I am not going to generalize from myself, only think aloud. I think I could feel comfortable as a sidekick, but it seems like in many situations I don’t get this option.
Part of that is related to gender stereotypes: In the past, whenever I stopped being a leader in a relationship, my then girlfriend usually quickly replaced me with a guy who enjoyed that role. (I know there are also relationships with the opposite dynamic, but I never experienced one.) Another part is about money, which indirectly is also related to gender stereotypes: I feel a pressure to make a lot of money (maybe it’s just in my head, but so far I haven’t met any volunteer to pay my bills, so I treat it as real). Leaders make more money than sidekicks.
Sometimes I get into leading position by being the first one or among the first ones who care about a problem. If there are other people interested in the position later, they usually easily succeed to push me away, because I am not good at status fights and I don’t enjoy them. Sometimes I am even happy that someone else took the role instead of me, although I may complain about some consequences later (such as completely losing the ability to influence things).
But this is all along one dimension. I would actually prefer a role of an expert: to be fully responsible for one aspect of the problem where I feel most competent, and leave other aspects to people who feel competent there. No a second-in-command, not a general-purpose assistant, but a domain expert: making decisions within my domain, and only providing suggestions elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t work this way. I understand that even with domain experts, there needs to be a role of a leader: someone to make decisions outside of domains of all experts, someone to decide situations where two experts disagree, someone to choose project priorities and budget, etc. But, as Dilbert has shown us is various colorful ways, it often ends by the leader questioning all decisions of the domain experts, effectively wasting their contributions. In open-source programming I usually took the role of a translator, sometimes of an internationalization expert.
I think I am an egalitarian by nature. I am not professing a political opinion here; it’s simply how I naturally behave unless forced to act otherwise. Sometimes it seems like people really don’t understand this: they instinctively understand the roles of the master and of the slave. (Ironically, even people who publicly profess equality often have strict hierarchies; just different than their perceived enemies.) It’s probably a very strong human instinct. And there are the few weird people where this instinct somehow fails; they passionately refuse to be slaves, so they are pattern-matched to masters, but they also fail to behave like real masters, which confuses and irritates the others. On the other hand, I suspect that egalitarianism doesn’t scale well. So, my optimal role would probably be a member of a small group of equals; a specialist at some domain.
I am not going to generalize from myself, only think aloud. I think I could feel comfortable as a sidekick, but it seems like in many situations I don’t get this option.
Part of that is related to gender stereotypes: In the past, whenever I stopped being a leader in a relationship, my then girlfriend usually quickly replaced me with a guy who enjoyed that role. (I know there are also relationships with the opposite dynamic, but I never experienced one.) Another part is about money, which indirectly is also related to gender stereotypes: I feel a pressure to make a lot of money (maybe it’s just in my head, but so far I haven’t met any volunteer to pay my bills, so I treat it as real). Leaders make more money than sidekicks.
Sometimes I get into leading position by being the first one or among the first ones who care about a problem. If there are other people interested in the position later, they usually easily succeed to push me away, because I am not good at status fights and I don’t enjoy them. Sometimes I am even happy that someone else took the role instead of me, although I may complain about some consequences later (such as completely losing the ability to influence things).
But this is all along one dimension. I would actually prefer a role of an expert: to be fully responsible for one aspect of the problem where I feel most competent, and leave other aspects to people who feel competent there. No a second-in-command, not a general-purpose assistant, but a domain expert: making decisions within my domain, and only providing suggestions elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t work this way. I understand that even with domain experts, there needs to be a role of a leader: someone to make decisions outside of domains of all experts, someone to decide situations where two experts disagree, someone to choose project priorities and budget, etc. But, as Dilbert has shown us is various colorful ways, it often ends by the leader questioning all decisions of the domain experts, effectively wasting their contributions. In open-source programming I usually took the role of a translator, sometimes of an internationalization expert.
I think I am an egalitarian by nature. I am not professing a political opinion here; it’s simply how I naturally behave unless forced to act otherwise. Sometimes it seems like people really don’t understand this: they instinctively understand the roles of the master and of the slave. (Ironically, even people who publicly profess equality often have strict hierarchies; just different than their perceived enemies.) It’s probably a very strong human instinct. And there are the few weird people where this instinct somehow fails; they passionately refuse to be slaves, so they are pattern-matched to masters, but they also fail to behave like real masters, which confuses and irritates the others. On the other hand, I suspect that egalitarianism doesn’t scale well. So, my optimal role would probably be a member of a small group of equals; a specialist at some domain.