OK, let me try to bring this back to the "approach" issue..............
I want to throw out a sort of made up term that I attribute to VATSIM....."leadership by coercion". VATSIM is an all volunteer organization. We all know this. But it is a distinction that makes it so much different than any of the management experience that most people have had. In the public and private sector, leadership is done to some extent with buy-in, but you always have 'leadership by decree' to fall back on. That doesn't exist here. Edicts without 'buy-in' are doomed to disaster whether they are good ideas or not. Volunteers have nothing more than a desire to serve keeping them in place, and once that begins to be eroded, the turnover will commence. It is not unique to VATSIM, all volunteer organizations experience it and I have dealt with it heavily first hand outside of this network. Participation has very natural, albeit at times steep, ebbs and flows, and I think that it is extremely important to recognize that volunteer management is the inverse of the norm.
In volunteer management, the top truly needs the bottom a hell of a lot more than the bottom needs the top. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is true. So when we talk about 'stability in the division staff', it is really a flawed concept. You really do not need a lot of stability in personnel at the division level because the heavy lifting is not done there. Where you need it is at the ARTCC level. Those guys are the ones that directly influence the makeup of the INS cadre, they have the most influence over the attitudes of the controllers on the frequency, and they are the ones that provide for the existence of every layer of management above them.
We need their buy-in and their belief in the direction of the network, because the happiness and job satisfaction of the 1st echelon of staff in a volunteer organization will translate into higher productivity (e.g. more hours of training provided, more people online, more controllers moving more quickly through the system). If those people feel over-regulated and hamstrung......does it really matter what the EC or the BOG thinks about whether or not it is true?
The org chart here is a hierarchy, but you may as well torch it because it is meaningless. The top echelons do not drive the success of this network. They have the least amount of influence over it short of pulling the plug on the servers. The bottom drives the organization. I told my staff on many occassions, the ATMs, TAs and other staff members at the ARTCCs our our customers and that is exactly how they should be treated. I felt that the USA staff was here to support their efforts not to drive them. In the same way, pilots are the customer of the controller, and it is unfortunate that sometimes the way people are treated doesn't reflect that. Without pilots, there's nobody to give ATC services to. Similarly without staff at the lowest level, there's no need for the upper levels. Being approachable is fine, but that concept is severely diminished when a part of that turns into open attacks or divisive statements when someone dissents, or in this network's case, gets tagged as a troublemaker. The fact that someone regularly disagrees, and maybe even chooses their words to do so poorly, does not mean that their point of view is automatically invalid or that they deserve anything less than friendly, respectful treatment from the leadership. But as of late, that has not been the case here. And that is truly a shame, and disheartens me more every time I see it.
So to tie it all back together, when I say 'leadership by coercion', what I mean is presenting a attitude and an approach that lends itself to people wanting to do the same things you want to do, and being open to the idea that your thoughts are not perfect, and be willing to compromise to achieve the best result, recognizing that having the last word or being right really is not that important in the grand scheme of things.
