You must have heard of this PUSH and PULL way of leading people. It's said that pull way is good way of leadership. But believe me, it turns out to be disastrous when not done the right way. In this post I will discuss what 'I think is the right way'. This may not apply everywhere precisely and is only for your consideration, when you are in dilemma to choose amongst many.
PUSH WAY of getting things done - when you are responsible for getting something done and you have people to actually execute the task, you order them to do this, this and this. And then you are gone. May be you will monitor every now and then and you will push them again and again to complete it. This is push way.
PULL WAY of getting things done - when you are responsible for getting something done and you have people to actually execute the task, you sit with them, you plan things out about how we all can do this together and how the tasks can be split assigned, etc. And most importantly you also participate in doing things than just monitoring the task and deliverable.
These ways have been pictured as follows.
In the push way it's not right to call you a leader. But let's keep that debate aside and assume that we have accepted the PULL way of leadership.
What is shown in the second picture - the one at the bottom - is a leadership way of doing things and we call it as the Pull way. The other one is the Boss way or we call it as the Push way. But wait, before you conclude and decide to follow what has been depicted, please give a though to another aspects of the same which may give you clarity on how you can implement the pull way right.
The problem with micro level participation of leader in doing the things can be seriously problematic in some cases. Following is a list of such scenarios
PUSH WAY of getting things done - when you are responsible for getting something done and you have people to actually execute the task, you order them to do this, this and this. And then you are gone. May be you will monitor every now and then and you will push them again and again to complete it. This is push way.
PULL WAY of getting things done - when you are responsible for getting something done and you have people to actually execute the task, you sit with them, you plan things out about how we all can do this together and how the tasks can be split assigned, etc. And most importantly you also participate in doing things than just monitoring the task and deliverable.
These ways have been pictured as follows.
In the push way it's not right to call you a leader. But let's keep that debate aside and assume that we have accepted the PULL way of leadership.
What is shown in the second picture - the one at the bottom - is a leadership way of doing things and we call it as the Pull way. The other one is the Boss way or we call it as the Push way. But wait, before you conclude and decide to follow what has been depicted, please give a though to another aspects of the same which may give you clarity on how you can implement the pull way right.
The problem with micro level participation of leader in doing the things can be seriously problematic in some cases. Following is a list of such scenarios
- Leader decides to share equal load of pull as that of other members. Remember that leader is not responsible for just this one task. He has to be busy with many other tasks of importance. In such cases leaders trying to carry out equal load as that of members is a dangerous sign. He may not get enough time to devote to this and ultimately the task may fail. To make this work you must be a superman.
- Leader tries to carry out similar tasks as that of the others. Be it small or big load, any load similar to others, will expect leader to perform better than others or at least as good as others. Actually his performance decides the success or failure of the task. As leader is not doing just this one task and has many other responsibilities he obviously, will be slow with his portion. Now somehow this becomes an excuse for others to go at slower pace. People may not do it intentionally. But somewhere the delays don't get discouraged because the leader himself isn't meeting the deadlines. He becomes the benchmark, which is wrong. Again, you should avoid this unless you are a superman.
- Leader enforces transparent update strategy across the hierarchies. This is strategy is choice of many pull leaders. Somehow they think everybody is equal. So everybody's progress is made visible to everyone. Believe me, this transparency may lead to failure. Everywhere while carrying out responsibilities people don't look at who all are doing better than them. They mostly look at who all they are better than. So bench mark isn't the best, surprisingly it's the worst.
- Leader combines pull and push. Many a times when leader tries to make it pull. As it isn't possible every time, intermittently he applies the push. This combination of pull and push makes member to disbelieve leader. This disbelief is vicious circle. They all end up disbelieving each other. Ultimately task leads to failure.
So you may ask - what is the right way to apply the Pull? Yes, the Pull is good way to execute things. But the leader should not 'really' pull the rope. If he pulls, his rope pulling shouldn't be measured. His efforts shouldn't be part of any estimate. His task is to enable and direct. He should just do that and stand by the members irrespective of what happens. His monitoring should be precise and in the best interest of task at hand. He should expect and not extort.
Following depict the right way of Pull. Here he is part of the task, he is carrying out one of the tasks, but not exactly what others are doing. If the boat is moving slowly, he isn't the one responsible directly, actually he is not even being monitored on the same scale as that of others. Here the leader is responsible to LEAD and not to DO.
- Prakash Pimpale | pbpimpale @ Google's mail service.
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