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March 3 - March 15, 2024
The first question about leading into uncharted territory is not about change but about what will not change.
Conviction is the core ideology in action.
From that comes a reframed conversation about drum sets or anything else: It’s not “What will make our congregation happy?” or “What will attract new people to the church?” or even “What does the pastor want?” But “Will this discussion about drums in the sanctuary further our mission?” Because the mission is what matters. The mission trumps. Even more than whether our stakeholders like it, our mission demands that we make decisions based on conviction. So, do we need the drums to fulfill our mission?
In the military a principle is drummed into all officers: Everyone involved in an action needs to know the commander’s intent.
“Take the enemy airfield so we can use it ourselves.” The commander’s intent clarifies the goal so that all strategies and tactics (Should we blow up the air traffic control room or not?) can be evaluated. The commander’s intent is another way of describing the clear purpose and desired end state of a mission. This statement is usually brief and exceedingly clear, easily communicated to any decision maker in the change of command. There is perhaps no greater responsibility and no greater gift leadership can give a group of people on a mission than to have the clearest, most defined mission
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What are we passionate about? What are we constantly talking about, praying about, involved in and concerned about? In the words of Jim Collins, “Nothing great can happen without beginning first with passion.” What do we have the potential to do better than anyone else? Collins says that this is an awareness of self, not aspirations or hopes. It is the humble and clear perspective about the particular value we as a church, organization or ministry have to offer our community or the larger world. It is a statement of uniqueness, not arrogance; a statement of the distinctive contribution we are
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Mulago requires grant applicants to write a simple proposal with an eight-word mission statement.7 The statement must be in this format: verb, target, outcome. And it can use only eight words. Some of the examples offered are, “Save endangered species from extinction” and “Improve African children’s health.”
Again, the process and the conversation around it is the most important element. As we discuss, debate and decide on each word, the mission becomes a conviction.
The leader in the system is committed to the mission when no one else is. For the leader the mission always trumps. Again, this is hard.
clear on his or her own convictions and personal mission. The more inner congruence between our personal convictions and the missional conviction of the church, the more likely we are able to stand and work through the resistance that follows making tough decisions.
“You are not our mission. Our mission is to be a community of disciples who proclaim and demonstrate the good news in every sector of society. We want to reach people for Jesus Christ. Our mission is not to help Christians move from one church to our church. You are not our mission. But . . . I think God brought you here so that you would join our mission. You have a heart for the unchurched and desire to see people come to know Christ and experience his reign and grace in their lives. All you have heard has resonated with you, and you have already begun new ministries here. No, you are not
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The mission trumps, and real transformation in a congregation is only going to occur when the mission (and the decisions it inspires) begins as a clear personal conviction of the leader.
In one respect the clearest sign of a leader is that he or she begins whether anyone is following or not. In one sense followership is irrelevant.
Leaders start being leaders by acting on conviction. But what makes a leader a real leader is what we do when the followers start having opinions about our convictions. When we hear the grumblings, the criticisms, the second-guesses. When we see the rolled eyes or read the disappointment on faces, that’s when the leader is truly being pressed into service.
Adaptive change stimulates resistance because it challenges people’s habits, beliefs, and values. It asks them to take a loss, experience uncertainty, and even express disloyalty to people and cultures. Because adaptive change forces people to question and perhaps redefine aspects of their identity, it also challenges their sense of competence. Loss, disloyalty, and feeling incompetent: That’s a lot to ask. No wonder people resist. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line
But the real challenge of leadership is not tactical or strategic but emotional. Not only do we have to deal with the inner uncertainty that goes with leading into uncharted territory, but we also have to manage the two-front battle, which includes our own need to be liked, to gain approval from others or to be seen as a competent professional. And sometimes we get really anxious that we are never going to measure up.
For the leader it is critical to monitor our own emotional reactivity when the anxiety within the church rises.
The calm leader is self-aware, committed to the mission (the mission trumps) and focuses on his or her own self in the transformation process. As Edwin Friedman reminds us, the leader’s own presence is the most powerful tool for furthering the transformation process.
When dealing with managing the present, win-win solutions are the goal. But when leading adaptive change, win-win is usually lose-lose.
Technical competence pleases people. When we teach a good Bible study, sing a great solo, run a fine program or hit a home run, people cheer. Most of us who have been asked to consider leadership have big cheering sections. We are used to applause, affirmation and feeling successful. But the minute we accept the call to adaptive leadership that brings transformation, we should expect most of the cheering to stop.
Heifetz and Linsky inform us that people do not resist change, per se. People resist loss. You appear dangerous to people when you question their values, beliefs, or habits of a lifetime. You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Although you may see with clarity and passion a promising future of progress and gain, people will see with equal passion the losses you are asking them to sustain.
One of my former clients was a large church trying to adapt to a changing culture. As they sought to come up with new experiments, interventions and innovations, they also faced tightening budgets and increasingly limited resources. The executive pastor said to me, As a church, we haven’t had to face tough choices like this, ever. For at least a generation we could solve every problem through addition. If we wanted to address a need, we just added a new program, a new staff member, a new line item in the budget. But now we don’t have the money and personnel to do that. We can’t solve our
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Transformational leadership, therefore, equips people to make hard choices regarding the values keeping them from the growth and transformation necessary to see in a new way and discover new interventions to address the challenges they are facing.
Systems theory reminds us that “today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.”
A leader’s job is to regulate the heat. The leader is like the thermostat on the Crock-Pot, keeping enough heat in the system so things begin to change, but not enough that individual parts get scorched.
The first step in creating change, for Kotter, is helping the organization grasp the necessity of change (“there is no water route and winter is coming; we have to cross these mountains now”). At the same time, Kotter reminds leaders that another paradox of leadership is that it takes time and patience to create true urgency—an approach that Heifetz and Linsky call letting an issue “ripen.”
Often when a leader shares a dream, the organization begins to wrestle with their untapped potential, the demands of change and the realization that they are being led forward. Which is when the heat really starts to rise.
A significant part of staying calm and regulating heat is in understanding that most often the heat that hinders organizational systems from moving toward their aspirations and goals is anxiety.
We feel anxious when we are reacting to a threat, whether real or imagined.
In his book The Anxious Organization, Jeffrey Miller writes, “In and of itself, anxiety is neither functional or dysfunctional. It is a state of readiness to do something or other that may or may not be appropriate in response to a threat that may or may not be accurately perceived.”
Chronic anxiety is present when the threats of the past continue to hold power even though the system is no longer in danger.
For leaders this is the point to remember about anxiety: People who are overly or chronically anxious don’t make good decisions. When anxiety spikes we revert to more primitive ways of being. We fight, we flee, we freeze. We run from danger and leave others to face the lions alone. Or we capitulate and allow the herd to be overrun. We turn on each other instead of working together. We jump to quick fixes; we look for technical solutions to adaptive issues. Transformational leadership is built on leaders making good, wise, discerning decisions for the sake of both the health and the mission of
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To stay calm is to be so aware of yourself that your response to the situation is not to the anxiety of the people around you but to the actual issue at hand.
Staying calm means so attending to our own internal anxiety in the heat of a challenging moment and the resistance around us that we are not tempted to either cool it down to escape the heat (thus aborting the change process) or to react emotionally, adding more fuel to the fire and scorching the stew we are trying to cook.
A firm denouncement or a stirring call to action is the act of a prophet. But prophets become leaders when those around them follow their lead.
The paradox of the change process is that it is less about changing anyone else and more about being the leaven of transformation within the church. That is even truer when it comes to regulating the heat of transformation.
Remember: we don’t act like a thermostat, we are the thermostat.
Peter Steinke writes, “To lead means to have some command of our own anxiety and some capacity not to let other people’s anxiety contaminate us; that is, not to allow their anxiety to affect our thinking, actions, and decisions.”14
Peter Steinke notes, “The leader’s ‘presence’ can have a calming influence on reactive behavior. Rather than reacting to the reactivity of others, leaders with self-composure and self-awareness both exhibit and elicit a more thoughtful response.”15
No one would live in Boston without owning a winter coat. But countless people think that they can exercise leadership without partners. Ronald Heifetz, “The Leader of the Future”
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them. Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve
Hal is blind. Gus is an amputee confined to a wheelchair. Alone they would each be what we sometimes call shut-ins. Octogenarians both, they don’t get around very easily on their own. When they come to worship services at SCPC, Hal pushes Gus and Gus directs Hal. They make their way through the parking lot and the patio to their place together in the pew. Gus sits in his wheelchair and gives direction, Hal pushes the wheelchair and follows Gus’s lead, and together they get to where they want to go. And together, and only together, they come to church. A blind man giving energy to a man who
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Over the years of observing an actual family business, leading a church and being a leader in a Christian organization of higher education, I have learned that the complexity of Christian organizations as family businesses requires more communication, not less, more clarity of agreements and even more difficult conversations to name and navigate the role conflicts inherit in such a system. Church leaders and family business owners could learn a lot from comparing notes.
Very often the same people who applaud the stirring vision resist the implementation.
leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world, then leadership is always relational.
is focused on a community of people who exist to accomplish a shared mission.
organizational transformation cannot be accomplished through the efforts of one person, no matter how gifted.
So, in addition to “start with conviction and stay calm” we add stay connected.
In the seminary, our president often reminds us that our executive team must be committed to support the mission of the whole school over any individual program. As a pastor I had to work with my colleagues and elders to understand that the first commitment of church elders is to the whole church, that the Session itself is the “first team.”
Six different teams that reflect the different kinds of relationships a leader must attend to in order to bring transformation to the whole organizational system.
