It Takes A Church...

Why "Good Disappointing" Leadership is So Important

After writing a brief series of posts for the Presbyterian Global Fellowship "Sending Out Blog" (the first of which is up and creating some conversation), I am back to working on the next post in my "Being a Good Disappointing Leader" series.  In the meantime, I offer this tidbit from Peter Steinke as both a book suggestion and an encouragement to my leader friends to keep "standing the heat and dancing in the kitchen". 

Next post: Leaders as Thermostats.

Like healthy people, systems promote their health through “responsible and enlightened behavior.” The people who are most in position to enhance the health of a system are precisely those who have been empowered to be responsible, namely the leaders. They are the chief stewards, they are the people who are willing to be accountable for the welfare of the system. They set a tone, invite collaboration, make decisions, map a direction, establish boundaries, encourage self-expression, restrain what threatens the integrity of the whole, and keep the system’s direction aligned with purposes.

Peter L. Steinke, Congregational Leadership in Anxious Times: Being Calm and Courageous No Matter What

Standing the Heat and Dancing in the Kitchen

Nobody who “starts with a conviction” intends to abandon that conviction when the heat is turned up.  No couple who pledges “til death do us part” intends to be sitting in a lawyer’s office dividing up the couches and flat screen TVs.  No parent who draws a line of expectation in the sand intends to cave when arguing starts with his teenager.  No leader who plans to take her people to Promised Land intends to high-tail it back to Egypt. Nobody who declares that they will follow Jesus intends to deny him three times in one.  But we do way more often than we want to admit.  The strong conviction that comes from our best intentions tend to fade faster No matter how strong our convictions, we all know that sooner or later we will all suffer from what Edwin Friedman calls “a failure of nerve.” 
   
I have been writing some reflections on being a “good disappointing leader” that is built around this simple-to-memorize-and-oh-so-difficult-to-live-out maxim:

Start by acting on conviction, stay connected, stay calm, stay the course.  

While we leaders think of ourselves as faithful, determined and steadfast, too often we give up on change because we hit so much resistance we simply get worn down.  We don’t so much abandon our posts, as we silently step back and surrender them meekly.  We tell ourselves that the key is to “gut it out”, to “grit our teeth” and to “go head long into the breach”  but I want to offer that the key skill is more subtle.  It’s more Tai-Chi than Kung-Fu.  If we want to be able to stay in the kitchen when the heat turns up, we have to learn the two-step dance in the middle of the maxim:

Stay Connected and Stay Calm.

While there are some of us who respond to threats or emotional attacks by “fighting” most of us are more prone to “flee”.  Most of us who work in organizational life, especially organizations filled with volunteers (like churches) tend to avoid conflict at all cost.  

I don’t remember the last time that somebody talked to me about their reasons for leaving our church.  I don’t remember them coming to me, sitting down with me and sharing their feelings about the circumstances.  Mostly, they just silently slip away, grumbling as they go.  Not until they see me around town and we endure the awkward silence about their absence do I get a formal letter telling me that they have “moved on” and they wish me "well."  

Mostly, when we get into conflict, we go away.  The “normal” response to a threat is to distance, to disconnect, to grumble to ourselves or gossip to our friends, but to avoid confrontation for fear that it will turn into a bad scene or that we’ll get a bad reputation for being a grumpy complainer.  And the same is true for those of us in leadership.

So fearing that we will stew in the searing emotions that are swirling around us, we check out, “get busy” with something else, or simply drift away.  We tell ourselves that if we don’t back down we’ll do something in anger that we’ll regret.  So we do nothing instead.  Face to face conversations become quick voicemails, phone calls turn into emails and discussions over lunch become “formal letters.”  And after awhile, because we are so afraid of the heat, walls of ice rise up around us that are so thick that while we may be able to see the subjects of our conflicts, we can’t hear or touch them. 

But if we lose connection, we lose opportunity to keep gently influencing the system for good.  We need at least a light touch on the wheel to steer the car toward the destination of our convictions. 

So what is a leader to do?  Stay connected.  Keep contact.  Close the distance with word and touch.  When someone writes me an angry email, I call them at home.  When someone sends a “formal letter of complaint”, I invite them for coffee. When people start getting upset, I call a meeting and invite them to talk. The more heated the situation, the closer I want to get to it. 

From The Godfather, we learned to “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” but that was for self-protection.  In this case, that great advice is a way to keep trying to turn enemies into friends (NOT through accommodation, but through influence.)  To keep influencing the system toward health and life.  To stay connected to those who are resisting change so that they might eventually join with us. 

This is counter-intuitive and is very dangerous. Most of us avoid heated situations because we don’t want to get burned or we fear that we’ll be gasoline to the blaze that will torch the whole house.  The purpose for staying connected is to calm the situation down. To regulate the heat so that we can keep cooking toward the goals of conviction that will bring good to our families, organizations, companies or churches. 

But to do that we must learn to stay calm, while connected.  We need to learn to be a thermostat.  Which is where we will pick it up next. 

Disappointing Leadership: The Core Competency

“Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.”  Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky

Most of us who take on leadership roles do so from a place of technical competence.  The best player on the team often becomes the captain.  The best teacher in the department is asked to become head of the department.  The best sales associate is given a promotion to manager.  And as I wrote in my last post, the best “lay leader” in a church is encouraged to become a pastor.  This, of course, can be the root of the dreaded “Peter Principle”: "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."  Not every one who is competent at sales is good at managing (see Scott, Michael)  not everyone who is a good teacher is a good administrator.  But there is one core competency for leadership that is almost never recognized until it is too late: Disappointing people well or, as Linsky and Heifetz say, “at a rate they can absorb.”  And this is the skill that requires such incredible competence: Disappoint people too much and they give up on you, stop following you and may even turn on you.  Don’t disappoint them enough and you’ll never lead them anywhere.

In my last two posts I have written about the complexities of pastoral leadership and the confusion of the role of leadership that plagues most of us right from the beginning.  I promised to take up some of the “adaptations” that are necessary for making the transition from “star player” to “coach” or leader.  And with this post I want to begin some specific reflections on the necessary competencies of a leader.

First, leadership isn’t so much taking people where they WANT to go (that is more what management is all about.)  Leadership is taking people where, in that great phrase of Lincoln’s, “the better angels of their nature” know that they need to go and yet resist going.  Deftly handling resistance and the disappointment that comes along with it so that a community of people can accomplish a goal for the greater good is the core competency of leadership.

What does it take to disappoint people well?  I’ll discuss those particular skills in my next post.  But there is one internal adaptation of expectation that is necessary in order to leading through disappointment.  By definition, the move to leader from a position of technical competence is difficult.  And not just technically difficult (e.g. learning how to run a good department meeting, managing direct reports, setting vision and protecting values).  The real challenge of leadership is that it is emotionally difficult for the leader.  The first great challenge for the person who wants to go from player to “coach”, from star to leader is to determine whether you have the stomach for disappointing people.

Technical competence pleases people.  When we hit our sales numbers, or teach a really good Bible Study, sing a great solo, run a really great program, or hit a home run and people cheer.  Most of us who have been asked to consider leadership have big cheering sections.  We are used to applause, affirmation and a feeling of success.  But the minute you accept the call to leadership, you have to expect that most of the cheering will stop. 

When you stand before people and tell them that in order to accomplish a mission, they have to change, adapt, give up something for the greater good, work with those whom they don’t like or compromise on something that they care about they get mad.  They get really mad.  And mostly, they get mad at you.

For those of us who are pastors, this is even harder.  Note that the quote above from Linsky and Heifetz  defined leadership as, “disappointing your own people.”  (This is a huge part of the complexity that I wrote about previously.)  Leaders want to bring change.  We want to accomplish big goals.  We gave up our cozy platforms of people-pleasing technical competence to take some big hill.  But the real challenge of leadership is not anywhere “out there,” it’s among our own people.  People whom we love.  People who love us.  People whom we consider “brothers and sisters.”  People who are the “family” of God for us.  People with whom we have found a place of belonging, camaraderie of beliefs, a sense of shared purpose and meaning in life.  The call of leadership is learning how to disappoint THESE particular people well and that is not what most of us ever considered when a most pleased people asked for us to lead them.  

Next Post: the skills for disappointing well.

The Problem with “Going Pro”

What do Wayne Gretzky, Bart Starr, Isaiah Thomas, Ted Williams and many, many pastors have in common?  They were once great players who became woeful coaches. 

I know, it’s an interesting tidbit about the superstar athletes, but what does this have to do with being a pastor? 

In my last post, I reflected on the complexity of being a pastor and the toll it often takes on leaders.  In this post, I want to offer another piece of Pastoral Complexity:  We are mostly confused about our calling.  That is to say, we often become pastors without realizing what the job really is. 

Most of us who end in the pastorate do so because someone experienced our ministry skills and encouraged us to consider it as a vocation.  In short, most of us were about the best lay leaders in our churches, organizations or missions and somewhere along the way someone heard us teach, heard us pray, saw us at a bedside or were part of a successful ministry program that we headed up and they told us that we were so good, that we should “go pro.”  (And most often, was mostly about “preaching”.  If you could preach or teach the Bible better than most, then it was assumed that you were called to be a pastor.)

And so what did we do?  We headed off to “professional ministry school” (i.e. “seminary”) or took a job on a church staff with the assumption that now the only thing that was going to change was that we were going to be PAID to do what we used to do as a VOLUNTEER.  (And, really, what’s not to like about that?)  On top of that, once we got our “professional association card” (i.e. “ordination”) we then became the resident “pro” for all kinds of wonderful and meaningful family and community “religious events” (like weddings, baptisms, funerals, invocations and such).  For most of us, this seemed like it would be the best possible world.  Our friends and family were proud of us, our home churches affirmed us and we now got to be paid (ok, not much pay, really, but the “ego perks” were nice) and “freed” to “do ministry full-time.”  We were now expected to be the resident “pro”, the “star player”, the “free agent” who brought the “home team” great results.

But… there is one really big problem.  Being pastor really isn’t about being the star player.  It’s really about being a COACH.  When you get ordained, you don’t get on the playing field, you go to the bench.  You are not the “resident professional Christian” but the leader of a community of mission. 

And that leadership calling is very, very different than most of us expected.

When you become a pastor, your domain is away from the stadium lights and cheering fans and off to the “practice field” where you, in the words of Paul, “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12). And let’s face it, many of us who are quite gifted at teaching, preaching, counseling and care are just not all that good at “equipping the saints” for teaching, preaching, care and mission. Like Bart Starr or Isaiah Thomas, we are much better at taking the ball into our own hands than we are at leading a team of players. 

For many star athletes, however, perhaps the hardest parts about the adjustment from “player” to “coach” however are the things “away from the field.”  Deciding who “plays” and who doesn’t, managing conflicts, developing strategy, motivating players (who are sometimes pretty unmotivated) and making personnel decisions for the overall health of the team.  Many famous athletes who were great in the game wither under the criticism of the press and the second-guessing of the fans, and grow weary of the “drama” of the locker room and front office. 

In the same way, when most pastors are interviewed about the hardest parts of their job, they talk about how seminary didn’t prepare them for strategic planning, conflict resolution, organizational leadership and staff supervision, (let alone personnel issues, building projects, and administering preschools and the like.)

Even more, this “equipping” and “coaching” ministry is often much more about conflict, change management, and attending to a relational “system” than it is about teaching the Bible or training eager lay people to “share their faith” or serve others.  Again, most pastoring (at least in congregations) is far more about LEADERSHIP than anything else.  And that is pretty different than what we signed up for.

If that wasn’t enough (and this is where it gets really complex….) The REAL players…the laity, would mostly rather that we DIDN’T coach or lead them either.  Most lay people, truth be told, don’t want to be players, they want to be “Fans.”  They want the “Pros” to do the ministry. (That’s why they sent us to seminary, isn’t it?).  They don’t want to suit up and take the field any more than we want to go to the bench and coach them. 

And so…soon, we all fail.  Before long the “coaches” start just asking to play (like pastors who only want to preach and teach and do visitation, you know “real ministry”) and the “players” become spectators.  And the mission of a community of God’s people who are seeking to live out the Kingdom of God is really what gets benched. 

Of course, there are some “players” who become great coaches.  And that “adaptation” is what I want to write about next time.