How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going: Leading in a Liminal Season

by Susan Beaumont

Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999),

Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 97.

William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change

Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God. —Hildegaard of Bingen

The authenticity of any leadership action depends upon the interior condition of the leader—on his or her ability to be true to self and true to the institution, to remain non-anxious, and to connect with the Divine.

She wants others to admire her leadership. She needs the church to grow under her watch. Miranda has been captured by her ego self and will have a hard time discerning what God is calling forth from her or from the congregation. Unless she can relinquish these ego-driven expectations, Miranda will have little hope of leading this congregation authentically.

liminal seasons elicit disorientation and dysfunction. They also invite creativity and imagination.

leads from a place of wonder,

Presence has its roots in the Christian wisdom tradition of Contemplation.

an ongoing discipline of seeing events, people, and issues through the lens of “God Consciousness.”

We practice letting go of personal agendas, our own anger, fear, and judgments. In the empty space created by this release, we invit...

Presence, then, is a leadership awareness characterized by an openness to wonder. Presence demonstrates a willingness to experiment, take risks, and learn from mistakes.

On his worst days Marcus is captured by his own anxiety and the anxiety of the congregation. He becomes fearful about his own future in ministry.

On his best days, however, Marcus is a different kind of leader. He leads with Presence. He incorporates a regular practice of seeking stillness, so that his leadership choices originate from a centered place. He detaches himself from any one outcome about the future of worship at Stonecrest Community Church. He listens deeply. He inwardly acknowledges that what is best for the future of the church might involve his departure. Marcus realizes that he will likely be made the scapegoat for any bad decisions made. He moves the conversation forward anyway.

Marcus confronts those congregants who behave badly when their anxiety gets the worst of them, always inviting his leaders back to a spiritual stance of wonder. When congregants vent their frustration at Marcus, he regulates his personal emotional reactions, so that those reactions don’t color his leadership choices.

On his best days, Marcus embraces the unknown for all that it might teach him. He surrenders to the hard work and the possibility of failure.

Every outward leadership action originates from an inner source—the consciousness of the one who is leading.

when I open the fridge at home and see it packed with lots of fresh produce, I celebrate abundance. I anticipate with delight all the possible meals that I might concoct from those precious fruits and vegetables. When my husband opens the same fridge, he is filled with an overwhelming sense of responsibility for eating all those fruits and veggies before they go bad. He wonders why I would take the risk of purchasing so much produce all at one time. Each of us interprets the same reality (a well-stocked fridge) differently. My consciousness about food is shaped by a family that celebrated life through food. His family taught him to be a careful steward of food as a precious and limited resource.

Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Presencing Institute,

When we download, we make sense of the whole organization by placing self at the center. We may refer to this mental activity as thinking, but it is more aptly known as downloading, because it is unexamined and reactive.

The diagram on the following page illustrates an expansive field of attention. We stop viewing the organization as a closed system that we negotiate from the center. We see things from a broader vantage point, one that allows us to gain fresh perspective, incorporating a more comprehensive understanding of the environment, the players, and their motivations. We invite things into the boundary of our experience that were previously excluded.

Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus, I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real.

What happened to Lindsay is a universal experience. We lose sight of our authentic selves and begin chasing an ego persona, an image that we or someone else imposes upon us as an ideal. Then we measure our worthiness by our success at chasing the false ideal.

Her gift may or may not be right for this congregation. But when Lindsay lost sight of her own inherent worthiness and giftedness, she abandoned any possibility of satisfying herself, God, or this congregation. She embraced a false self. It was the false self that failed.

The false self lacks Presence. The false self will always be reactive, anxious, and striving. The false self has a narrow field of attention. The false self restricts the boundaries of its own awareness, because it is invested in self-protection and self-promotion.

an existential crisis. “If I am not an outstanding preacher, then who am I?”

false self and blind spots go hand in hand. It is hard to say which comes first, as they reinforce one another. We develop blind spots, and in our blindness, we develop a false self.

Leaders unaware of their blind spots demonstrate pathologies in their leadership choices. Unaware leaders are tempted to believe that they have only one self, that there is only one way to view their situation, and that there is only one truth to be honored in the choices that need to be made.

Notice the all-or-nothing thinking and the stark conclusions that are drawn by the voice of judgment.

Conrad wants to eliminate his blind spots, he needs to adopt a stance of wonder about his starkly drawn conclusions, those judgments created by his all or nothing mindset. Only then will he be able to identify other possibilities. Only then can he discover a hopeful future waiting to emerge.

the voice of cynicism likes to attach pejorative labels. This voice does not want Conrad to be vulnerable or tender-hearted.

To expand his awareness, Conrad needs to challenge the voice of cynicism. He needs to invite a more whole-hearted, open stance. He needs to cultivate his capacity for vulnerability, his willingness to suffer at the hands of another if that should come to pass. Only then will he be able to call forth the best from those that he leads. Only then will his thinking become more generative, hope-filled, and loving. Only then will he rediscover his true self.

To suspend the voice of fear, Conrad must learn to recognize opportunity in failure.

three spiritual shifts that invite Presence. The three shifts include moving from knowing to unknowing, from advocating to attending, and from striving to surrendering.

Traditional practices of leadership expect a leader to apply the best of what they know to an identified problem or challenge. By contrast, leading with Presence invites us to unknow, to drop preconceived certainties about how things ought to unfold, to acknowledge that God’s work within an organization is mysterious. This is frightening work for the leader, pastor, or professor who has been authorized to lead by virtue of demonstrated expertise.

We must yield to uncertainty. I began to embrace these practices in my personal life in the first year of the program, but I kept that discipline separate from my professional life.

I felt called to serve as a spiritual director to institutions.

much more than having a centering prayer time at the beginning of each day.

People pay a consultant to know many things, to bring outside expertise into the organization. How could I embrace an unknowing stance and still make a living?

unknowing is not the same thing as ignorance.

After my third round of arguments with Joel, something shifted in me. It wasn’t alarm. It wasn’t a need to control Joel’s behavior. It was a moment of release. I recognized that Joel was operating from a deeper place of wisdom than I was operating from. I had been dismissing Joel because I thought he had to be handled. I thought I knew what needed to happen next in the room. But I decided to unknow my plan and to see what might happen if I followed Joel’s lead. I agreed to Joel’s demand, and he returned to his seat.

This was the thing I had signed on for, an experience in nature. And yet, in my sustained effort to master the goal of the ride, it almost passed me by.

It is not a coincidence that my shift in stance happened in a moment of failure.

The challenge that this congregation faces is not a leadership or managerial problem; it is a spiritual dilemma. The congregation needs to shift from a striving stance to a surrendering stance. The congregation must embrace the reality of its present size and capacity.

Making great efforts to achieve or attain something is admired in our culture. Indeed, it seems a basic part of the human condition that we struggle or fight vigorously to overcome barriers that stand in our way. We struggle, we labor, we do all that can be done, even when the odds are against us and losses seem inevitable. We make every possible effort, so that at the end of the day we can say, “I have done my best, my utmost. If the effort fails and the battle is lost, at least I did every conceivable thing that I could imagine. No one can accuse me of giving in or slacking off.” The problem with striving is that we erroneously place ourselves at the center of the equation. We form false attachments to actions of our own making. We imagine that it is all up to us and that the best of our efforts, skills, and imaginings will be enough to overcome the obstacles.

“We did not choose to have this disease, it chose us,” my brother said. “But I choose it back,” he went on to say. “I choose this experience for everything that it can teach me about myself and our future.”