My day job is, essentially, “grunt”. I work with about 30 other people. I can immediately think of two leader-types among the grunts—three if I count someone who recently quit. I used to work a different shift, and there were no leader-types among the grunts there. There are a few more people who I’m pretty sure could be leader-types if they wanted to, but don’t want to.
Small sample size, I know, but one ought to test these things against daily life, and by that test 1⁄30 seems to be in the right ballpark.
That said, things like grunt jobs and (I assume; I’ve never played any) MMORPGs probably lend themselves more easily to leadership opportunities than things like rationality—there are different sorts of leadership called for.
In the one case, there are concrete and well-defined goals to be met, and there’s domain-specific knowledge accumulated mostly through experience that needs to be applied in order to meet those goals, and leadership entails being generally recognized as 1) having a sufficient accumulation of domain-specific knowledge to know what has to be done to meet those goals, know what to do in most situations that will arise, and probably be able to figure something out in most of the rest of the situations, 2) not a prick.
In the other case… I’m not really sure what leadership in the ratsphere calls for, but it’s probably not that. For one thing, we don’t have concrete and well-defined operational goals; for another thing, we don’t even have much general agreement on _strategic_ goals, although there are subsets of the ratsphere that do.
My day job is, essentially, “grunt”. I work with about 30 other people. I can immediately think of two leader-types among the grunts—three if I count someone who recently quit. I used to work a different shift, and there were no leader-types among the grunts there. There are a few more people who I’m pretty sure could be leader-types if they wanted to, but don’t want to.
Small sample size, I know, but one ought to test these things against daily life, and by that test 1⁄30 seems to be in the right ballpark.
That said, things like grunt jobs and (I assume; I’ve never played any) MMORPGs probably lend themselves more easily to leadership opportunities than things like rationality—there are different sorts of leadership called for.
In the one case, there are concrete and well-defined goals to be met, and there’s domain-specific knowledge accumulated mostly through experience that needs to be applied in order to meet those goals, and leadership entails being generally recognized as 1) having a sufficient accumulation of domain-specific knowledge to know what has to be done to meet those goals, know what to do in most situations that will arise, and probably be able to figure something out in most of the rest of the situations, 2) not a prick.
In the other case… I’m not really sure what leadership in the ratsphere calls for, but it’s probably not that. For one thing, we don’t have concrete and well-defined operational goals; for another thing, we don’t even have much general agreement on _strategic_ goals, although there are subsets of the ratsphere that do.