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To be a leader, one has to be a servant (Mark 9:35), has to be willing to watch out for the whole-person of the subordinates.
Down in the belly of this beast called IT, a favorite sport among the peons is to complain about the bosses; an attitude that is typified by the cartoon series Dilbert. Fortunately, I don’t have a boss that doesn’t act like the pointed-haired one. Nevertheless, I was greatly intrigued when I came across the article titled "So You Want to Be a Manager" by Paul Glen in a recent issue of ComputerWorld. Paul gave a few wrong reasons for wanting to be a manager and a few right reasons. The rational given in the article really strikes a cord with me. Here, I will only pick up on of them — leaders need to have a "desire to help people to grow."
When I was a little younger, I often wonder what does those bosses and bosses of bosses do. After working with my current boss for a few years, I gradually realize that it take a great amount of effort to organize a project and acquire the necessary resources to get the project underway. I started to appreciate these aspects of the management tasks. This aspect of the leadership, "to help people to grow," only recently started to take shape, and Paul’s article appeared at just right time for it to crystallize.
Everyone has this innate desire to grow. At work, this may manifest in the form of perfecting our own skills, learning new ones, or taking on more responsibilities in the organization. No matter what the case may be, IT is evolving too rapidly for anyone to stand still. I suspect that one of the reasons that IT works seem to complain more than in other industries is related to this rapid changes in the IT industry. In the US, the IT industry is also changing rapidly from a pure technology environment to take on a lot more service components. This also creates additional need for a typical peon to keep on growing, in particular, to acquire more skills to deal with customers that are technologically less sophisticated and to deal with coworkers from half-way around the earth that definitely have a different culture background. In short, the pressure to change and adapt is tremendous, and a lot of the bosses are failing their subordinates miserably in helping them to grow.
Leaders usually rely on others to complete the specific tasks they need to accomplish, helping them to complete these tasks more efficiently is an obvious form of "helping people to grow." However, unless the subordinates are robots, this form of growth is not sufficient. Many workplaces offer some forms of on the job training opportunities such as professional conferences. This is the next level of growth, acquiring new technical knowledge. Most workplaces are ignoring the harder form of growth, the growth in soft-skills, such as interpersonal interactions, managing the pressure of the changes, personal well-being and character development, i.e., the development of a whole-person.
To be a leader, one has to be a servant (Mark 9:35), has to be willing to watch out for the whole-person of the subordinates. I heard Pastor Chuck Swindoll quoting someone as saying "Business is like playing tennis, if you don’t serve well, you will lose." Guess this is especially true for leaders in business.
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© John Wu
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
