Leaders

If you want to be treated like a leader, BE a leader!

I may be just an engineer, and the general perception of engineers are people who will work and work and work to solve a problem, will not be very interested in dealing with people, etc.

But just because your title is "engineer", it doesn't stop you from exploring other avenues of growth. Take challenges to lead work teams. Learn management and leadership skills from books, mentors and training workshops. Assume leadership roles whenever difficult situations are presented. Learning how to cope with disaster is key toward effective leadership.

Pretty soon, even though your title is "engineer", people will naturally come to you for guidance, leadership and decisions. You no longer have to work and work and work to solve a problem. You need to make the right decisions in order to make the work happen!

Of course there will be people perfectly contented with being the worker. That is not bad at all; in fact, without workers, a world full of leaders will run into chaos and unproductiveness.

For me? I do like to work. I like to analyse, dwell into the intricacies of problems and solutions, find ways to tackle different situations. But thinking from a different perspective, assuming the leadership role is also work! It's working with people, it's motivating people, it's ensuring that the workers do the work! When you see it from this point of view, nobody has the right to criticize leaders for not doing any of the hard work. Because the most difficult work is to correctly and efficiently assigning work to the correct workers. The most demanding task of a leader is to make right decisions and learn to improvise should the decision backfire.

The most important thing a leader should be is "confident and decisive". Amidst a swarm of engineers who can prescribe 1001 ways of solving a problem, we need ONE good leader to choose ONE good solution and make it happen!