What Makes You “Pull Rank”?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 29, 2013
I have to own up to this; I used to pull rank on people. I don't mean people who worked in my department because they already knew who was in charge. I mean people in other departments who, for whatever reason, would be impeding what I needed to get done. And sometimes it was other directors; that was interesting.
Every once in awhile you have to pull rank when you're a leader; that's just how it goes. If there's a meeting where everyone's arguing and it's your meeting, you might have to pull rank to get everyone to calm down and get back on the same page, or at least on track of the topic that created the meeting in the first place. There might be a deadline that has to be met and someone has fallen off track & doesn't fully understand the seriousness of what's going on.
Here's the thing about pulling rank on others. If you're going to do it, you need to make sure that your cause is selfless. In other words, every time I've pulled rank, it's never been for me personally. I've done it for work and I've done it for relatives. I've never done it because I was in charge and wanted to flaunt my authority. I've never done it with the provision that I was an irate customer & wanted to get someone fired. Sure, on that last one I probably could have tried to go that route, but a different emotion takes over at that point.
And one last thing; whenever I've done it, I've gone into the situation knowing I was absolutely correct. That's because the first time you use it on someone for the wrong purposes, they'll never acquiesce to it again and neither will anyone else who knows about it. Thinking you can use it on people who have no idea who you are or what you know... idiocy. Thinking you can impress how important you are because of your name or what you do when there are people who could care less... useless.
There are many celebrities who try this, and it works only as far as someone knows who they are. Still, it shouldn't work at all just because someone's a celebrity. If they're in the right then that's a different story, but it shouldn't be because of who they are.
Do you know people who pull that kind of thing on you? How do you react?
Pulling Rank has so much of a negative connotation. leadership requires that everyone knows who is responsible for what in the team, and someone needs to have to handle finances, future development, and a smooth working environment. To show an employee that you are in charge of these things, and they inform your conversations, then it’s more like Mentorship, isn’t it?
Unfortunately it’s not. Mentorship involves working with others to help both employee improvement and growth and of course the company benefits that come with it all. Pulling rank is something that’s outside of your normal realm, when you have to cajole or force someone who doesn’t work for you directly do to what they’re supposed to do and you have the authority to get it done. It’s negative only in the fact that the leader might have to resort to it in the first place. If someone who works for you needs you to pull rank, that person shouldn’t be an employee of yours.