Group Processes I

Group Processes I
(c) Melina Magdalena 2006

Here's a letter I didn't send!

Dear T,
I am writing to complain about my systematic exclusion from involvement in the project. My intention is not to attack or undermine you. On the contrary, raising these matters shows my respect for you. If I did not respect you and wish to encourage you in developing your leadership potential, I would simply write this episode off as a hurtful event caused by the brashness of your youth and inexperience.

In the past, I have had to deal with leaders who withheld information, played games and changed their stories according to which group member(s) they were speaking to at any given time. This kind of leadership engenders a great deal of hurt, feelings of disempowerment, disappointment and anger. It leads to factions in the group, when members band together in order to gain some support from one another. Other group members become outcasts. I do not sense that you are this kind of leader. I sense that you are doing your very best to stay afloat. I do not think you had any plan, intention or conspiracy to treat me badly.

In finding yourself in a position of power, you have had the added stress of trying to manage a group that includes some of your close friends, as well as people you don’t know very well. It is natural for you to seek support from your friends and to feel more comfortable in dealing with your friends, than with the outsiders. What you need to keep in mind though, is that because I am an outsider I am already highly sensitized to the threat of being left out. For this reason, it’s especially important that you as a leader are conscious of my position as outsider. It is your responsibility, having invited me into the group, to ensure that you treat me fairly.

I accept that within the series of dot points that describe active and inactive roles in this project, I must clearly define myself as inactive. This is not my major complaint, although the fact that you failed to inform me about or invite me to attend the meeting at which you decided these roles backs up my view of the systematic way in which you have excluded me. Devising out this system to justify your doing so a mere six weeks before the launch of the project seems to me to be a sneaky and fundamentally dishonest way to deal with this issue.

From my experience, leaders who operate from an information-sharing mode can feel far more supported and appreciated by group members who in turn, feel empowered and able to participate in the group. It’s not about giving up your control as leader, but about keeping your intentions and methods transparent.

The most important thing about leading any group is to recognize that there are people in that group, each of whom brings a whole set of viewpoints, experiences and feelings to that group. The style of leadership helps to determine what kind of experiences group members will take away with them, and how successful that group will be. I feel very hurt and disappointed by my experience as a member of this group.

I have repeatedly and explicitly asked for information about the project. In my very first email reply to you, I said, “I am not young. Am I still eligible?” to which you replied that I was, of course, and welcome to take part. However, I have not felt welcomed or included. I have felt as though you delayed bringing me into the group; that you and others have made every decision without me; and that you have now taken steps to explicitly exclude me after the fact.

Communication is the one thing that makes or breaks a project. An effective leader is committed to communicating openly, honestly and regularly with the other members of the group. Even though I have explicitly sought to be involved in the project and have repeatedly offered to assist with various aspects of the project, you even failed to give me your phone number so that I could contact you, until I had requested it three times on three separate occasions.

In seeking information, I was not trying to take over or change decisions that had already been made – I was only seeking to become part of the group. I was operating from the idea that group members had a right to know what decisions had been made, and to participate in future decision-making. This misunderstanding on my part could very easily have been avoided, had you told me from the beginning that I was welcome to pay to exhibit in an exhibition that was being organized by others. Had you told me this, my response would have been – how nice that they are willing to do all the work and still include me, but that was never my understanding!

I believed from the outset that I had been invited to take part in the organizing of the exhibition itself. I have felt bewildered and hurt that you have not shared information with me and shown no interest whatsoever in any of the skills or knowledge I could have contributed to this project. Perhaps I am just a little slow on the uptake, but some honesty and openness and information sharing could have alleviated the hurt and disappointment this has caused me.

In offering to help manage the invitation list, I was not seeking to control who would be invited. I was not seeking to take over your role as leader. I was simply offering to use my administrative skills to relieve you of what you seemed to see as another onerous task. The same can be said for my offering to assist in organizing catering for the launch. I was not seeking to determine and control what kind of food would be served. I was not seeking to take over the roles that someone else had already taken on. And I would not have offered to help organize catering if I had thought that my travel plans over the next few weeks would make it impossible for me to do what I offered to do. Having been a sole parent, student, worker and community activist for many years, I am good a prioritising my time and juggling many commitments.

I have not been blind or deaf to your body language and emphases during meetings, when you have reacted to things I have said. When you read out the role of an active member and stressed the word ‘respect’, I felt you were singling me out and giving me a reprimand in front of the group, as though my behaviour toward you had not been respectful. Again, when I questioned your use of the inclusive third pronouns during meetings, and asked who the we was to whom you were referring, you tensed, refused to meet my gaze, and acted angry and defensive about my question. Why did you automatically seek to defend your position, without bothering to listen to what I had to say, or try to understand the feeling behind my plea for inclusion?

When you marched me out of the last meeting, and let me know exactly how you had felt when I sent you an email which expressed my anger at not being told the previous meeting had been cancelled, and which explicitly asked whether I was being deliberately excluded, I got no sense that you were committed to including me, or that you had even bothered to try to understand the source of my distress. This is not good leadership. It is power tripping, controlling behaviour. If you re-read my email, you will see that it is not a personal attack on you. It is an email in which I express my anger at turning up for a meeting that I had thought I was going to be included in, and discovering that no one else had turned up. At that point I was aware you had neglected to invite me to the previous meeting, and I wondered whether you had changed the meeting time, date or venue in order to exclude and embarrass me. I had a right to express my anger, and to ask for information. This was not a personal attack on you.

I anticipate your response to this letter will be to want to give me back my money and say that I am no longer allowed to exhibit as part of your project. Or if you think that is too much, perhaps you will say that my artworks are too big or too inappropriate to be included. Or maybe you will just pick the worst spots in the gallery to display them or put incorrect information on the catalogue about my work, and me in order to pay me back. Please take a few deep breaths before you react with passive aggression. I’m not interested in petty game playing. I don’t want to carry a grudge against you, and I don’t want you to assume I am a bad, difficult person just because I have had the courage to express myself in this way.

No one likes to be criticised – myself included. If I have done anything that has offended you, I expect you to let me know what that is, so that I can try and make amends for this. All I can think of so when I turned up an hour late to a meeting, because I misread your email. I am very sorry for this mistake.

I am also sorry to have to make a complaint, because I think the project is great, I agree that it is needed, and I hope it comes off really well. I hope that you are able to look back on it as a giant step in the direction of project leadership, and that in the end, you are pleased with how it goes. I am really happy to be involved in the project, and accept now, that my involvement with it is in an inactive capacity.

Best wishes,
Melina Magdalena