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This article will cover the topic of being displeased with others’ ranking of you in the various social domains you find yourself in.
Managing people involves organizing them, prioritizing certain ones, and triaging those who need help most. The ones managing the groups in need of management share common management methods notwithstanding what domain they find themselves in.
Organizing two teams during a pickup basketball game is similar in its requirements to assigning milestones and deliverables to members of your team at work. No position or task is ever exactly the same; those we manage will have their preferences, their predispositions toward certain areas of expertise, and varying levels of comfort zones.
There is a common tendency in those who fail to see the bigger picture to take issue with their assigned place or role as their group undergoes the process of being managed by a leader.
The players at a basketball court take it personally when someone they deem themselves better than gets picked to be on a team before them. Similarly, subordinates take offense to their preferences and skill sets not being at the forefront of a manager’s plan of attack on a project.
Below are reasons why complaining about the importance of your place on any list in life is a bad move to make.
Immediate Signal of Selfishness and Limited Scope
Finding yourself on a list unveils your position in relation to others on that list related to that specified context. Any such list defines roles, orders, and importance relevant to the context at hand. It’s made to achieve a goal of some kind – whether to organize a competitive event or to organize members of a team by assigning them roles.
Rather than being stuck on the micro relationships between each respective role and order, focus on the ultimate goal the lists you find yourself on try to achieve.
What was the list made for? How will your reaction to your place on the specified list help the creator of it achieve their goal?
Beware of outing yourself as a self absorbed member of any group you’re a part of. A negative reaction to the position someone else placed you in will communicate one thing clearly: that your image and ego matter more than the collective task / goal that organizing a group attempts to achieve. There are no two ways about it; you wouldn’t be able to twist your displeasure to pretend it benefits the makers and members of the list you’re on.
The Introduction of Outwardly Competition Can Poison Team Dynamics
In addition to labeling yourself as someone who places too much emphasis on their image, you’ll do well to outwardly communicate that you’re in direct competition with everyone else on said list.
With that act, you may be the one who introduces a toxic air of competitive disdain to waft through the members of any structured group you took issue with.
Your disdain for your position or ranking can encompass the unfair order of presenters in class, believing yourself to be an afterthought invite at a friend’s wedding, or feeling envy when a particular team member always gets the first word at work meetings.
A simple mention of your displeasure with others’ ranking of you in any social dynamic will unveil your act of competing with others in that setting. The worst part isn’t that they’d now make life difficult for you as they perceive you to be a competitor – bad as that may be. Worse than that, is the crack you’d leave open for others to question their own position in the social setting at hand.
Since you would take issue with your position and voice your displeasure in some way, you’d remind those in the social setting at hand to perhaps question their own positions in comparison to those around them.
The End Result Is Your Omission the Next Time Around
Being an unapologetically selfish entity and one who is willing to introduce instability among the members of a structured group will not work in helping you rank higher next time. It’ll, in fact, have the opposite effect.
Though you may have legitimate points backing your case to be perceived in higher regard, your ignorance of the bigger picture will ensure those points are never acknowledged.
The only person who benefits from the public acceptance of your desire to be placed higher on any list in life, is you. The people managing groups, the members within those groups, and anything that is affected by the performance of those groups care not for what position you hold within that group. They care about achieving a larger goal.
The result of complaining about your spot, position, standing, or order in life is an almost guaranteed demotion or absence the next time around.
You serve to introduce unproductive elements to the picture when you complain. Those unproductive social elements would be universally deemed to be unproductive to the mutual goals others have around you. You’d serve to poison the waters of the specified setting, thereby resulting in your extraction from it sooner or later.