Leadership

It’s been quite some time since I last updated here, things had been quite a ride…

There’s one course we are all forced to take here, called “Community Service”. As the name goes, the course is about doing something that benefits the community (in the long term, specifically) and submitting a report for grading after finishing it. Sounds a little strange for a university course, but yeah we have it and everyone here needs to take it.

For those who don’t like interacting with people, this is a pretty nightmarish course, because as the name states, community service, you are going to deal with quite a lot of people and a notably high level of teamwork is required to make things work. When things click together (magically), it is super fun and enjoyable. The not-so-good part is, they don’t click straight away most of the times…yeah, we’re on Earth, not heaven or some imaginary perfect universe that may or may not exist.

Now, let’s just hear a tale about this community service thingy.

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You can’t do something too big alone, so it’s a group work. A group contains about 30 people, but due to the number of students we have in our class, we only get 23 of them in ours. To be honest it does sound a little unfair, because some other group in other class has up to 37 students and with simple division you can tell that the workload for each of them will be significantly lower than what we will be expecting here, but as always, you cannot really ask for fairness especially in situations like these when things just happen to be like this.

My group is basically the default group - this means, the group that gets formed from the ones that are left out. As usual, this group only consist of people who doesn’t know what they are doing. That’s not my original plan, but that’s what happens when you don’t have enough friends to form a sufficiently large group right away. And, as usual, the default group does not have someone properly suited to be a leader. What do you expect anyway?

The lecturer isn’t very forgiving on this one and demands a name list with group leaders’ names marked on that day. I decided to just bite the bullet and submitted my name to it - since like really, I don’t really trust anyone else in this group. It’s like a false safe feeling you want to get by getting control of something - even if you don’t know how to control it.

Yes, by saying that I mean I don’t have any clue how to lead a team.

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When we say about a team, we usually think of a group of people that does stuff together - well ideally it should be this way and that’s how the term “team” is defined. Generally speaking, that’s what I hope to achieve from this group of people - make decisions together, and achieve the final goal together.

At least that’s what how a team should function in my mind.

But as usual (yes, I really like the phrase “as usual”), it doesn’t really work out as smoothly as I thought.

Since we don’t get to choose who to have in our group, we are naturally left with a not-so-good but pretty through mix of great peeps and the not-so-decent ones. When I was trying to make a group decision, the nice ones will join in the discussion and help with the decision making, while the others decided to stay on the other side of the moon, swiping their phones instead of even trying to look like paying attention…so it is really impossible to do real group decisions, not to mention simple majority or anything like that. It’s just plain impossible.

Hence, most of the plans actually went pretty painfully - opinion collecting is hard, and everything progressed slowly. Even if on the very rare occasion that they actually participated in the discussion, there’s another issue - we have 23 peeps. I know, that is a relatively small amount compared to other groups, but the amount of ideas and opinions collected is still huge and it just makes things complicated.

In short, things just go the other way I expected. Well, you cannot expect more from some newbie leader…

Since I actually took this job as a leader to “have control” of stuff and to make sure that no one is going to do something so silly that we all would die from facepalming, I tried to make sure that everything is going fine and have to look here and there to make sure that everything is going in the way I am expecting. To be honest, it feels more or less like babysitting. I guess that’s what my mum feels when seeing me doing stuff from afar…hey, he’s doing something that seems stupid… I really have that Asian parenting blood running in my veins. It’s like sticking to each members’ progress of their work so closely so that I can be sure that no one is doing funny things, just like what you will normally expect from some Asian moms from those TV shows.

And it’s no fun. For real, it’s very tiring and somehow frustrating when things don’t go in the way you like, and they almost always go the way I don’t like. I guess I can finally get a gist of how those controlling parents feel all the time. Note to self: Don’t be a controlling parent in the future, unless I must.

At that point I am actually questioning life on why did I submitted my name to the teacher that day.

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Let’s talk a little about my assistant leader.

He is a strange existence in the team. A little lazy and does not care much about stuff, the kind of person who can spend hours playing games on his phone during training sessions, does not take note about deadlines, and hate meetings. Basically…me if I am not the leader. Well, half joking. I don’t play games during training sessions. But after all, he has something he is really good at - you give him a list of things pending to be done, and he will arrange it out properly then assign the right amount of human resources to deal with it almost immediately. So, most of the times things go like this - I tell him what they need after attending a ton of meetings, and he comes out with the list and points at the proper peeps to deal with it.

Sometimes I really think that he should be the leader instead of me. Too bad you cannot change the name list after submitting.

I forgot what we were chatting about before a meeting starts (yes, I managed to drag him along because it’s really troublesome for me to explain why he is not around if the teacher wants a proper reason), but I mentioned about the video team’s progress on the project teaser and the fact that I want to make sure about something very trivial with them. I don’t really recall the specific details, but here’s what he told me.

“Dude, you’re the leader. That’s not how you should do stuff. Assign stuff to those who are under you, check with them later. If it does not fit the requirements just tell them to redo. You manage everything, that’s different from doing everything.”

Hey, it actually…makes total sense.

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I can’t really control every single thing in the group. Think it in another way, group works are interesting because their products can be very diverse depending on whose elements were poured into it. If I go and control the hell out of everything, it will be a solo project of my own and the rest of the members will be nothing more than slaves.

As long as they can fit the criteria and does not cause trouble for others, why should I bother that much?

It’s similar to how larger organizations work - the boss sets a goal, the managers delegates their job to the workers. That’s also a little similar to how a country is managed - sets something to be achieved, each department does their job to reach it, the one at the top of the hierarchy does not go and control every single thing there. It’s just impossible.

After the meeting, the video team who just went out to capture some footage for the teaser video called me up.

“Hey we’re back, do you need to see the footage?”

“The design team is at your side right? Just follow their storyboard and you guys continue as you wish. Call me again if you have some technical difficulties on your side, I’ll catch up once you guys are done with it or have a prototype to show.”

Ever since, I pushed work over to subgroups and didn’t really question much - they just do what they should be doing and let me check at the end, and I propose some fixes if required. It also bumped our productivity by quite a huge percent since I’m not there to irritate them all the time. Plus, we did something right by putting at least one sensible people in each subgroup so they could do the quality control before pushing their work to me. That’s also a good factor that pushed our productivity, since we don’t meet all the time :)

And that’s why we are (miraculously) catching deadlines, I’m still alive, and is writing this thing leisurely now.

Oh, and yes, the end product for the teaser is amazing.

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Leading a team isn’t really as bad as I used to think, and it is really something different from what I used to know. It’s something you cannot go with a book of theories or something like that - it demands you to adapt to how the group goes, and appreciate how the group is. After all, the job is to get something done. As long as you get the product according to the specifications, that’s it.

Sometimes me and my friends will just sit down at the restaurant and start ranting on how one or two members didn’t do anything at all, and at the same time do some reflection on what we could do - especially on what I can do. They all know that I have no clue on leading and stuff like that. But, learning by doing is my style of knowing things, so I am indeed learning a lot from this intense and somehow chaotic community service course.

I guess I will really have a lot to write on my personal reflection report after this event ends. Too bad it’s part of the course so I can’t put it here. Anyways let’s see, probably I will also prepare an altered version for me to share it over here :)

That’s all for now, approximately one week left from the event :) this week’s going to be more intense but it’s going to be a pretty fun ride, I guess? Feel free to guess what the event is by the way, hint: I’m at Xiamen University Malaysia. That should be obvious enough haha.

See you next time!

–Lilacse

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