How to Deal with (Incompetent) Student Leaders
Monday, October 13, 2008 by Kelly Sutton College is weird. College is weird in more ways than one. It's especially unique in that students can ascend the student job ranks to relatively high-paying positions with little or no prior experience. Or sometimes they just take their Glee Club treasurer position a little too seriously. Inherent in the concept of leadership is a lack of experience and an amount of incompetence. That's okay, we're students. We're supposed to learn, but improvement is necessary.
At one point or another--provided you aren't an engineering major that is working 'round the clock on homework--you will have a run-in with a terrible superior that is also your peer. After discussing the topic with a friend, we figured the problems with student leadership boil down to two things: communication and ego.
Communication
For how connected students are these days, it's remarkable how often miscommunication occurs.
Almost every student organization loses steam beginning about the fifth week into the term. I'm proposing that this is entirely the fault of a lack of communication. Around the fifth week, organizations without tight communication begin to slowly unwind. The goals set that first week get forgotten. Everyone runs around like a self-serving headless chicken.
Connecting the Lines
The key--in my experience--for successful communication is to keep it concise, relevant and constant.
For concision, keep emails to a maximum of 5 lines and limit yourself to only a few per day to each person. Word counts should be less than 200.
Keep communication relevant. Each email or message sent should have one topic. Write a clear subject line. Given the growing paradigm of search over organization (i.e. I search for emails rather than go poking around in dozens of folders), concise emails with relevant subjects and key phrases insure effective communication and quick retrieval of old information.
Without constant communication, an organization loses steam. People need reminders of goals and milestones to be reached of each campaign. Establishing a reliable (and sensical) method of communication early is key. Weekly "in real life" meetings aren't the answer. Why meet if there isn't a reason to?
A great solution for communication for my own personal endeavors has been religious use of BaseCamp, the Web 2.0 project management software. Check it out.
Ego
Straight up: students seem more susceptible to ego-inflation, especially for positions that he or she has been voted into. Because a certain leader garnered 51% of the students that bothered to vote, that leader suddenly believes that she possesses a God-given mandate to execute upon each idea on her platform.
Sooner or later, ego begins to trump accountability and organization. Feelings start to get hurt. People start leaving the organization. If an unbridled egomaniac runs wild for long enough, the entire entity comes undone.
Deflate that Balloon
There's not much you can do to deflate someone's inflated ego without organizing some intervention worthy of an MTV special. The best you can do is to protect yourself from being bullied.
My personal method of handling this is to let my superiors know that I need at least a 48-hour warning to complete anything. Even if my week is more open than Linux, I still hold myself and others to a 48-hour cutoff.
Why? Without such a system in place, you start becoming the personal assistant to anyone that needs work done for them. It might not be a problem at first, but soon you will find yourself overwhelmed with work you shouldn't be doing.
Stay tuned for a post dealing with those incompetent leaders that never graduated.
How do you deal with incompetent superiors? Let us know in a comment (or two)!
Reader Comments (44)
A perspective from the other side - Here are few tips I find useful in being a student leader.
A. Be respectful of your peers who elected you. They will only comply to your your decisions as a leader if you take into account their feelings. Don't Be A Prick.
B. Serve your fellow members. When they see that you are working for their benefit, they will be infinitely more accepting of your efforts. A Leader Must First Be A Servant
C. Motivate properly. Show people that the ideas you present will benefit them, and not through punishment or criticism. People Only Act When It Benefits #1.
I am a House Manager in a Fraternity. AKA, I have to get 50 college guys to clean stuff. These axioms have served me well. Best of luck!
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Basecamp is good at project management.
Though if you are really interested in collaborative project management I'd recommend you to try Task2Gather. It is reasonably priced and has all necessary features for collaboratin. It also has iPhone client and WM client is about to be released.
I don't have time to tell the whole story. But at my university we've had a big problem with lack of involvement in Student Government. Last year, some dude got in office, and gave the majority of student funds to his fraternity(that he was also president of), and other really frustrating things. I caught wind of the situation, started poking around the SG website, to see exactly what was going on, through bills in the Senate and things. Once I got all the information together... I told as many people as I could to attend the next public forum with our Chancellor, and I let the SG president and other officers in the organization have it in front of the student body, and administrators present. It actually caused some reform to happen, and now this year we have decent leaders in SG. Sometimes you just have to let incompetent leaders know that you are actually paying attention.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on dealing with incompetent student delegates; how to get people to attend meetings, check email, focus on a deadline and actively involve themselves in decision making. I'm studying engineering which is supposedly great if you want to create graduates with 'a logical approach' to problem solving. My experience with group projects has shown me that once students are turned into these logical creatures, they lose all their creativity. Worse still, they are far too happy to critique your suggestions and far too reluctant to submit their own.
[...] How to deal with incompetent student leaders. [...]
You have no idea how much I needed this post.
Incompetent leaders? It happens. But if a person is reasonable and will listen to constructive criticism as well as possible solutions then it's almost always possible to rectify any problems. But that does suppose that everyone else is competent too; or even that anyone else is. So the real question probably should be: is everyone else competent or most every one else? And how do you know? Or is it just one person or a few people who can't seem to figure it out? And is that person YOU?!!!
But let's face it. Sometimes ego gets in the way of reason where an egomaniac simply won't (and can't) listen to reason or apply it. And when confronted by an unreasonable egomaniac there's really only one solution -- beat their a$$ (mentally, at least)! It's also unfortunate these unreasonable egomaniacs are often spoiled CHILDREN or the mental equivalent of a spoiled child who has had too much power for far too long too. And isn't THAT what we're really talking about here? Power intoxication causing an inflated ego combined with a lack of knowledge?
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