The Position Myth - Part 2

From: Boss
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 7:49 PM
To: Me
Cc: HR Manager
Subject: RE: Opinion on "The Position Myth"

Hi Subordinate,

Thanks for your opinion.

Not disagreeing with what you have mentioned....but when you said TOP....what does it mean....meaning one is in a leadership position already? If so, then a team or project leader is in a leadership position.

In organisations, its very difficult to promote someone to the very TOP position eg General Mgr and then "demote" that person....that is very difficult for anyone to accept. (Not like politicians, which runs election every 5 years). Hence, usually, organisations would "test" one's leadership capabilities by empowering him or her to run projects or lead a small team. Once he has proven himself in terms of delivering the results -- both in terms of "hardware" and the "software", then we can say that he is really a Leader -- both in name and in substance.


Regards

Boss


===============================================================================
and my reply to the above email

From: Me
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 9:28 AM
To: Boss
Cc: HR Manager
Subject: RE: Opinion on "The Position Myth"


Hi Boss,

In my opinion, sometimes people get trapped into what I think as one of the greatest fallacies in leadership: the Initial Support must (and in extreme case, always) be coming from the bottom first. To put it in another way, I made a distinction between a profit organization and a country.

Again, like what I have said, at the end it needs to come from BOTH directions.

On the “demotion” issues, I think that really depends on the culture of the company, in a high-performance company (and under high-performance manager like Jack Welch) maybe there is no such thing called “demotion”, the person gets fired. I believe, people like Jack Welch is NOT everyone idol, ask those who were fired by him, ask those whose comfort zone has been taken away by him. For the same number of people who praised him, there could be an equal number of people who hate him. But for many, he is considered one of the greatest managers, why? I guess, at the end it is still the results and achievements that count.

I just asked myself, if Jack Welch did not bring continuous excellent growth to GE that made GE’s market capitalization bubbled up few times during his tenure, will anyone say he is one of greatest managers and that he has a good team leadership (keeping in mind that he had offended and fired many people too)?



Regards,
Me
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------