Trust me, I've looked.
Even today I still get twitchy whenever someone else is left in charge of a situation I’m heavily involved in. I have always been a bit of a control freak, and my decision to go to a middle school where over sixty-percent of projects were group-based wasn’t exactly the smartest decision I’d ever made. In the seventh grade for example, I was working on a group project where we were instructed to design a robot and have it compete in a “robot showdown” along with all of the other groups. I wasn’t exactly familiar with my group members, as they pulled students from different classes to form each individual team. As was to be expected, I ended up pulling most of the weight in our group.
However, I was not “the leader.”
Instead, I had been chosen as the designer, which fitted me best because of my obvious love for drawing and all things art. Nevertheless, I still was not happy with our group’s appointed leader, Tanner. Now, I didn’t have a problem with this Tanner kid on a personal level, but the way he handled his tasks stressed me out. It was frustrating to watch him make these silly blunders (such as making mistakes when tallying inventory, repeatedly stepping on the robot’s key components, etcetera) and not have the power to fix everything he was doing. After biting his head off for, I don’t know, possibly the 247 time, our teacher came over to me and told me not to worry about Tanner’s contributions. She explained to me that one of the main purposes of the project was to expose us to life in a workplace, where people can easily be placed with a complete moron—like Tanner—in charge. This helped me realize that there will always be points in life where I have to rely on others for support, and I won’t always have control over every little thing. Focusing only on my own task at hand, I continued to work hard at completing our robot, and it turns out all of our hard work paid off when our robot actually won the showdown. Through winning, I realized that by fretting over Tanner’s duties distracted me from my own. However, once I got my act together and focused solely on my own contributions, our group was able to progress at a much faster rate. This tiny triumph also proved to me that I had been stressing out over nothing, as Tanner still managed to pull through in the end.
Lesson Learned:
If someone else is in charge, let them take care of leadership tasks and don’t stress over the quality of their performance. Being supportive is one thing, but trying to take over someone else’s position is nothing but a hindrance to a group’s efforts.
