When I started the work force at a young age, I respected or at least had this fear of power of managers, bosses, ceo's, etc. The more years I worked and knew these managers and how they worked and what kind of work they did, I became less respectful of them for their seemingly "laziness." By the time I was in college I worked my way up in the company I worked for and became managers of different departments as well as ending as the Second Manager, only under the direct store manager.
This "climb" of experience was good for me I think, because 1) I appreciated the value of someone doing the actual labor of things; and 2) I knew that the laborers valued the manager as long as it was evident that they was functioning at all.
The same experiences, I believe, are true for the church I work in. I started out 5 yrs ago volunteering where I could and it was primarily in the sound booth, running the visuals. Now I'm the executive pastor.
In the book Leadership Pipeline, it talks about the struggles most make when making a managerial change with more responsibility. If the change happens too fast or you don't recognize the value in your more people skills and planning skills and taking the time to think skills versus labor skills or you become too disconnected from the laborers, you will not only fail in that function as a leader, but you also let the team down and really halt any kind of growth for your company.
The idea behind a leader is a person who can both manage multiple tasks and people, but also foresee and plan for future problems and areas of growth. Without the leader working in this fashion, the day to day tasks get down but years down the road, the company will wonder why it's on the verge of death. It hasn't reached out to new people. New workers are only introduced with a spot opens up. There's no creation of new spots to create future growth. It hasn't tried new things. It's hasn't found new ways of doing things better. It hasn't gotten rid of things that don't really work.
Both leaders and laborers are essential, but both functions have to ask key questions to themselves.
Do you as a leader know that your role is to take time to think about the future of the people and the business? If you're stuck in doing, doing, doing, who's leading, leading, leading? Man up or woman up and set the bar high for leading the team to the next level. Your team might work harder if they know you're busy about developing their future.
Do you as a laborer not value the function of the leader to think and plan and do less of the doing? Do you support your leader by doing all you can so they can lead? Giving your leader grief all the time for being "lazy" can really affect the leader mentally. They want to please the team and they probably already struggle with this battle to think and plan versus jumping in and helping out physically all the time.
Do you as a leader value the function of your support staff? Are you still in connection with them to value their input on what's wrong and what's working? Maybe it's good for you to get busy sometimes back into the laboring so you don't lose touch of what it takes and what are the challenges to working for you. Often times it's good to accomplish something where people can see something was done. Even something small like cleaning up the room where most of the people work or changing out the light bulb that has been out for a month.
There's this fine balance as a leader to not just sit in an office and plan with straw figures or to always keep ourselves busy with tasks to the point that no one is planning for the future.
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