Of course, I can always choose to let it go. But I decided to take it personally because it challenges one major principle which I’ve long been holding onto: Productivity does not always equate to being seen as busy.
Okay, just a short story: People, in real life, knows how my leadership style is. While I am a professional yapper most times, I have often received feedback about how I just let my colleagues do their own thing to achieve the goals we set together. My style is I just lay out the plans, tell everyone what I want to happen, and then let them all take the wheel. And then, I’ll just be out there monitoring from time to time, making sure no one’s going astray and then throw out advices here and there.
You see, we were not given the most intelligent brains out of all creations for nothing. Human beings are born to think; and for us, who chose to stand as leaders, we are given the responsibility to hone and allow our fellow thinkers to be able to do so. This way, we can eradicate laziness and slacking - because trust me, in my years of leading volunteers, this is how I managed to encourage them to perform and commit even without getting paid.
Now, do I set a timeline? Yes! We all have deadlines. The pressure will always be there. But as I’ve said, if you allow people to think and do things the way they do; as long as they get things done, how they are seen during work hours should not matter. If my teammates prefer to act on the tasks at once and complete it earlier than expected, thank you! But if they prefer to cram and work on things last minute, as long as the deadline’s met, then so be it!
Many traditional leaders would think that this could encourage laziness, but honestly, this works well because I understand that it’s not all the time that people’s mind work at its best. We all have moments. We all have our downtime - and as a leader, I know fully well that I have to respect that.
If the teammate eventually turns lazy and a task gets compromised, then that’s the time that I have to step up. After all, I’m the leader. I should know what to do in case things go south, and in fact, I should know even before things fall apart.
Going back… I’m not saying I am better than the boss who apparently accused us for doing nothing. It’s just that I cannot help but establish a point of comparison because I don’t feel like we were given a fair assessment, especially that for the past months, we had to settle things for the company on our own because we were left to fend for ourselves alone.
As indignant as I felt, I still tried to look back to somehow try to understand where that kind of feedback came from. And looking at us from a bird’s eye view, yes, we can easily be misconstrued as slacking. We often go out for lunch, never had a dull moment, and are performing on other co-curricular activities for the company. So yes, it’s easy to judge and assume that we’re really not doing anythingwhen at work.
The thing is… it only means one thing to me: The boss (and all the other people who think the same) just does not understand the nature of our job. And as someone who should be on top of everything, that is saying something.
This is not about defending our unit. This is more like expressing my realizations that there are still a lot of supposed leaders in the corporate world who think that productivity always equates to being seen as busy. To be honest, I don’t see them a leaders at all. They’re just that - bosses.
It’s not our fault that we were a bunch of efficient office workers. It’s not our fault that we were trained well to complete tasks within the day. And it’s completely and downright unfair when we are judged of not doing anything when our jobs are totally dependent on our counterparts.
But are we slacking? No. We have side tasks, of course. In fact, we’re using this downtime to iron a lot of things out for the company. So to say we’re doing nothing basically raises a bigger question: Why doesn’t he know what his team’s up to? A leader should be on top of everything, right? Why isn’t he?
It’s 2025 soon and maybe I’ll carry this annoyance to the next year as a motivation to maybe, be a little louder with what we do. Maybe that’s the problem from our side - we tend to work things on our own and just keep people updated via emails and meetings. So I realized that maybe it’s time to put myself more out there and you know, present bigger evidences that we are indeed working.
This is me being petty, I think, but I consider it necessary already. After all, a leader should know how to adjust - and yes, this is me promising to do just that.
