“
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. T
he 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.
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