John N. N. Ng'ang'a

A Leader's Work Ethic

A leader’s work ethics will determine the extent of success of the group or project he is leading. In addition, how he leads will also determine the degree to which the group or project either succeeds, or fails.

One of the difficulties of supervising work is encountered in the area of delegation. You delegate work, only to find out at the end that the person you delegated to did not understand your instructions, or maybe did not take the instructions seriously. The person might be a malingerer, one who doesn’t take work seriously, or he might be a relative of your boss, meaning that your hands are tied; you can neither discipline him nor fire him, unless you want to be fired yourself!

Any project that you work on will only succeed if you learn how to manage the challenge of effective delegation. You will never be able to achieve your group goals until you know how to handle such kind of people. 
You might be hardworking as a leader, but that is not enough, because you cannot do all the work by yourself, when you have tens or hundreds of staff or workers who are supposed to make their input. Even if you decide to work for twenty four hours, without sleeping, there is no way you can do it and complete it alone. You can only do so together with the other people on your team. That is what leadership calls for.

And Moses' father in law said unto him, The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone.
Exodus 18:17-18

If you have been a successful worker, used to doing things and taking pride in what you have produced, working through others could end up making you feel like a failure. The problem in this case might not be that the person you delegated to did not take the work seriously; he took it seriously and worked hard at it, but because he did not get back to you while he was doing the work to find out if what he was doing was the right thing, when the work got finished, it turned out differently from what you wanted!

Have you met people like that? They do not like consulting. They believe as soon as you instruct them, you should wait for the product. They say, ‘I am not a fool, sir. I know what you told me. I can do it.’ Whenever you ask them if they have any problem, the answer you get is, ‘no problem.’ Three days later or three weeks later, the job is complete, but it is a different thing from the one that you told him to make. You wanted him to make a car, but he made an aeroplane. He is very proud of himself. For sure he can score an ‘A’ for effort, but zero for the product, because that is not what you wanted.

This is a difficult type of teammate, one that you cannot blame fully. What you need to do is to figure out how to get him to channel his efforts appropriately so that you get the results you want from him. But until that happens, you as a leader will not achieve what your department wanted to achieve through him.

A third problem you might encounter when leading a project involves being given a task to execute which, unfortunately, you do not understand. It might be that you do not understand what the Board wants, or maybe technically you are not qualified to deal with it, yet you are the boss. How do you explain something you do not understand? So the problem in this case is not the subordinates, but the leader. Here, you are part of the problem. Very few of us have the humility to admit to our subordinates, ‘I do not understand this project, so let us try to decipher it together.’

If you do that, you will be the subject of discussion in every gathering involving your subordinates that evening. They will report, “You know my boss gave me a job he does not understand. I am teaching him. He must have been promoted by his cousin. Why did they give him a big office when he does not know the work he is supposed to do?”

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