I came late to positions of responsibility, and still try to avoid them. I have a deeply ingrained mistrust/suspicion of institutions and authority, and generally opt for positions/roles where I have more freedom of movement and fewer restrictions, less paperwork, and so on. I consider myself a Chaos Technician, most comfortable in unpredictable and uncontrolled situations. And I look on Order and Structure people as a whole other tribe - useful, but hard to understand.
So it's still strange to me that I'm now chair of a program involving a lot of logistics and planning, safety concerns and volunteer management. And paperwork. It's manageable, but with volunteer programs, overly competent leadership can pose a serious threat to the long-term stability of the program: overly capable leadership results in passive volunteer participation, reduced initiative and leadership from others. Once the leader(s) move on or burn out, the program's left with a bunch of participants who don't have adequate experience leading.
I've long fantasized about leading corporate bonding leadership outings in the wilderness where the challenge was for the participants to
1-Recognize that their leadership was incompetent.
2-Unite to overthrow the leader(s).
3-Find their own way out of the wilderness.
I would have been that incompetent leader, losing the maps, accidentally sabotaging the gear, pulling power struggles while insisting on increasingly foolhardy and dangerous schemes. Getting trip insurance would likely have been a challenge. Point being, since somewhere in elementary school (and quite likely before), I've instinctively questioned the rightness of leaders who lead, and often found them to be more confident than competent, more ego than inspiration.
It's pretty easy to do cynical reads on leaders - there's a lot of messed up stuff happening out there, and someone's got to be responsible for it. And it's comfortable and reassuring to stand on the sidelines critiquing. But in the long run, unsatisfying. I slowly came to realize that I could keep finding flaws in things for the rest of my life, but that wouldn't result in much constructive engagement in reality. And at my core, I wanted to be making things right, I wanted to strive and struggle for the good, and that meant I had to start taking responsibility for things.
So here I am now, leading things. Turns out I'm good at some aspects, and not so good at others. I like building and growing things, making them stronger and bigger and better. And a few years in, now that I've gotten conflict management worked out, and have the patterns pretty well managed, I realize that I'm still doing a lot more work to support the program than I feel I should be. I want to pass on the chair role and don't know who's going to step up. I've lined up great opportunities for the program, but it feels like 9 out of 10 won't happen unless I lead them. I've got leader teams supporting existing programs that are stable but not growing.
Which brings me to crisis management, or rather management by crisis. I've learned from working with volunteers, that people will rise up to challenges presented to them. Most people (99%) will happily participate passively in a worthwhile project, without ever being interested in taking a more active leadership role. The best way that I've found to turn participants into leaders is to create a scenario that requires leadership. A crisis.
Which is of course antithetical to my sense of my responsibilities as a competent leader. I can't possibly deliberately create crises in the organisation I've worked so hard to build up! So I don't. But I'm also recognizing that sometimes my work to keep things stable, has a long-term destabilizing effect - I'm denying the next generation of leaders the opportunity to take a more active role as leaders, to take on challenges and build their skills.
So now sometimes I let the crisis happen. Or at least the appearance of a crisis. I like to see who will step up. Usually the first sign of a new leader is someone who comes up to me and tells me what they think is wrong with the program, expecting me to fix it. Usually they're right about the problem, but not about the fixing. There's almost always a good reason why that particular thing is wrong:
-to protect against something worse happening.
-because no-one's yet stepped up and taken charge of fixing it.
-because institutional change takes a lot of work.
I often get annoyed when people come to me with a problem like a client complaining to customer service, because this is an all-volunteer program. None of us get paid. We do it because we care about the program. I realize that this sense of entitlement is based on an impression of a competent and capable organization, which is a testament to the hard work and commitment of many. I usually bite my tongue and hear them out. Sometimes I put them in charge of fixing it. That never works. Complainers aren't fixers.
Except for that 1%. I can't tell you how much I love that 1%. I have met about 2.75 of them in the last 5 years in this program. Totally worth it. These are the people who see a problem and work to fix it. These are the ones who will come up and tell you what you're doing wrong and how to fix it. And if you brush them off they'll come up with their own ways to make it work, and show them to you and then tell you to fix it for good. These are the ones who will fight you to make things better, they'll stir up all those stabilities you've worked so hard to protect, teach you 17 incredible things in the process, and make the program strong in ways you'd never imagined possible.
So...management by crisis. I'm a fan. Stability is death, growth is chaos/crisis.