Sunday, May 2, 2010

Division of Labor

Leadership is a funny thing.

In the current context, it is vital. When you are out in the world, not surrounded by walls that keep out the undead, it can mean everything. Having a cool head when confronted by a swarm of zombies is essential; you may understand why I have a select group of people  that I choose to associate myself with in those types of situations.

Many of us have never encountered the real thing. Maybe military folks have, but I think that for the most part the rest of us have only ever had "leaders" who were in charge of us because of a superior position at a job, being an elected official (which equated, I think, to being a better liar than the other candidates...) or some other factor that took the choice of who would lead away from those being led.

I have always felt that being a leader of people meant more. That it was imperative to gain trust, to set an example for others, so that they would follow you by choice, from respect, and not because some arbitrary set of rules helped you get lucky.

I was voted in, and by extension so was the committee that keeps me balanced. And soon, we might be voted out. It seems that our growing community has fallen victim to one of the oldest of society's stumbling blocks: a case of the have-nots.

Need an explanation? No problem.

You see, last night I fielded the idea to a great many folks about the possibility that those of us who have been actively coordinating all of the construction, farming, and other work going on around here doing that as full-time work. Or I should say, as our only full time work, since it takes up so much of our time. This was met with a pretty even split in opinion, with slightly more than half of the people in favor of it. But the problem I ran into wasn't whether or not John or Jane Doe was ok with this, it was that seemingly every person had some project or idea that they felt was vital to us.

But none of them had any idea how to accomplish them. Well, a few had some thoughts on that, but most didn't. The prevailing opinion was that it seemed pretty easy to do what we have been doing, planning and executing it all, and most of the people thought that it would be no more difficult to fulfill their ideas as well. The logistical nightmares we have been dealing with did not occur to them, because we haven't been shouting about them from the rooftops. We encounter a problem, and we solve it, because we HAVE to.

So now I have a ton of people getting pissed because I couldn't hand them promises, or because I had to explain why an idea they had wasn't feasible. Many grumbled, asking why we needed to have full-time jobs in running this place, if we weren't going to do what we were asked.

Maybe they will vote us out, that would be a nice break.

But we did make it official: I and my council (which is what the committee is now called; we have committees for individual projects now, the council oversees them all) are doing our jobs full-time. This pisses people off, but I really don't care. I won't allow the people that have been doing all of the work designing and implementing plans for our long-term survival to burn out from overwork. So we'll be busting ass to get as much done as we can in the shortest possible time, just in case they do kick us out of office.

Cheers!

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