About eight years ago, I told myself that the path I should journey into was the management world. But sadly, I never really understand what the management world is. I only knew, well, I wanted to be a Project Manager.
But what exactly is a Manager? Manager, in any organisations, is someone who was granted with a position to govern over a group of one or more people to fulfil certain tasks during their working hours. The people that were reporting under that Manager will be required to comply with any order within his/her control. And that's my friend, is called a "position leader".
But what is so peculiar about this "position leader"? Well, anyone who worked under this person will not only be unmotivated, but would only do what is needed from them, and will never contribute anything more to the organisation. Have you ever counter this strange phenomenon in your office that all the employee left the office exactly at knock off time? 10 minutes before d-time is the toilet break, 5 minutes before d-time is the saying goodbye stage, and what happen exactly at d-time? An empty office without a single living soul.
But why is it so? The answer is simple. Heart. All the employees under this person had never felt any sincerity of being cared for and never felt the heart of this leader. This unappreciated feeling results in distrust of this "position leader" and would never follow him/her outside their jurisdiction.
That is what happened to me two years ago when I was with DSTA when building an internal application with 13 developers. As all other "Managers" had left the project, I am lucky enough to be appointed as their Scrum Master, someone who is similar to a Manager. It is a very new position for me as I had never lead such a big team before, and not even worth mentioning, to influence the Scrum way to them.
Excitement rushes all over me, and the first thing I would want to do is to execute all the Scrum methodology processes to all the developers. Day by day, I would make changes in different areas and try to enforce everyone to follow them. Then came one day, suddenly I realise how distant I am with the team, and how much unhappiness I had created just within a three months period. No one on the team approves me or appreciate what I had done in the last couple of months. It was more of a devastating experience to them, then an opportunity to learn something new. Deep down, I am sure that I was trying very hard to create the best out of everyone, but in reality, I don't understand what went wrong.
Looking back now, I realised what I had wanted to do is not wrong, but just that I never really get the trust of the team before implementing so many changes. Everyone in heart will always have this fear of change as it an unknown path where they had never stepped foot on before. And without a good leader they trust to bring them along, they will never move out and explore the new horizon.
This experience is just a glimpse of what a fail leadership is really about, and I now understand that I am still just around the starting line of this overwhelming topic.
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