Spring Break
The importance of leadership and accountability
Chris Topham
Issue date: 11/14/08 Section: Forum
Do you ever have those days when you feel like the boat left and you weren't on it?
One of the hardest things to do in life is admit when you're wrong. However, following closely in second is changing somebody else's opinion of you if you are right but are perceived to be wrong.
There are few things that are more despised in the military than a comrade who jumps ship when the going gets rough or someone who rushes to call in sick right before some type of ,rigorous training. These are tell-tale signs of a soldier who won't have your back in a firefight. Unfortunately, there are times when luck runs out and a good soldier falls to these circumstances just by chance, and it is times like these that the true character of that dodgy individual comes into play.
Any leader worth their salt will not take a sick individual and thrust upon them the full force of his or her job. Be it in the military, sports or even in the medical field, the job to be performed is usually designed to take the full ability of a well-trained, able-bodied professional to handle the tasks assigned.
You would never trust a teacher with the flu to grade 100 midterms correctly, much as you would never ask a firefighter with a broken hand to be the first person into a burning building. Yet there are those individuals who "fake the funk" to get out of something they really do not want to do. These people give every other legitimate person with an ailment a bad name.
I write this because we are a society of labels, and once we are assigned one we find it hard to shake it. No matter who we are or where we go, we will find this to be true. Everybody knows the "teacher's pet" when they see it, much as nobody misses the hard worker. Labels are not always harmful, but sometimes they take away from the actual reality surrounding the individual. The point of the matter is that nobody is ever how we imagine them to be, or how we are told they are, when all of our knowledge is based on labels and generalizations. Facts differ from opinions and beliefs so greatly that I have sometimes wondered how many times they can be mixed up. However, sometimes an opinion could be so close to a fact that they seem identical except for one small detail somewhere.
One of the hardest things to do in life is admit when you're wrong. However, following closely in second is changing somebody else's opinion of you if you are right but are perceived to be wrong.
There are few things that are more despised in the military than a comrade who jumps ship when the going gets rough or someone who rushes to call in sick right before some type of ,rigorous training. These are tell-tale signs of a soldier who won't have your back in a firefight. Unfortunately, there are times when luck runs out and a good soldier falls to these circumstances just by chance, and it is times like these that the true character of that dodgy individual comes into play.
Any leader worth their salt will not take a sick individual and thrust upon them the full force of his or her job. Be it in the military, sports or even in the medical field, the job to be performed is usually designed to take the full ability of a well-trained, able-bodied professional to handle the tasks assigned.
You would never trust a teacher with the flu to grade 100 midterms correctly, much as you would never ask a firefighter with a broken hand to be the first person into a burning building. Yet there are those individuals who "fake the funk" to get out of something they really do not want to do. These people give every other legitimate person with an ailment a bad name.
I write this because we are a society of labels, and once we are assigned one we find it hard to shake it. No matter who we are or where we go, we will find this to be true. Everybody knows the "teacher's pet" when they see it, much as nobody misses the hard worker. Labels are not always harmful, but sometimes they take away from the actual reality surrounding the individual. The point of the matter is that nobody is ever how we imagine them to be, or how we are told they are, when all of our knowledge is based on labels and generalizations. Facts differ from opinions and beliefs so greatly that I have sometimes wondered how many times they can be mixed up. However, sometimes an opinion could be so close to a fact that they seem identical except for one small detail somewhere.
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