When I Grow Up I Want to Be A Master

When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"
#17, Tao Te Ching

I noticed that Nipun said (tongue in cheek) when he grew up he wanted to be a sage. When I grow up I want to be a master - as defined above.

When I was 17 years old I founded my high school's Pep Club [if no idea what I'm referring to, here's are a few photos for context] . One of my teachers was new to our school and described the Pep Club from her previous school. One thing led to another and she became the advisor and I became the first president.

Within a few short weeks we had well over 100 students eagerly signed up and ready to go with getting everything they needed to get their uniforms in order before football season begun. The kids were pretty enthusiastic in the beginning - there was lots to do - paint banners for the football game, learn new cheers for the pep rallies and games, sell T-shirts as fundraisers, arrange carpools to the games and the pizza parlours apres, etc.

I realize now that people join something like a Pep Club to feel part of something bigger - in this case to belong to a group of like-minded folks having fun and promoting school spirit. Not everyone gets an opportunity to be out on the field as a football player, or cheerleader or majorette - this is a more inclusive way to contribute and feel a part of the energy of your school at a football game and other athletic events.

By the end of the school year, the enthusiasm had dwindled and the club was nearly extinct. What had happened?

I was not a very good leader, much less a master. I didn't have a lot of self-confidence myself nor trust in others.

I didn't give the other kids a chance to initiate and run their own projects, do their own things, plug into the Pep Club deeper and make it their own. As Valdis Krebs related last week at the KM Cluster on Enterprise Social Network Analysis (next Dec 3) he found that minorities and women in corporate organizations are often "outliers" in a corporate social network and thus their commitment to feeling part of the organization is on the line - literally. They're not embraced into the network enough to be central within it - so they don't feel a part of it either.

It was my show. My baby. At the core, I didn't think anyone else would or could care as much as I would. It's goes beyond mere delegation - although at times that is called for as well - but an assigned task from the president doesn't necessarily give one a sense of authorship and ownership either. I guess lurking under all this I didn't believe anyone else would do as good a job as I could.

He [Peter Drucker] was speaking to a group of senior level executives and he asked them to raise their hands if there was a lot of "dead wood" in their companies. Many in the audience raised their hands. He then responded, "Were the people dead wood when you interviewed them and decided to hire them or did they become dead wood? - Maslow on Management

If you noted a twinge of sorrow it's not about the Pep Club - that was a long long time ago and the past is past and I've integrated that lesson - but it's the sadness that witnessing eerily familiar scenarios recreated over and over that lingers.

The lesson here is if you are must be a Theory X manager [note I don't say leader] you might want to get it out of your system as early in your life as possible. But you don't just don a Theory Y management style. Both Theory X and Theory Y are core beliefs about people that goes deep into the marrow of our being. These are fundamentally different ways of perceiving and relating to the world.

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer... - Peter Drucker

The key question now is given my years of wisdom, what would I do differently (um, that's assuming that I have clear sense that the Pep Club presidency is what I ought to be doing) today:

1. I'd start by writing a compelling and magnetic manifesto - a public declaration - of what the Pep Club is to find aligned people that resonate with its mission. A few of the girls in particular that joined were in all honesty hoping this would be as magical in the dating department as cheerleading - and their enthusiasm waned when they realized this wasn't quite on par with cheerleading in the eyes of the football players. The manifesto would help to lay out what we're about - and facilitate a match. We're about this - if you resonate, you're invited to join.
   
2. I'd use Civic Space, Meetup, SMS, wikis, moblogs - whatever to communicate and coordinate - and also to allow others to set up their own groups within the meta-group called the Pep Club. I don't really recall exact numbers but we did have somewhere between one to two hundred members - too many to juggle for a 17-year-old - and I didn't know many of them personally. Something like CivicSpace would provide a platform to allow the members to self-organize into sub-projects around ideas that had never occured to me. Imagine that. The social network would be dense with connections and interactions and projects spontaneously occuring. And the core projects that a Pep Club was created to do in first place would be enhanced with feedback from a wider set of people than just my core group (quite often me, myself, and I).
   
3. Don't misunderstand. This is NOT about the tools. I agree with Ross Mayfield whom said at last week's Future Salon that the effects of costs for group-forming and publishing falling significantly are great and unprecedented. He hinted that the tools do require a different mindset. If your mental model hasn't expanded - these tools will remain largely untapped because you haven't tapped into the hearts and souls and creative capacity of people. It's a conviction...or not. The tools are that - tools.
   
4. I'd be less about the answers. I'd throw out more questions. Good questions: What ifs...? How can we....? And I'd let the answers echo.
   
5. I'd just chill a lot more. I wouldn't take it all so seriously. I'd allow flowers to blossom instead of prying apart the buds. Less doing - more being.
   
6. I'd demonstrate complete rational faith in other's creativity, enthusiasm, and self-motivation. They joined of their own volition to be part of something, to create something together, have fun together. Together. Not mine - ours. This is most important of all the points and it alone can work miracles.
   

We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and of love. - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving