"It amazes me that you can write an article on leadership and include words like superior and subordinate!! How do you build trust, enable and engage your team when you call them subordinate/less than equal?"

This was a comment to an article I wrote on motivation. To be honest, I have struggled for a long time to find a good way to represent the boss - worker relationship, but the correct words seem to be more related to the context than anything else. In that case subordinate was appropriate. But, all that aside, it's the second part of this comment that bears some consideration. The concept of equality has become very closely related to self-esteem; if everyone isn't treated equally, they will feel less self-worth. That's very unfortunate!

This desire for equality has led to some pretty ludicrous behaviors. For instance, consider the practice of telling everyone in the meeting they are equal participants. The facilitator tells everyone that they have an equal voice and while that guy over there may be the boss, today he or she is just another person in the room. Yea right. The only one in the room who might actually believe that is the somewhat naïve boss.

How did we get to this point? There's an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. At some point American society (this isn't always as true in other countries) decided that it really mattered what people thought of themselves, especially at a young age. While that may be true, as a society we began to focus on making people feel good about themselves at the expense of honesty and reality and, in the process, we perverted the concept of self-esteem. My favorite example is youth sports where supposedly no one is keeping score. I can assure you that while there may not be an official score keeper, there are certainly two groups of people who know exactly who's winning and losing: the kids, and the parents.

Why am I making such a point of this? Simply because this idea of everybody wins, no one loses, everyone's equal, protect self-esteem at all costs can make for a dysfunctional workplace. Let's examine that from two different points of view.

First, though there are exceptions, most supervisors, managers, and leaders have earned their position through superior knowledge, hard work, or a combination of the two. They have additional responsibility, and often the stress that goes with it.

Second, workers are responsible for their jobs and do not experience the stress of being responsible for others, making big decisions, or dealing with crises.

So, they are unequal; however, that doesn't make one better than the other. This is a critical point. Unfortunately, some who have attained a higher position begin to believe they are better than those who haven't. It is a leadership development responsibility to yank these people off their pedestals and help them realize they are not in the position because they are better, but because the organization expects more from them. Those subordinate to them are critical to the organization's success and therefore need their support, not disdain. Likewise, workers who are not in leadership roles must know they are important to the organization, but they do not have the same level of responsibility as their leaders. Those leaders have additional responsibility and authority, but that doesn't make them better people.

Everyone in the workplace is not equal, but no one is better either. Do the leaders in your organization clearly understand this?

PLAN - LEAD - EXCEL