Deprived Boston sports fan

Recently, I've come to the realization that the company in which I'm working for is currently mired in office politics. This isn't your usual, typical office politics however. In the normal form, co-workers typically compete against each other in order to climb up the power ladder, creating a rift in the team and becoming completely counter-productive. As I said in the beginning however, this is not your usual office politics dynamic.

In this case, the team is fully united and committed to accomplishing a project. There is no in-fighting amongst the peers. Everyone on the team looks out for one another and we don't try to make others look bad for the sake of personal glory. There is one glaring weakness to this team however, the lack of a good leader.

A good leader should possess at least these qualities: organizational skills, experience from the ground-up, flexibility, accountability for their own actions, and loyalty to their team.

Apologies to my colleagues who are reading this, because I know I promised not to rant as much about the job anymore, but believe me, this rant has more to do with standing up for our team rather than just bashing the boss. The current leader of our team does indeed possess organizational skills, experience in the field, and flexibility (to a point). However, accountability and loyalty are qualities that he does not seem to view as important.

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when our leader delivers a speech to the entire team and begins by saying, "Currently, I am working on a major project to be finalized in..." Amazing. He has single-handedly taken all of the credit for the hours and effort that our team put in to the project without acknowledging that we even had anything to do with it all. The truth is, 99% percent of the project was written, created, tested, and edited by our team. Our leader puts in 1% of effort, and the project is his now.

On the subject of accountability, our leader has shown great skills in avoiding blame when things goes wrong with certain projects. For example, last year's project went very well and everything was clicking smoothly, with the exception of one mistake in the transportation of essential materials. Our leader's response? "Well, you should have taken the materials with you earlier last week." Although he said that, he forgot to mention that the materials were not completed yet at that time. Secondly, he promised us that the materials would be delivered on time. Still, not one apology was issued and he managed to put the blame on our team for his shortcoming.

First and foremost, I would like to express my graditude to our team for being exceptionally classy in the face of a classless leader. My loyalty goes to our team and I truly feel that our team does not get the respect that we should. In the meantime, let's keep taking the high-road and don't let things reduce us to the level of our leader.