Thoughts on Groups and Leadership

-Never order someone to do something you will not do yourself. Once my commander, a Major, cleaned up human feces with an e tool because he wouldn’t order anyone else to do it.

-Following on the first point never give an order you do not think there is a good chance your people will follow. Either you seem out of touch or like a complete a hole for no reason, neither of which is good. Also when they inevitably fail to follow the order you knew they probably wouldn’t follow the options are to punish them, which is stupid, or ignore, which makes you look weak are both bad.

-Delegation is an interesting thing. As a leader at almost any level you simply cannot personally do everything that must be done. That being said you can delegate authority but not responsibility. In plain language that means someone can act on your behalf to get something done but if they mess up it’s still on you.

-My general belief on delegation is that people should focus on doing stuff they can do which others cannot. People should pass the things others can do onto those folks.

-Of course you need to figure out what people are capable of when handing out tasks. Even if they want to do the right thing (which they generally do) asking folks to do something they can’t just doesn’t work. If I was given the task to write a code for a computer or rebuild the engine on a vehicle I would almost surely fail, because those tasks are outside of my skill set. Furthermore leaders should, whenever possible, have people do things they are interested in. Even if it causes some shuffling of other things if you have folks do stuff they are interested in they will do better and everything goes well.

-The preparedness/ survivalism scene is full of people who want to be the leader but absent people who want to be led. Every yahoo wants to be the Chief but nobody wants to be an Indian.

-Leading people without a readily apparent extrinsic (money, etc all) motivator is a hassle. Honestly I don’t envy ‘leaders’ in preparedness/ survivalism. Aside from the fact that they are herding cats, they have to figure out how to create intrinsic motivation in people to get them to do stuff. Leading a bunch of cats by consensus in an environment where you have no stock and an iffy carrot would suck.

-In a decent sized group peer pressure is a hell of a thing.