leadership down
friday, october 18, 2002


there are some things i just do not like about leadership and those things are among the reasons i keep bailing out of leadership positions. don't get me wrong, there are good things about being a leader or i wouldn't keep ending up in a place where i have to be one at least some of the time. i like seeing group projects come together, i like delegating and giving rewards and making people feel good about the work they've done to make come together. i like knowing that my ideas will be heard and considered, something i don;t usually get when i'm not a leader (maybe my ideas aren't so good? naaaaa . . . can't be it!). some would say that the pay is better for leaders, but most my leader positions have been volunteer so i wouldn't know.

but i hate having to deal with dissension, not so much with me but between members of my team or group or whatever. i hate the politics often involved with leadership. and i hate having to handle members of groups that are causing problems. i don't like telling people to straighten up and i definitely don't like telling people to remove themselves from the group. i find letters of reprimand or removal difficult to write (and not just because i have difficulty with my tact, although there's that too) and even more difficult to send. don't get me wrong, i know it has to be done when you have someone not working with the group or causing problems that they refuse to solve in a way that's beneficial to the group. but knowing it has to be done doesn't mean i have to like it.

i led a team at tsf for awhile. it was fun doing the building and the activities. but it eventually hit a point where most of the leadership stuff was administrative. i need to be creative and doing purely administrative stuff was very draining on me. then there was the infighting among the leadership at tsf - the crap the fighters don't get to see but the leaders deal with almost daily. and a lot of it turned political. if you liked one person you certainly could not like another person who disagreed with the first. and how much power the people involved had determined a lot of what happened with your team that week. piss off the wrong person and you could get no fighters and have no point to work with to get some of those who had been erroneously dq'd into the ring. then, again, piss off another person and you wouldn't get your choice of winterfest activities. that kind of bs was not why i joined tsf and what was responsible for turning me off the whole experience.

i also was briefly a leader in a woman's group. the cat fighting there was insane. people telling you one thing to your face and stabbing you in the back the next. i didn't leave voluntarily. i was essentially told to resign quietly or be fired. since i was there for the other women involved i resigned quietly. why disturb them if they felt they were getting something out of the group? but the whole thing came down to this: i had management over committees and activities that some of the other leaders wanted, so i got the boot, they got what they wanted. the group is still in existence, but a far cry from the 700+ members it was. it's split into two and had more splinter and offshoot groups created than i can count. i don't count myself as a good leader, but at least i know that the leadership sets the tone for the rest of the group. the leadership was so bitchy in this group it's no wonder it fell apart. it would be nice if the leaders got their acts together, but i wouldn't count on it.

both experiences really soured my opinions of such things. i get invites into women's groups all the time. every once in awhile i test the waters, but i rarely stay or participate.

still, i keep putting myself in these positions, even if i do everything i can to limit how often i have to step into the "almighty leader" shoes. my current leadership venture is the dreaming in ink writing group (named after my writing journal). we generally put things up to the members to vote on, i just count votes and implement what the members want, for the most part. but every so often a situation comes along where i have to step in and take charge. i have two other people i often talk to about these situations, but they usually leave the hard work up to me.

we're in one of those situations now. i'm doing what i need to do, but i'm not happy with it, especially since the member involved is a bit resistant. she's already offended several people in the group and apparently thinks i'm trying to shut down her honesty. on the net, honesty has to be more tactfully phrased than in r.l. in r.l. you have tone of voice to cue you in, you do not have that on the net. when you moderate a group of any size on the net, you have to keep that in mind, along with other issues of net etiquette. and i try to do that. and i try to explain my reasoning as tactfully as possible. so far it's not working.

i really need to stop getting myself into positions like this. i have to keep reminding myself that leadership may have its good points, but a lot of the bad points make the whole thing not worth it. not that that's going to help any now. if i try to close dreaming the whole group will come and try to lynch me.

i guess i should count my blessings and consider it nice to be wanted.