage this project in our cooperation and he can take decision by his own responsibility. 

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One big difference between those two choices is whether you control your members from the top of your team or the bottom. I strongly believe that  team leaders must do more things from the bottom, because the major role of them is not to take all responsilibility, but to maximise team efforts by reorganization and task distribution.

Leaders can be worthy for others simply because they are the most dedicated members, not they are the top. My answer for the question at the beginning is "No".