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Communication a Foundation of Leadership

Communication is Multifaceted
Leaders have to master communication. In its simplest form communication is the ability to outline the actions a team or group must take to carry out a task.  This sounds simple yet outlining actions also requires that a leader outline their values, expectations and the reason for the action to be taken.  In fact the greater the scope of leadership responsibility the more complex the layers of communication become so that verbal and symbolic multilayered communication is critical for the success of the organization.

Symbolic communication (also called non-verbal communication) incorporates a leader’s tone of voice, facial expressions, posture, clothing and the environment in which the communication transpires (e.g., a board room, a break room, the hallway etc.).  If not understood, symbolic communication projects a message that actually contradicts or undermines verbal communication.  One CEO had turned around the financial position of his company.  On the brink of bankruptcy when he accepted the position the company had made up its deficits under his watch and gained  recognition as a model institution.  Employees were encouraged to know that their jobs were safe.

However, when the CEO walked out of his office on day in an unguarded moment without greeting employees in the hallway as he rushed to grab lunch prior to an afternoon appointment rumors started swirling that the company was about to go under.  He was angry and shocked when the rumors resulted in a string of resignations and panic.  What happened?  The fact he failed to engage employees in the hallway made him seem detached and worried.  Employees assumed by his symbolic communication (unintentional as it was) that he had been less than truthful about the extent to which the institution turned around.  It took him weeks and a concerted effort to undo his one thoughtless walk from his office to the cafeteria. What did he learn? He said, “I have to disengage from the analytical thinking I do in my office so that I can engage my employees and allow these casual encounters to reflect the values and the stability of the company I talk about in our employee meetings.”

Deficiency in how a leader communicates is one of the most common complaints I run across when working with organizations experiencing difficulty in meeting performance goals. Poor communication is often characterized by the employees and volunteers we interview as one way, last-minute, manipulative, unclear, demeaning, and self-indulgent.

What makes up good communication?  In working with leaders across a variety of industries and non-profits I have defined four components of effective communication: transparency, responsiveness, authenticity and apprehension.  These components are defined in Table 1.

Table 1: Components of Effective Communication

Component Characteristics
Transparency Communication the meaning of which is clear whether verbal or written and carries a sense of honesty and professionalism.  It is direct in that it communicates to the source never via another (never triangularly).
Responsiveness Aware of the moment, fully present personally as is evident in active listening, requests for feedback, reflective responses (mirroring), inquiry and consistent/appropriate follow up.
Authenticity Treating others with respect, sensitive to others’ needs, feelings, and points of view.  It is communication that is tactful, characterized in active listening and open (i.e., appropriately vulnerable).
Apprehension Communication that is perceptive, comprehending characterized by behaviors that challenge ideas not people, attacks the problem not the person, effective negotiation and constructive conflict resolution.

The data categorized in Table 1 derive from two data tables in a qualitative questionnaire I use when assessing organizations. Engaging in communication is not just delivering a message it is engaging in a series of exchanges both verbal and symbolic (non-verbal) that make sure that the message received by those who are listening is verifiably close to the intended communication action.

Remember that facial expressions, body posture, context, delivery cadence, tone of voice, and pauses designed for others to express various forms of feedback are all part of the act of communication.

Impact of Deficient Factors Illustrated

In one large metropolitan school district a department suffered a severe loss of morale and productivity.  When I tabulated the data from our interviews with their employees and the questionnaire we used to evaluate their operation a distinct pattern emerged that illustrated a gap in communication (see Figure 1).  This gap resulted in part from the director’s devaluation of communication in all its factors.   He equated communication with staccato instructions and complaints about poor performance.  His communication style when viewed by others demonstrated that he was somewhat clear in the meaning of his words but consistently failed to communicate authenticity, apprehension and responsiveness.  He gave one way commands.

Figure 1: Leadership Communication Factors (Data Table A)

As is clear in Figure 1 the director of the department scored highest in transparency and lowest in apprehension.  His communication illustrated a focus on delivering data (technical facts).  He avoided emotional connections to the point employees felt contempt from him. After identifying the deficiency in apprehension, authenticity and responsiveness I interviewed the director to uncover the source of the contempt.  He had little patience for those who did not share his level of technical expertise.  This intolerance of technical imperfection expressed itself in mistrust and emotional detachment.  While his facts were correct (his employees truly did not share his level of technical expertise) he alienated his entire department and lacked the ability to inspire anything but mistrust or fear.

As a result of the directors assumptions about communication conversation in his department consistently took on a disrespectful and combative tone.  Employee comments in the questionnaire confirmed that the department lacked constructive conflict resolution strategies.  The director and his reports exhibited a tendency to personalize challenges and not concrete issues on the one hand. On the other hand the director’s emotional detachment de-personalized people and remained emotionally detached to even when facing the most sensitive of staff issues.

The employees scored themselves as higher in authenticity and lower in transparency, a reversal of the trend seen in the leaders’ scores (Cf. Figures 1 & 2).  This reversal was interesting especially in light of the fact everyone in the department leader and follower both shared virtually the same level of development in apprehension and responsiveness.  It may be that these two communication traits are tied directly to the size and age of an organization while transparency and apprehension are tied to the personal skill development of the people within the department.

By this I do not mean that apprehension and responsiveness are not a factor of personal development but that they are required in greater measure in more complex and larger organizations.  The reversal evident between authenticity and transparency is a classic pattern of behavior when leaders want to talk facts (denying the human factor) and employees or volunteers want to talk about people needs (often denying the facts).

Figure 2: Employee Communication Factors (Data Table D)

How is Your Communication?

Test your communication as a leader in several ways.  First, ask whether the behavior of your team is consistent to your message?  When behaviors align with what you thought you communicated there is a good chance you communicated clearly and consistently over time.

Second review the factors above and ask yourself how you think you do.  Do these factors enter your consideration when you plan communication?

Third, ask people around you to rate your effectiveness in each of these four factors.  Ask people who are neither intimidated by your position nor biased to your role.

Leaders can develop more effective communication skills.  I have found that practicing a more transparent and responsive approach to communication is important to achieving a greater level of self-motivation and goal ownership among staff and volunteers as well as a greater degree of efficiency in daily operations because it encourages learning conversations, clear and timely performance feedback and recognition of a job well done. Each of these factors contributes to employees’ sense of contribution and commitment. Like all other leadership disciplines and practices communication needs planning, evaluation and practice.

 

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Shaping Leaders through Experience, Transitions, and Challenges

I saw it in a two friends one is a CEO one is a COO.  We had not talked for over a year as I was buried in my academic program and they were both transferred to new assignments.  When I caught up to these friends of mine I was frankly astonished at how they had changed.  They both possessed a measurable growth and depth in their confident demeanor and aura of authority.  I wasn’t seeing arrogance or self promotion.  They carried themselves with a sense of confident purpose that they had not previously exhibited.
The change was so noticeable I shared my observation and asked them what they thought contributed to the change I was seeing.  Both described how entering a new and more challenging situation opened up new ways of seeing themselves.  Their new assignments had required that they step into a new sense of situational awareness, self-confidence and growing competence as leaders.

These men had been through a boundary in their development.  The change each of these men faced was not easy both assignments required that they alter the trajectory of failing organizations.  They both had to step in to difficult situations, use their experience to size up the problems and outline the steps needed to bring change.  They had to move quickly to stop the hemorrhage of cash and talent.  Neither one really had the time to second guess their actions until after the changes had taken place.

A boundary represents a point at which a leader faces the necessity of moving to depth in: skills, perspective or self-awareness to continue in and grow in effectiveness.  Facing these barriers means that leaders have the opportunity to:[1]

  • Bring to closure recent experiences – closure identifies significant lessons and allows the person to move forward.
  • Deepen relationship to God or spiritual depth – growing in spiritual depth or relationship to God does not result in religious weirdness it results in a clearer picture of purpose, moral fabric and awareness of others’ current and potential contribution.  One of my friends identifies himself as a Christian the other does not. But both describe a deeply spiritual experience in the challenges they faced.
  • Expand perspective to see new things – without the challenge of barriers or challenges people often tend to plateau in their growth.  I am reminded of the now proverbial definition of insanity attributed to Peter Drucker i.e., doing the same activity over and over expecting different results.
  • Make decisions that launch a new phase of development – this development extends to everyone within reach of the leader’s influence.  The entire organization benefits when leaders successfully navigate the barriers to their personal growth.

Leaders develop through their careers through boundary events characterized in one of three ways. Boundary events are either powerfully formative or devastatingly destructive.  It is not the experience itself that determines the outcome in leaders lives.  Individual choices determine the outcomes of these boundary experiences.  Outcomes are not inherent in the experience itself.[2]

New Experience – defined as being thrust into new terrain – an overseas assignment, unexpected turn of events in business or family life, new social or organizational role etc.  The challenge in new experience is to overcome disorientation and weave it into one’s own experiential tapestry and not be consumed by it.  Both friends of mine made this kind of choice. As a result they found themselves not only challenged but also enjoying their work.  Be aware of the frame through which you view new experiences.  Your first impressions will most likely be wrong. Ask questions.  Learn to rely on others, gain common ground by telling stories and encouraging others to share their views. Remember that events may conspire to make you a leader more than any inherent talent or unique ability.

Setback – loss or failure that is profoundly disruptive and bewildering – what was permanent is transient what was believed is questioned. The challenge in setbacks is to see one’s situation in a fundamentally new – and more comprehensive – way.  Seeing this bigger picture is often tremendously freeing.  A more comprehensive perspective introduces new opportunities and options that were previously hidden by the individual’s short-sightedness.  In today’s difficult economic environment setbacks are common.  What is not as common is watching people use setbacks to define a new sense of meaning and purpose and skill.

Deferral – an unanticipated hiatus during which routines are set aside, sometimes forcibly, and replaced with regimented structure or no structure at all.   Deferrals challenge leaders to clarify or create their personal mission and purpose; to cement their foundational beliefs and values.  These foundational beliefs and values are critical to shaping organizational culture, creating powerful delegation and unleashing innovation.

The significance of identifying boundaries is twofold.  First, experiencing boundaries is normal and is not a sign of fate aligned against the person.  I do occasionally meet people so narcissistic they believe that everything and everyone is against them – effective leaders do not have time for such self-absorption. Second, boundaries tend to cluster around specific periods of development. New territory boundaries seem to cluster in early career, reversals tend to cluster in mid-carrier and suspension seems to cluster around later career.  Even though this clustering pattern is clear it is not absolute – all three boundary experiences are present at any time.  But recognizing the clustering pattern does help leaders (1) recognize boundaries to development sooner and (2) expect their arrival to capitalize on the learning experience sooner.

The question then is how do you handle your boundary times? Do new experiences, setbacks or deferred hopes collapse your personal sense of purpose and emotional resilience?  Or do you use these boundary times to engage learning and development to see new things about yourself and your situation?  It takes a certain amount of courage to face change I saw this courage in my friends.  In fact I was a little envious of the difficulties they had been through.  I liked the men and the leaders they had become…I embrace my own boundary times in hope that my own growth will be as evident to others as my friends’ growth is to me.  If you are stuck in a boundary experience it is time to talk to someone about it.  Don’t let a boundary undo you – make it work for you.

[1] J Robert Clinton. Leadership Emergence Theory: A Self-Study Manual for Analyzing the Development of the Christian Leader (Pasadena, CA: Barnabas Resources, 1989).

[2] Robert J. Thomas. Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn from Experience to Become a Great Leader (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008).

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Servant Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility

Servant Leadership Acts in the Tensions of Parallel Demands

In his series of essays on Servant Leadership Robert Greenleaf clearly states the thesis he wished to support in expanding the idea of servant leadership,

If a better society is to be built, one more just and caring and providing opportunity for people to grow, the most open course, the most effective and economical way, while supportive of the social order, is to raise the performance as servant of as many institutions as possible by new voluntary regenerative forces initiated within them by committed individuals – servants.[1]

Greenleaf clearly discounts two popular assumptions of his day: (1) that it is impossible to negotiate a balance between economy and society and (2) that moral reasoning (the basis of ethical decision making) has no place in economic and business policy decision-making.

Are economic factors simple objective truths divested of moral/social concerns?  If the interests of both workers and shareholders are directly dependent on the success of the corporation then such a dichotomy is untenable not only in light of issues of legal compliance but also in the larger ethical issues the determine how grey areas of legality and social responsibility are addressed.  A greater responsibility among leaders (representatives of capital) exists to make sure that the social/political aspects of worker interests are sufficiently addressed in the process of wealth creation for the corporation.

This is not a demand that business leaders be limited by the emotionally immature.  If the interests of labor and capital are  de facto included in the success of the corporation’s ability to successfully navigate an independent economic reality then it is imperative that the corporation engage in wealth-creation, innovation and opportunity with the utmost flexibility in light of the changing economic environment with the hope that the benefits will always exceed the costs exacted socially.  To accept the idea of independent economic realities does not mean one must shun engagement with the social costs inherent in the quest for flexibility.  In fact to shun the social costs ultimately undermine the capacity of flexibility needed to maintain a thriving organization.  Greenleaf asked:

In an imperfect world, some will continue to be hurt…But, as my concern for servanthood has evolved, the…more prominent…my…self-questioning…. Could I have been more aware, more patient, more gentle, more forgiving, more skillful?[2]

The concept of servant leadership places the leader squarely in two parallel concerns (1) development and deployment of the corporation’s wealth generating ability and (2) training and enhancement of the talent needed to respond to new market demands. The concept of servant leadership follows the assumption that corporate flexibility necessitated by independent economic factors demands an equally flexible workforce.  Labor must also exercise flexibility characterized by an attitude that accepts the inevitability of the market economy and thus remains mobile, multi-skilled, and always learning.  Job security is not framed as a consistent source of employment but the consistent ability to adapt to new workforce demands on skills and attitudes driven by new economic realities.

The idea of flexibility not only alters the corporation’s stance to the present it alters the workers stance in the present as well and significantly enlarges the needed skill sets among leaders.  Flexibility demands more than that the corporation’s structure and approaches are free from the rigidity of institutionalism.  Responding to market changes demands the agility to configure or reconfigure itself in its marketing strategies, products, production systems, capital investments and talent composition.  Leaders must therefore be capable of accurately reading the overlapping logistics of re-configuring corporate structures and systems and the deployment of labor based on skills, attitudes and ability to learn.  Leaders must then not only possess the skills to read and understand market trends but also read and understand the needs and skills of those around them to persuade their best performance around corporate objectives.

Servant Leadership Exercises Emotional Intelligence

Manager’s and other leaders cannot afford to either possesses a high concern for people and low awareness of business goals or a low concern for people and a high awareness of business goals. On the one hand the leader is nothing more than a pal and on the other the leader appears as a brutal dictator.

Either case is morale crushing.  If the manager/leader does not possess the competencies they need to effectively read the market and find a competitive course of action they will lose the trust of their labor.  On the other hand behaviors that fail to register either an awareness of one’s emotion or its impact on others are characteristic of a lack of emotional intelligence. Assuming for the sake of space that Servant leaders own the right business acumen and industry knowledge then emotional intelligence rises to the forefront as the skill needed to successfully lead a flexible workforce.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to perceive and constructively act on both one’s own emotions and the feelings of others. Emotional intelligence creates a synergy between self-awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management. (See Table 3)

Emotional intelligence gives managers and leaders a competitive edge. Studies conducted at Bell Labs found that the most valued and productive engineers were those with the traits of emotional intelligence – not the highest IQ. Possessing great intellectual abilities or grasp of a job’s core skills may make an individual a successful line employee (although the case can probably be made that without emotional intelligence an individual won’t be an exceptional performer) but skill without emotional intelligence leads to predictable failures among managers and leaders.

Emotional intelligence is a concept that measures empathy and other qualities of the heart. Lack of these qualities or abilities explains why managers who attempt to lead without an awareness of the impact of their emotion on others create a shamble of their work relationships and frequently become disastrous pilots of their personal lives.

Analyses of the behavioral traits that accompany highly capable people lacking these emotional competencies portray the stereotypical dictator: critical and condescending, inhibited and uncomfortable with relationships and emotionally bland or explosive. By contrast, individuals with the traits that mark emotional intelligence are poised and outgoing, committed to people and causes, sympathetic and caring, with a rich but proper emotional life — they’re comfortable with themselves, others, and the social universe they live in.[3]

This insight into the mechanics of emotional intelligence provides a lesson for leaders. Those with high emotional intelligence learn from their previous encounters with people and are alert to the nuances of emotion in relationships.[4] How others feel is important to them.

The concept of emotional intelligence has found a number of different applications outside of the psychological research and therapy arenas. Professional, educational, and community institutions have integrated different aspects of the emotional intelligence philosophy into their organizations to promote more productive working relationships, better outcomes, and enhanced personal satisfaction.

Table 1: Components of Emotional Intelligence

In the workplace and in other organizational settings, “people skills,” another buzzword for emotional intelligence has long been recognized as a valued attribute in employees. The popularity of the concept in business is easily explained-when employees, managers, and clients have mutually rewarding personal relationships, productivity increases and profits follow. Conversely, where the emotional intelligence of key production managers is low productivity decreases and morale seems to crash.  Without emotional intelligence the harder production managers push to gain performance the less respect and trust they retain and the poorer the results they generate.

The Servant Leadership Challenge

The challenge faced by servant leaders is tochoose what part of the inner self to respond in light of the organization’s purpose when assessing:

  • Issues
  • Expectations
  • Situation
  • Opportunities
  • Risks
  • Skill Requirements

The inner self (illustrated and defined in Table 1) cannot remain isolated from a leader’s daily management tasks. Simply put, to be effective a manager/leader or to excel as a servant leader must bring all of themselves to the task of managing performance. If a manager’s self-awareness and self-discipline remains undeveloped they fail to understand the impact of their emotion on others and risk professional ruin by exhibiting self-defeating behavior by failing to mobilize the kind of flexible workforce needed to capitalize on new opportunities or changing market situations.

In the larger picture the concept of servant leadership refuses to dismiss the issue of how to achieve a balance between economic and other social values.  It recognizes the inherent danger of assuming a values free or solely technical approach to market changes e.g., the toxic nature of unmitigated greed, disregard for the environment or disconnection from the social consequences of a “profit only” stance.  However, to date the concept of servant leadership has not tendered a viable solution to these tensions.  It has addressed the nature of the conversation by insisting that economic and social values remain in dynamic tension and thereby provides one of the best approaches to creating a healthy corporate culture.   In other words the practice of servant leadership offers those organizations that embrace it a wider platform of legitimacy among both their employees and the communities in which they work.

[1] Robert K. Greenleaf. The Power of Servant Leadership, ed., Larry C. Spears (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1998), 32.

[2] Ibid 45

[3] These traits are also identified by D.A. Benton as the core traits of an effective CEO (see How to Think Like a CEO. New York, NY: Time Warner Books, 1996). If your career goals include moving up in the company you are with or moving forward in your career the development of emotional intelligence is essential.

[4] In the non-profit world the mix of character and leadership is imperative to success. In church or para-church leadership the tie between emotional intelligence and strong leadership has an explicit foundation (Galatians 5:22; Ephesians 4). Yet, the same complaints about executive leaders (senior pastors, denominational executives, mission executives) persist as those leveled at business leaders – they often disregard people. In light of this, the concept of emotional intelligence could serve as an integration point between the spiritual realities that drive the church or para-church organization and the daily out working of leadership and managing tasks.

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Generating Consistent Outcomes – Servant Leadership Applied

If your organization or company has struggled to move beyond the mediocre results of past years then consider changing the way leadership is understood.  Consider Servant Leadership.
Researchers recognize two things are needed to consistently generate above average results.  They sound simple yet organizations wrestle against a flood of poor leadership models, performance pressures and flawed assumptions about workplace productivity that leave them struggling to produce anything but mundane results.

First, businesses and organizations need to learn how to generate high performing teams who feel alive and experience exhilarating meaning in work.  The fact is that when these two particular dynamics exist teams perform at sustained levels of output that consistently surpass the common benchmarks of productivity.[1]

Second, businesses need to accept the simple fact that happy people (those who embrace the highs and lows of life as learning opportunities) exhibit the kind of contribution, conviction, culture, commitment and confidence that not only propels performance forward at astonishing rates but also reduces the costs associated with sick days, lost productivity, employee sabotage, and turnover.[2]

The idea of psychological capital at work is gaining traction.  Why?  It produces measurable results across company metrics in every industry.  The fundamentals of personal happiness are nested in individual perspectives and choices. The organizational benefit of retaining people who hold these perspectives is a function of powerful and meaningful company culture.  The nature of an organization’s culture rests at the feet of its leaders.

When discussing leadership it is important to talk about the skills and styles that effect good communication between leaders and followers but skill sets and outcomes are not sufficient to understand what makes leaders effective. Limiting the understanding of leadership to skill sets and outcomes leaves a void in understanding that results in a distortion of leadership (like that identified by Lipman-Blumen) that cannot distinguish between good and poor leaders.  For example both Gandhi and Hitler influenced people and generated results. They are however worlds apart when one consider the long-term benefit to cost of their influence and outcomes.[3]

Clearly leadership must be exercised with a defined and transparent moral imperative. Leadership is not and cannot be exercised in a morally neutral way.[4] By transparent I mean that the moral imperative of leadership must be something capable of scrutiny. The idea of servant leadership lends itself to moral scrutiny in how it approaches power and outcomes. In servant leadership the “… imperative is to lead sacrificially for the sake of others.”[5] The transparency of a moral imperative makes it accessible to critique. This necessitates a the willingness on the part of a leader to listen to concerns and challenges and to take his or her development as a leader seriously.

Organizations that exhibit the psychological capital needed to sustain extraordinary performance are lead by men and women characterized as servant leaders.   So what is servant leadership?

The servant-leader is servant first . . . It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve—after leadership is established. The leader- first and the servant- first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature. . . The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant- first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.[6]

Servant leadership is an orientation to leadership that owns a transparent moral imperative, exercises personal awareness for the impact of behaviors, recognizes the contribution potential of employees and builds a culture characterized by modeling, mentoring, development, discipline and fun. Servant leadership engages the essential activities of vision, structure and benevolence in an accessible way to employees, board members, stakeholders and stockholders.  Servant leadership sees a long view versus a foreshortened quarterly view that produces a rate of return on a company’s pre-tax portfolio of over 20%.[7] To some leaders this level of performance sounds mythical.  However to men like Ken Melrose (former CEO of Toro) this level of performance is a given result of servant leadership.

What kinds of actions define servant leadership?  Servant leaders listen, they use power ethically and persuasion as the preferred model, they build ownership of decisions by ensuring participation of all employees; they practice foresight that sees a preferred future and the paths and obstacles to achieving it.  Servant leaders exercise adaptive leadership recognizing when problems are ill-defined solutions must be designed and not dictated – they conceptualize well.  Servant leaders regularly practice withdrawal in recharging their energy.  Finally servant leaders practice acceptance and empathy recognizing that employees want to engage, they want to believe in something larger than themselves and they want to commit.  A servant leader helps provide the culture needed to engender employee commitment.

Servant leadership has moved beyond an esoteric idea of something that may work better and has entered the critical world of theories that measurably perform better.  It is a concept and a way of thinking that needs to be both understood and employed in order to see superior performance.

[1] Jean Lipman-Blumen. The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians and How We Can Survive Them (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 221-22.

[2] Jessica Pryce-Jones. Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 2-26.

[3] Ronald Heifetz. Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 16-18. Heifetz discusses the power of values and the necessity for including values in the definition of leadership.

[4] Tony Baron. The Art of Servant Leadership (Tuscan, AZ: Wheatmark, 2010), 6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader (Indianapolis: Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 1970, 1991), 7.

[7] Art Barter, CEO Datron Communications. “Datron’s Servant Leadership Journey – Success and Pitfalls” (San Diego, CA: Servant Leadership Winter Conference, February 1-3, 2011).

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Three Critical Acts of Leadership

Why is the role of the leader important? Consider that all organizations depend on shared meanings and interpretations of reality to facilitate coordinated action. In dynamic Churches the definition of reality and call to shared action is the central role of the sermon. Equally important is how the leader carries him or herself relative to the core values of those who follow. In dynamic companies the definition of reality and call to shared action is often expressed in the communication of the president or CEO and his or her interactions with the employees and board relative to their core values.
For leaders who realize the power of shared meaning in an organization three things become essential:

• Leaders reframe situations demonstrating new perspectives that call others to action

• Leaders articulate and define what had previously remained implicit or unsaid

• Leaders consolidate or challenge prevailing wisdom to suggest new directions

The social upheaval in Tunisia and the mirrored unrest in Egypt in 2011 and the current unrest in Syria demonstrate the power of these three actions and suggest that whoever frames reality or meaning wins the day. This is why entrenched power brokers who hide behind their privilege and/or power to maintain position by force always loose regardless of the context either political, commercial or religious.

Leaders are the kind of people to whom others are drawn – not because of their personalities but because they have:

• a dream,

• a vision,

• a set of intentions,

• an agenda,

• a frame of reference.

This is important to see. New leaders in many organizations or social settings often seem to arise from obscurity to prominence just at the right time or the wrong time depending on where one stands relative to change. But obscurity is usually another way of describing a lack of attention. When power brokers do not listen, do not pay attention they often do not see the opportunity for change nor those who inspire change until the status quo is thoroughly shaken.

Healthy, innovative, vibrant organizations (or churches or countries) are those that provide permission to leaders to leaders reframe situations demonstrating new perspectives that call others to action; articulate and define what had previously remained implicit or unsaid and consolidate or challenge prevailing wisdom to suggest new directions.

The real test of leadership however isn’t in the revolution/change.  The real test of leadership is in how change is consolidated to a new reality that is in fact different than the prior reality.  Some revolutions simply exchange personalities and processes yet do little to bring about significant change.  The only change is in who now controls the power and the privilege.

Who are the leaders in your organization? Are they recognized or unseen? Are they empowered or marginalized? Are they granted permission or shown the door? Are leaders a threat to your organization or do the leaders of your organization tend to attract the truly gifted and engaged into a synergy of innovation and vibrant execution? If your organization’s leaders don’t another group of leaders will.

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Mentoring Leverages the Power of Relationships and Experience

Developing talent is a de facto management activity.  Managers who fail to recognize that their daily interactions with their employees either develops or marginalizes employee talent are habitually represented in mediocre or failing performance.
Conversely managers who have mastered the skill of developing talent are identifiable in their continuous strong results.

The relational skills, approaches and perspectives high performing managers utilize to improve performance recognizes high performers and transitions low performers either toward greater productivity or out of the company.  Whether these skills are employed intentionally or intuitively they can be described as mentoring.

Mentoring is often popularly viewed as a monolithic activity. However, research indicates that highly effective managers utilize a composite of combined skills and interactions to develop employees in career and personal (psychosocial) feedback. In a multi-generational workforce mentoring offers a powerful tool for the convergence of existing and emerging talent.

Leveraging mentoring within an organization allows the organization to:

  • Leverage knowledge within short time constraints typical of many competitive environments
  • Acculturate new employees quickly and “cross-culturate” older and younger employees to generate new energy and engagement
  • Reinforce a positive organizational culture
  • Connect multiple generations into more effective work teams – an important competitive advantage in today’s multigenerational workforce

Initiating a mentoring approach in a company does not require large capital expenditures or lengthy training periods.  Creating a mentoring environment first requires that key leaders exercise the self-awareness needed to define their most effective contribution and investment in emerging leaders. Mentoring consists of at least twelve discrete functions including:

Career Functions Psychosocial functions
Coaching Discipline
Training Role Modeling
Sponsorship Acceptance & confirmation
Protection Counseling
Exposure & Visibility Friendship
Challenging Assignments Spiritual guide

Experienced leaders do not need to be competent in all twelve mentoring functions – they do need to know what functions they are best suited to employ in developing others.

The power of mentoring is that it recognizes that that learning is a career-long process.  Much of what is associated with effective leadership cannot be fully engaged in a classroom setting.  One must actually lead to learn what leadership is and how the tools of leadership (e.g., communication, vision, decision making, structure, care for others, emotional awareness in personal interactions, commitment to learning, appreciation of functions outside one’s expertise and situational awareness) are expressed effectively.

Creating a mentoring environment does not require a commitment to coordinate mentoring efforts through existing talent development processes or other management communication lines.  This helps if the culture of the organization supports mentoring efforts.  However, even where organizational structures fail to support mentoring effective leaders can employ mentoring as a means of leading change and improving performance.

Creating a mentoring environment is a powerful way to be deliberate about corporate culture and how it can enhance competitive advantage.  Where mentoring is viewed as a corporate activity organizational learning can be accelerated.  It is this learning culture that provides a competitive advantage because it continually allows and encourages emerging leaders to question the status quo by looking at new horizons.  Innovation is rarely a reactive activity (with reference to what may be wrong with the organization) it is a proactive activity in seeing the ways an organization can address needs no one else has seen.  This does not mean that innovation is blind to reality – rather it is brutally clear on one hand and refreshingly transparent on the other.

Most likely your organization already has mentors working in it.  Look around, identify these mentors and encourage their work.  Let them set the pace for influencing a mentoring culture.  Often this move is much more effective than determining that mentoring needs to occur and implementing a program to make it happen.  Programs work as company-wide initiatives in my experience only when they hitchhike on the skills of those already engaged in developing the next layer of leaders. Where this is not happening the chances are leaders are far too insecure to engage mentoring.  If this is the case then a completely different set of challenges needs to be addressed.

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Figuring Out How the Missional Church Works

Defining the Context of Missional Work

“It is odd,” the pastor noted, “that your company is investing time in a concept that will make your company obsolete.”  “You are stuck” he continued, “in a consumerist perspective and model of the church and so I wonder why you are here.  In light of the radical changes happening in the church the chairs you manufacture will no longer be needed.”

This was a leader of a movement of congregations known to take seriously a missional approach to its ecclesiology.  The affiliation of congregations he represents are Christocentric rather than ecclesiocentric in their practice (defined below) and are on the cutting edge of the thinking about being a missional congregation.  The shift in perspective from ecclesiocentric to Christocentric view of mission has focused them on the working of missio Dei (God’s mission) in all their community. Yet for all the vibrancy exhibited in their fledgling movement they exhibit remnants of a historical and local myopia.

My surprise at the statement emanated from the fact we met in a gathering sponsored by the several companies that work primarily with churches across the United States and who have partnered together to leverage each others’ strengths.  In our case we manufacture sanctuary seating serving both a domestic and global market.  Sitting where we do at the nexus of commerce and the church we all enjoy a fascinating perspective of the church in action.  The network of companies that sponsored these particular meetings represent men and women of deep conviction about the relevance and vibrancy of the local church.  Because we have a trans-local perspective of the church we see the need to bring together pastors and consultants from across the United States to share their insights and experience in leading missional congregations and to interact with some of the leading authors writing on the concept of the missional church.

This leader was personally oblivious to the background and stories of the men and women sponsoring the context of these meetings. He seemed at first ready to dismiss us all as antiquarian dinosaurs of a dynasty that has long outlived its usefulness. I could not help but recall the painful rebuke I once received from a more mature saint I had similarly dismissed in my radical youth, “Ray,” Sue noted, “before you write off the church that birthed you in faith you should consider that you operate as you do on both its resources and more importantly its heritage.  You should review the admonition of Hebrews 13:7 to remember the leaders of the past and to imitate the outcome of their faith.  You act as though you are the first to discover the dynamic of walking in faith.”

The corrective hurt then, now I am thankful for the broadened perspective that Sue and her husband Chuck helped me grasp.  Both were educated at Wheaton, they were active in the church, they were dynamic in their faith and Chuck was an engineer who introduced me to a much deeper spiritual formation and spiritual disciplines than I had known up to that point.

I love the conversation and the vibrancy that exudes from congregations wrestling with what it means to be the church in mission.  The conversation is important and the change (read repentance) it brings to how local congregations see themselves relative to their community is critically important. The conversation I had with this radical leader is also important. Three things hit me as I thought about the conversation I had that night over diner with this leader.

The Stumbling Stone of Western Dualism

Today’s missional reflection needs to reflect on its own historicity and the ongoing problem of dualism in western thought.  Jeff Van Duzer’s recent interview in Christianity Today titled “The Meaning of Business” addressed the one of the stumbling stones of our inherent dualism.  Moll writes:

Despite many books and conferences in the past decade that frame business as a divine calling, churches still wonder how best to support the businesspeople in their midst, many of whom feel demeaned for not doing “real” ministry.[1]

How is it that a concept that focuses rightly on the concept of communitas still exhibits the contradiction of treating business people as second class believers or reducing them pejoratively to mere consumers of faith?[2] Practitioners of missional ecclesiology still wrestle with ways to differentiate their understanding from those perspectives and views that represent the entropy of the church in the west.  Clearly the church in the west faces a crisis of identity theologically and institutionally. So I do not dismiss the need to rethink the church’s relationship with its context or to its theological assumptions.

However to relegate business people to second class believers is simply a result of inherent cultural dualism rather than a result of critical theological reflection. So what is dualism?  When it is used in reference to the human mind then it means that there is more to existence than mere materialism.  In this meaning of the word there is no particular problem.  In fact the scriptures clearly argue that a spiritual dimension is part of our material universe.  The problem arises in the nuances of how the relationship between the material and spiritual aspects of our existence relate.  Is the material world de facto evil?  In some traditions this seems to be the case.  This sets up an impossible tension that often works to diminish the impact of the gospel or the scope of God’s mission (missio Dei). Should the church only be concerned with the spiritual well being of others? Do we discount the social, environmental and economic forces that make up our existence and that contribute to oppression, imprisonment and misunderstanding?

Our theological traditions in the west are deeply influenced by Plato the Greek philosopher whose schematic of form and substance was utilized by the early church.  The problem is that Plato’s love of pure disembodied form runs counter to the creative activity of God and God’s pronouncement that creation was good.  When our current thinking uncritically adopts a dualistic perspective that assumes all material issues are either evil or less holy than what we consider spiritual issues the kind of tension cited by Van Duzer in Moll’s interview emerge. The point is that it is important to allow the scriptures to challenge our deepest assumptions rather than proof text our way to affirming our own cultural assumptions. Herein also the problem of historicity pops up.  We are not always conscious of the distance between ourselves and the authors of the scriptures. We are not always conscious of the impact our cultural social upbringing has on how we read the biblical texts. If we do not exercise a rigorous hermeneutic then we run the risk of creating a different gospel – one that is truncated between the physical and the spiritual rather than holistic.  A truncated gospel becomes biblically unrecognizable at best and at worst it becomes a contradiction to the mission of God.  In all fairness the reverse is also true.  If one spends their time working for social justice without the power of the redeeming and transforming work of Christ then a different kind of truncation occurs – it is also a distortion and one that would benefit from the holistic approach modeled by Christ.

The Blind Spot of an Ecclesiocentric Hermeneutic of Mission

Today’s missional thinking needs to be encouraged in its pursuit of a hermeneutic that pursues a Christocentric versus ecclesiocentric approach to mission (i.e., a pursuit of fresh theological reflection).  What do I mean by a Christocentric view of mission?  By this I mean that the confession that Jesus is Lord becomes the center of the life of the church. When lived out this confession does not recognize a distinction between secular and sacred realms as become evident in a dualistic approach to thinking. If Jesus is Lord of all that I do then work as well as worship is the context of God’s mission.  How deeply does the dualism I discussed above impact the way we think about church?  Consider the ramifications of starting the definition of mission with the church (i.e., an ecclesiocentric perspective of mission). If mission starts with the church then people tend to experience God as a church-based deity disconnected from the public realm.  God and faith become relegated to private life and offer nothing of substance to the public domain.

If faith is merely a private matter then it runs counter intuitive to the incarnation.  If faith is merely a private matter how does its expression correspond to the mission of God?  It does not correspond well. When the focus of the church’s mission is to create uniquely spiritual or separate contexts in which people express their faith then the church’s missional impulse is divorced from the incarnational model demonstrated by Christ and simply becomes an attempt to separate the sacred from the secular – this is an easy trap to fall into when one starts their definition of mission with the church (i.e., an ecclesiocentric model). In my discussion with my pastor friend I experience the remnants of an ecclesiocentric hermeneutic of mission when he expressed total shock at my statement that our executive team had devoted hours to discussing how we could appropriately and effectively demonstrate live out our commitment to Christ among our employees, vendors, partners and customers.  But why is this shocking?  Believers committed to Jesus as Lord live out their faith and missionary calling in all aspects of their lives. However where an ecclesiocentric perspective of mission is normative then such activities are demoted to second place in comparison with the activities that occur in the institution of the church.  Why diminish any aspect of incarnational ministry?  Why not celebrate all aspects of incarnational ministry?

My own pastor once taught a fabulous sermon on spiritual gifts. I made special note however that the only application of spiritual gifts he mentioned revolved around volunteering in the ministries housed on the campus or sponsored by the congregation in homes.  After the sermon I noted how encouraged I was with the content and that I had been challenged to rethink the use of Christ’s gifts in me. However I said, “Dennis, clear Wednesday for me.  I need you to be with me from 6:00 AM to about 8:30 PM. Will you do this?”   Dennis agreed to clear his day because of our great respect for one another and the fact he could see I had something unique in mind. “Meet me at the train station at 6:00, I will be in the front car” I said.  We parted until Wednesday.

When we met on the train car I explained that I wanted Dennis to see what my day was like.  My daily commute was an hour and a half to work one way to a company in which I served as Vice President of Administration.  During our day together Dennis sat in on our executive planning session, observed me coaching management staff, answering a deluge of emails, and even firing an employee.  One of my managers even collapsed into my arms in grief and Dennis watched me pray for her (it was her first day at work since her husband had died of a heart attack). Other than the rather dramatic encounter with the manager the day was a normal day for me.  On our way back home after a ten hour day I asked Dennis two questions.  “Dennis I asked you to come with me today to ask you two questions.  First, what part of my day was not ministry in your mind?  Second, you see what my daily commute is like.  We won’t get home until 8:30 PM, when do I have time to come by the church office and volunteer?”

There was no question about my commitment to Jesus as Lord.  There was no question about my support of the church financially, emotionally and spiritually.  But in what Dennis described on the Sunday he taught on spiritual gifts there was no sense of authentication or acceptance of the kind of schedule and impact an executive or professional like myself had on the community in which I worked.  I participated in Sunday morning worship as a point of refreshment and encouragement as much as I participated as an expression of giftedness. Were people like myself to be reduced to mere consumer status who are simply required to pay to play?  Or is there a well of wisdom extant in many congregations that pastors simply have not yet learned to draw on?  Dennis by the way jumped on the conversation with his usual creative and energetic pursuit of learning.  Dennis and I share in ministry it is a partnership.  We enrich each other, encourage each other, pray for each other and find that the contexts in which God has called us to work offer a rich insight into the fullness of God’s mission in the world.

However, among some leaders an ecclesiocentric perspective of mission remains a significant blind spot.  Pastoral leaders who are burned out, bummed out and tired of the machine that consumes them have two significant challenges in front of them.  The first is to refocus on why they are believers in Jesus Christ.  Jesus called this a summons to return to one’s first love (Revelation 2:4, 5).  Recalibrate activity not around the demands of the institution but the risen Christ.  The second is only possible as the first occurs: reinvigorate the adaptive work that summons others to true communitas together.

Heifetz and Laurie argue that adaptive work is required when “…our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge.”[3] This certainly describes the position many congregations find themselves. Effective pastoral leadership in the kind of rapidly changing social environment we find ourselves in leads people through the distress of adaptive work i.e., leading them toward change when they don’t want to change.  This requires that pastoral leaders break from the pattern of leadership in the form of solution or answer giving to shift the locus of responsibility for problem solving to the congregation. (cf., Acts 6 for a model of this).  This represents a significant shift in how pastors view themselves as leaders. It moves pastoral leadership from being the center of the life of the church to a position that works to equip the ministry of the church.  In some traditions (new ones as well as older ones) this represents a great leap of change. Leading adaptive work involves: the ability to view patterns, identification of the adaptive challenge, regulating distress, maintaining disciplined attention, giving the work of ministry back to people and protecting the voices of leadership from below.  These activities redefine how the traditional pastoral role is often defined but it seems to line up to the expectations outlined in the bible for leaders (e.g., Ephesians 4: 12-16).

The Shallowness of a Limited Historical Horizon

Today’s missional reflection needs a dose of historical perspective. The emergence of missional thinking and the struggle with how to describe the church as a missional entity is a predictable continuation of the reformation’s understanding of ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda (the church is always reformed and always reforming).  My friend in the discussion I cite at the beginning of this paper seemed to view missional activity in what I term missio intermitto (i.e., the idea that the mission of God is sometimes on again off again depending on the theological purity as viewed by the latest attempt to recapture the vibrancy of the early church).  While apparently true at the level of particular and local experience the historical intervention of God in the affairs of human kind is far less subjective.  The case in point is Elijah who upon complaining of the absence of vibrant vital prophetic activity in the nation of Israel was reminded that seven thousand others had not compromised their faith in light of the prevailing cultural view of Baal worship (1 Kings 19:18).

Today’s conversation on the missional church is needed, it is promising, and it is pregnant with potential for true reformation of the church.  But, it is not new.  It is a continuation of the work that commenced in the Garden, was exhibited and focused on Christ and continues to today.  As Mark so pointedly infers in his gospel “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God” recognizes a continuation and that continuation is the ministry of Christ reflected in the church. (Mark 1:1)

Alan Hirsch is fond of reminding us that the discussion around the missional church is really a summons to things forgotten, things that have been lost to experience but have always been a vital and vibrant part of the outworking of the church of Christ.  Why is this important?  History has so much to teach us – things to emulate and things to avoid.  The conversation God has with human kind is always a fiercely honest one – one that reveals the majestic as well as the disappointing.   The current conversation is no different and we do well to remain students as well as teachers in the midst of the conversation.  If we fail to retain a long historical horizon (i.e., to pay attention to the lessons of history) we walk with one eye shut and the other dim. We stand on the shoulders of others, we should leverage that perspective.

Engage the Fierce Conversation

By the time my pastor friend and I had completed our conversation we felt a mutual sense of respect and curiosity about how the mission of God was unfolding in front of us.  This result was not by accident.  Author Susan Scott identifies the qualities of conversation needed to get to the kind of understanding my friend and I began to enjoy, she calls it fierce conversation.  She describes it this way:

…robust, intense, strong, powerful, passionate, eager, unbridled, uncurbed, untamed.  In its simplest form, a fierce conversation is one in which we come out from behind ourselves into the conversation and make it real.[4]

True progress toward the adoption of a missional perspective (a Christocentric view of mission) and its practical implications on the way we live as the church is limited only to the extent we fail to engage the conversation.  But engaging the conversation requires that we master the courage to interrogate our present reality, come out from behind ourselves to make the conversation real, be engaged now and prepared to be nowhere else, demonstrate a willingness to tackle the toughest challenges, obey our instincts (the nudges of the Holy Spirit) and take responsibility for our own emotional wake.  Too many pastors and too many business professionals have disengaged the conversation under tidy rationale and accusatory conclusions.  I like the summons of the hymn that still resonates in my soul from the days of my childhood.  It is my prayer for the present for both men and women called and gifted by the grace of God;

Rise up oh men of God! Have done with lesser things;
Give heart and soul and mind and strength to serve the King of kings.
Rise up oh men of God! His kingdom tarries long;
Bring in the day of brotherhood, and end the night of wrong.[5]

[1] Jeff Van Duzer and Rob Moll, “The Meaning of Business” (Christianity Today, January 2011. Source http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/january/21.24.html; accessed, 16 January 2011).

[2] Communitas can be differentiated between three types of social interaction (a) existential – a transient personal experience of togetherness as is often the catalytic event the draws people into the exploration of relationship with Christ; (b) normative – group experience organized into a permanent social system as that which grows up around missional communities committed to Jesus as Lord and (c) ideological – any number of utopian social models as seen in various attempts by groups of disciples who experiment with the meaning of koinonia as part of normative discipleship.

[3] Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie. “The Work of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, December 2001,6.

[4] Susan Scott. Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time (New York, NY: Berkley Books, 2004), 7.

[5] William Henry Walter (1825-93).

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You Did Sign Up for This – It’s Called Leadership

The Effectiveness Lament

Leadership complexity“I did not sign up for this.” The “this” in the sentence refers to the work involved in attempting to hobble together the seemingly mutually contradictory demands of loving the community, caring for the hurting, discipling the responsive and complying with tax, zoning and employee regulations.  “I just wanted to communicate to my city about the power and goodness of God.”

I call this the effectiveness lament.  Every pastor I know who launches into ministry with the objective of being a vital, authentic and missional church has ultimately reached a zenith in their travels in which they feel that the gravitational pull toward tradition and distraction becomes wearying. The congregation started by my friend Doug emerged from an evening discussion with friends around a coffee table. The gist of the conversation was frustration and disgust with the traditional concept of church.  They committed themselves to be something different, to be involved in a missional thrust in their community that resulted in true discipleship and they succeeded at this.  They began to see lives in their community transformed, they experienced what social researchers and theologians call communitas.

Communitas is a term used to describe both the unique character of the church’s experience of living together and the aspects of that shared experience.  As Hirsch outlines it communitas describes the

…dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to “huddle and cuddle,” and instead to form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places, a mission that calls to the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into a world of action.[1]

Communitas can be differentiated between three types of social interaction (a) existential – a transient personal experience of togetherness as is often the catalytic event the draws people into the exploration of relationship with Christ; (b) normative – group experience organized into a permanent social system as that which grows up around missional communities committed to Jesus as Lord and (c) ideological – any number of utopian social models as seen in various attempts by groups of disciples who experiment with the meaning of koinonia as part of normative discipleship.

Communitas opened a flood gate

Doug and the team he worked with began to see people liberated from psychological/spiritual prisons they saw people physically healed and powerfully transformed.  Communitas lead to an outbreak of grace in hundreds of social networks that all wanted to converge with the epicenter to share what they had experienced and to find some explanation for their experience.  The way things took shape looked more and more like an apostolic movement.  By this I mean that the perspective, energy, impulse and outcomes surrounding these emerging social networks were more and more characterized in the attributes of the church i.e., (one, holy, catholic, apostolic).

I visited Doug shortly after his congregation had doubled in a weekend from 400 to 800 people.  The air around the neighborhood was electric (the congregation had bought an entire block of houses to facilitate the need for office space, single mom housing and child care).  The church did not displace their neighbors they became integrated in the neighborhood.  But as Doug and I walked out of the reception area to go to his office he paused went back in and asked the receptionist where his office was.  I thought he was joking…he acted like he had been clubbed on the head.  It was no joke, exponential impact lead to exponential chaos – Doug could not keep up with the changes.

Communitas is Contagious – Eventually

My own experience in pastoral ministry mirrored aspects of my friend’s.  I left my staff position to assume the reigns of a dying congregation with the goal of finding like minded people who wanted something other than church as usual. A dying congregation meant that I simply could not fail. You can’t kill a dead church.  I wanted to know what a church could really be in a community if it was unshackled from the weight of dead tradition and needless bureaucracy.  It did not take me long to suffer frustration. The board of the congregation had been reduced to fretting over how to pay the electric bill and apologetics for why I could not be paid.  When they weren’t decrying the failing finances they engaged in querying how I would grow the congregation and why I did not focus on salvaging their youth. In desperation for change one night, I crammed them all in my station wagon and drove them to a neighborhood.  “What do you see?” I asked.

They answered with the obvious, “I see houses” one said.  “I see a house that is poorly maintained” another replied.  “I don’t get it” another said while the rest grunted approvingly at this not so subtle statement about wasting precious meeting time.  “That woman with the stroller there, what do you see?”  I pressed again.  Finally one ventured, “I think she is single and hurting.”  In an “aha” moment a voice from the back of the station wagon suggested, “I see a single mom who has no hope, who needs to know that God knows her.  We can make a difference for her and her children by loving them – by demonstrating how much God loves them.”  This finally unleashed a torrent of new ways of “seeing” our community.

After several more stops we returned to the building and spent time talking and praying about the kind of church we wanted to be.  In a moment of refreshing and unguarded transparency they all admitted that they were tired of business as usual, they found the church irrelevant to their daily experience and they were bored with Christianity as they knew it. We had our own coffee table discussion.  The result?  We began to act like the church, to love our neighbors, to engage in honest conversation (versus religiously correct conversation) we grew into a new intimacy with Christ.  Like my friend Doug’s experience we saw the same powerful change in people and simultaneous contagion begin to manifest in dozens of social networks.  We began to enjoy communitas together.  We saw God working in our community in new ways.  We engaged a relationship with Jesus as Lord in a way that began to impact every aspect of our lives.

Radical Breakthroughs Happen Slowly Over Time

We went for several years blissful, manageable spiritual and numeric addition occurred.  Then one September the numbers of people who showed up on Sundays more than doubled and before long I was as disoriented as Doug had been.  I felt that we had lost control of the warm, authentic, intimate, organic congregation we had become.  Yet, everyone who now showed up as strangers to me had a rich personal connection somewhere among the people in the congregation I knew well.  We were also in the midst of exponential chaos that seemed engendered by communitas.

I had wanted to grow a large church but I wanted to do it while also avoiding the chaos of rapid expansion I had seen Doug endure.  I wanted nice authentic (read, controlled) community.  I began to realize the oxymoron involved in combining “controlled” and “organic”.  There is no such thing as controlling the organic nature of the church…one can warp, twist, injure, starve, sicken or nourish, nurture and enjoy the organic nature of the church.  The church once unlocked in its fullest DNA is unpredictable, irrepressible and transformational. It jumps across social and cultural boundaries.  It cannot be domesticated by systems and structures instead it will grow around and through systems and structures transforming them and re-purposing them.

I found the lament of effectiveness flowing from my own mouth, “God, I did not sign up for this….”  My time faced demands I had no idea existed before.  The city had noticed we existed and I was faced with zoning hearings, police visitations over decibel levels emanating from the youth who gathered each week to share their experience with Christ and traffic flow patterns that had begun to choke the driveways of our neighbors. Some of my peers in the pastoral community became hostile and distant.  New demands sprung up on our systems with regard to discipleship, financial management, staffing, volunteer training, facilities management, insurance, employment records, risk management assessments, property transactions and background checks. Some of the people who had joined the congregation complained at my lack of pastoral skill while others simultaneously declared me to be the best pastor they had ever seen.  Some loved the worship services while others complained at the lack of traditional services.  I sat staring out my office window one day feeling like a prisoner and longing for the simple days we sat in the station wagon together seeing the community with new eyes.  How in the world could I get back to that day when the whole thing now felt so out of control?

Inescapable Complexity in Organic Growth

In light of all that is being written about the missional church, the simple church, the organic church etcetera it seems that one thing is consistently overlooked – something that should be as obvious as our own existence.  Organisms don’t develop from complexity to simplicity but from simplicity to complexity.  The transition I needed the day I sat in my office was not an escape from complexity but a reconnection with the DNA that drove the changes I was seeing.  If the missional church movement is an attempt to escape complexity of social interaction and especially the exponential complexity inherent in large numbers of people being together in the same place then it will die a deserved death of irrelevance like so many other concepts.

That day in the office I began to reflect on one of Jesus’ more peculiar miracles, the feeding of the five thousand.  The event is a great one to introduce the challenges inherent in leading a missional church. Recall, that a crowd (invaders in the communitas the disciples enjoyed with Jesus) had gathered drawn by the fact that they had seen the signs that Jesus performed on the sick.  Jesus characteristically “…seeing that a great multitude was coming to Him….”[2] engaged Philip in a mentoring moment according to John’s record.  “Where are we to buy bread, that these may eat?” Jesus asks.[3] The complexity of the need and the logistics to meet the need obviously concerned the apostles who may have been more than a little taken aback that Jesus seemed to place the responsibility for addressing the need squarely at their feet.  In case the reflection of John is not clear enough on this point, Luke’s record makes it crystal clear.  When the apostles suggested that people be sent away to find food Jesus said, “You give them something to eat!”[4]

As I reflected on the event I found Jesus’ words remarkably contemporary and disturbing.  I wanted to disengage from the complexity I faced because missio Dei was happening around me.  I was seeing the signs that Jesus performed on the broken, the sick, the isolated, the successful and the downcast.  A crowed had invaded our communitas and I wanted Jesus to dismiss them.  Jesus wanted me to assimilate them into communitas.  The very complexity I wanted to avoid Jesus was asking me to embrace as a way to draw more people into communitas.

Embrace a New Definition of Capacity

I was struck by the extreme differential between my capacity and God’s.  My capacity was the small group I had grown to love and share life with.  God’s capacity was to love the whole world. I was rapidly moving to an “us four no more” focus that sought to isolate my closest friendships from those challenges and complexities introduced by strangers or outsiders. I wanted control over who, when, how and where complexity entered my life. I possess a limited capacity defined by my own abilities, time and resource.  This is the essence of what missional church writers call a traditional or an attractional church. When we rely on our own capacity or comfort to define what a faith community looks like toxicity is de facto loaded into relationships. Writing on what it means to be a missional congregation Hirsch makes a similar observation:

As we shall see, structures are absolutely necessary for cooperative human interaction as well as maintaining some form of coherent social patterns.  However, it seems that over time the increasingly impersonal structures of the institution assume roles, responsibilities and authority that legitimately belong to the whole people of God in their local and grassroots expressions.  It is at this point that things tend to go awry.[5]

This tendency for things to go awry or become toxic is evident in three successive encounters between the apostles and Jesus in events recorded by Luke just after the feeding of the five thousand.[6]

The first event is an argument over who would be the greatest.  Jesus reinforces the reality that the focus in communitas is on responsiveness not position or power.  The illustration of the child contrasts sophistication and superiority (adopting an attitude of condescension toward others) with response and engagement.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if one’s pursuit is the power to control or dominate.  Capacity is released when complexity is embraced with responsive curiosity that asks questions previously either unasked or unpermitted. Until leaders embrace the perspective of play and characteristic engagement of children capacity remains consistently limited.

The second encounter was the unnamed disciple rebuked by the apostles for casting out demons because he was not part of the communitas of the apostles proper. Jesus made clear that the criterion of communitas is relationship not parochialism.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if room is not made within the leadership circle for new people who demonstrate an intimacy with Christ.  Capacity is limited when entrance into leadership is restricted to a false criterion limited by personal connections to the familiar rather than to Christ.  The central criterion is demonstrated intimacy with Christ as Lord not demonstrated connections with the right group or power structure.

The third encounter emerges from the rejection suffered by the apostles at the hands of a Samaritan village.  The apostles wanted to call fire out of heaven to consume those who had openly resisted them. Jesus made clear that the agenda of communitas was liberation not destruction. Capacity is never enlarged when the focus is how we are personally received. If leaders look more to their own feelings of rejection (the need to be right) rather than the need for reconciliation then capacity for what God is doing is constricted to the point a congregation becomes toxic rather than redeeming.

A Metamorphosis not a Destination

A capacity for dealing with complexity (the condition of being made up of many interrelated parts) is imperative to being a missional church.  Yet this capacity to being the missional church is reduced when one possesses a misaligned focus, a poorly defined criterion and a faulty agenda.  It is impossible to fathom engaging the complexity resulting from the works of Christ when one is more concerned; (1) with their role in the plan rather than knowing Christ in a more intimate way; (2) with who is like them and therefore in or out rather than seeing others relating to Christ as lord and (3) why outsiders should be judged and condemned instead of seeing what God is doing to liberate them.

For leaders who do pursue the concept of being a missional church two things seem unavoidable.  First they enter an engagement with the living Christ that irreversibly alters how they see the church and the community around them. Second, they enter a relationship with Christ characterized by exquisite transparency – the awareness of God’s penetrating gaze that simultaneously judges sin and frees the guilty.  Being a missional church is not a destination, it is a metamorphosis engaged by living a life style of repentance and discovery.

[1] Alan Hirsch. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 277.

[2] John 6:5 (NASV)

[3] John 6:6 (NASV)

[4] Luke 9:13 (NASV)

[5] Hirsch 2006, 23.

[6] Luke 9: 46-56 (NASV)

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You Did Sign Up for This – It's Called Leadership

The Effectiveness Lament

Leadership complexity“I did not sign up for this.” The “this” in the sentence refers to the work involved in attempting to hobble together the seemingly mutually contradictory demands of loving the community, caring for the hurting, discipling the responsive and complying with tax, zoning and employee regulations.  “I just wanted to communicate to my city about the power and goodness of God.”
I call this the effectiveness lament.  Every pastor I know who launches into ministry with the objective of being a vital, authentic and missional church has ultimately reached a zenith in their travels in which they feel that the gravitational pull toward tradition and distraction becomes wearying. The congregation started by my friend Doug emerged from an evening discussion with friends around a coffee table. The gist of the conversation was frustration and disgust with the traditional concept of church.  They committed themselves to be something different, to be involved in a missional thrust in their community that resulted in true discipleship and they succeeded at this.  They began to see lives in their community transformed, they experienced what social researchers and theologians call communitas.
Communitas is a term used to describe both the unique character of the church’s experience of living together and the aspects of that shared experience.  As Hirsch outlines it communitas describes the

…dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to “huddle and cuddle,” and instead to form themselves around a common mission that calls them onto a dangerous journey to unknown places, a mission that calls to the church to shake off its collective securities and to plunge into a world of action.[1]

Communitas can be differentiated between three types of social interaction (a) existential – a transient personal experience of togetherness as is often the catalytic event the draws people into the exploration of relationship with Christ; (b) normative – group experience organized into a permanent social system as that which grows up around missional communities committed to Jesus as Lord and (c) ideological – any number of utopian social models as seen in various attempts by groups of disciples who experiment with the meaning of koinonia as part of normative discipleship.

Communitas opened a flood gate

Doug and the team he worked with began to see people liberated from psychological/spiritual prisons they saw people physically healed and powerfully transformed.  Communitas lead to an outbreak of grace in hundreds of social networks that all wanted to converge with the epicenter to share what they had experienced and to find some explanation for their experience.  The way things took shape looked more and more like an apostolic movement.  By this I mean that the perspective, energy, impulse and outcomes surrounding these emerging social networks were more and more characterized in the attributes of the church i.e., (one, holy, catholic, apostolic).
I visited Doug shortly after his congregation had doubled in a weekend from 400 to 800 people.  The air around the neighborhood was electric (the congregation had bought an entire block of houses to facilitate the need for office space, single mom housing and child care).  The church did not displace their neighbors they became integrated in the neighborhood.  But as Doug and I walked out of the reception area to go to his office he paused went back in and asked the receptionist where his office was.  I thought he was joking…he acted like he had been clubbed on the head.  It was no joke, exponential impact lead to exponential chaos – Doug could not keep up with the changes.

Communitas is Contagious – Eventually

My own experience in pastoral ministry mirrored aspects of my friend’s.  I left my staff position to assume the reigns of a dying congregation with the goal of finding like minded people who wanted something other than church as usual. A dying congregation meant that I simply could not fail. You can’t kill a dead church.  I wanted to know what a church could really be in a community if it was unshackled from the weight of dead tradition and needless bureaucracy.  It did not take me long to suffer frustration. The board of the congregation had been reduced to fretting over how to pay the electric bill and apologetics for why I could not be paid.  When they weren’t decrying the failing finances they engaged in querying how I would grow the congregation and why I did not focus on salvaging their youth. In desperation for change one night, I crammed them all in my station wagon and drove them to a neighborhood.  “What do you see?” I asked.
They answered with the obvious, “I see houses” one said.  “I see a house that is poorly maintained” another replied.  “I don’t get it” another said while the rest grunted approvingly at this not so subtle statement about wasting precious meeting time.  “That woman with the stroller there, what do you see?”  I pressed again.  Finally one ventured, “I think she is single and hurting.”  In an “aha” moment a voice from the back of the station wagon suggested, “I see a single mom who has no hope, who needs to know that God knows her.  We can make a difference for her and her children by loving them – by demonstrating how much God loves them.”  This finally unleashed a torrent of new ways of “seeing” our community.
After several more stops we returned to the building and spent time talking and praying about the kind of church we wanted to be.  In a moment of refreshing and unguarded transparency they all admitted that they were tired of business as usual, they found the church irrelevant to their daily experience and they were bored with Christianity as they knew it. We had our own coffee table discussion.  The result?  We began to act like the church, to love our neighbors, to engage in honest conversation (versus religiously correct conversation) we grew into a new intimacy with Christ.  Like my friend Doug’s experience we saw the same powerful change in people and simultaneous contagion begin to manifest in dozens of social networks.  We began to enjoy communitas together.  We saw God working in our community in new ways.  We engaged a relationship with Jesus as Lord in a way that began to impact every aspect of our lives.

Radical Breakthroughs Happen Slowly Over Time

We went for several years blissful, manageable spiritual and numeric addition occurred.  Then one September the numbers of people who showed up on Sundays more than doubled and before long I was as disoriented as Doug had been.  I felt that we had lost control of the warm, authentic, intimate, organic congregation we had become.  Yet, everyone who now showed up as strangers to me had a rich personal connection somewhere among the people in the congregation I knew well.  We were also in the midst of exponential chaos that seemed engendered by communitas.
I had wanted to grow a large church but I wanted to do it while also avoiding the chaos of rapid expansion I had seen Doug endure.  I wanted nice authentic (read, controlled) community.  I began to realize the oxymoron involved in combining “controlled” and “organic”.  There is no such thing as controlling the organic nature of the church…one can warp, twist, injure, starve, sicken or nourish, nurture and enjoy the organic nature of the church.  The church once unlocked in its fullest DNA is unpredictable, irrepressible and transformational. It jumps across social and cultural boundaries.  It cannot be domesticated by systems and structures instead it will grow around and through systems and structures transforming them and re-purposing them.
I found the lament of effectiveness flowing from my own mouth, “God, I did not sign up for this….”  My time faced demands I had no idea existed before.  The city had noticed we existed and I was faced with zoning hearings, police visitations over decibel levels emanating from the youth who gathered each week to share their experience with Christ and traffic flow patterns that had begun to choke the driveways of our neighbors. Some of my peers in the pastoral community became hostile and distant.  New demands sprung up on our systems with regard to discipleship, financial management, staffing, volunteer training, facilities management, insurance, employment records, risk management assessments, property transactions and background checks. Some of the people who had joined the congregation complained at my lack of pastoral skill while others simultaneously declared me to be the best pastor they had ever seen.  Some loved the worship services while others complained at the lack of traditional services.  I sat staring out my office window one day feeling like a prisoner and longing for the simple days we sat in the station wagon together seeing the community with new eyes.  How in the world could I get back to that day when the whole thing now felt so out of control?

Inescapable Complexity in Organic Growth

In light of all that is being written about the missional church, the simple church, the organic church etcetera it seems that one thing is consistently overlooked – something that should be as obvious as our own existence.  Organisms don’t develop from complexity to simplicity but from simplicity to complexity.  The transition I needed the day I sat in my office was not an escape from complexity but a reconnection with the DNA that drove the changes I was seeing.  If the missional church movement is an attempt to escape complexity of social interaction and especially the exponential complexity inherent in large numbers of people being together in the same place then it will die a deserved death of irrelevance like so many other concepts.
That day in the office I began to reflect on one of Jesus’ more peculiar miracles, the feeding of the five thousand.  The event is a great one to introduce the challenges inherent in leading a missional church. Recall, that a crowd (invaders in the communitas the disciples enjoyed with Jesus) had gathered drawn by the fact that they had seen the signs that Jesus performed on the sick.  Jesus characteristically “…seeing that a great multitude was coming to Him….”[2] engaged Philip in a mentoring moment according to John’s record.  “Where are we to buy bread, that these may eat?” Jesus asks.[3] The complexity of the need and the logistics to meet the need obviously concerned the apostles who may have been more than a little taken aback that Jesus seemed to place the responsibility for addressing the need squarely at their feet.  In case the reflection of John is not clear enough on this point, Luke’s record makes it crystal clear.  When the apostles suggested that people be sent away to find food Jesus said, “You give them something to eat!”[4]
As I reflected on the event I found Jesus’ words remarkably contemporary and disturbing.  I wanted to disengage from the complexity I faced because missio Dei was happening around me.  I was seeing the signs that Jesus performed on the broken, the sick, the isolated, the successful and the downcast.  A crowed had invaded our communitas and I wanted Jesus to dismiss them.  Jesus wanted me to assimilate them into communitas.  The very complexity I wanted to avoid Jesus was asking me to embrace as a way to draw more people into communitas.

Embrace a New Definition of Capacity

I was struck by the extreme differential between my capacity and God’s.  My capacity was the small group I had grown to love and share life with.  God’s capacity was to love the whole world. I was rapidly moving to an “us four no more” focus that sought to isolate my closest friendships from those challenges and complexities introduced by strangers or outsiders. I wanted control over who, when, how and where complexity entered my life. I possess a limited capacity defined by my own abilities, time and resource.  This is the essence of what missional church writers call a traditional or an attractional church. When we rely on our own capacity or comfort to define what a faith community looks like toxicity is de facto loaded into relationships. Writing on what it means to be a missional congregation Hirsch makes a similar observation:

As we shall see, structures are absolutely necessary for cooperative human interaction as well as maintaining some form of coherent social patterns.  However, it seems that over time the increasingly impersonal structures of the institution assume roles, responsibilities and authority that legitimately belong to the whole people of God in their local and grassroots expressions.  It is at this point that things tend to go awry.[5]

This tendency for things to go awry or become toxic is evident in three successive encounters between the apostles and Jesus in events recorded by Luke just after the feeding of the five thousand.[6]
The first event is an argument over who would be the greatest.  Jesus reinforces the reality that the focus in communitas is on responsiveness not position or power.  The illustration of the child contrasts sophistication and superiority (adopting an attitude of condescension toward others) with response and engagement.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if one’s pursuit is the power to control or dominate.  Capacity is released when complexity is embraced with responsive curiosity that asks questions previously either unasked or unpermitted. Until leaders embrace the perspective of play and characteristic engagement of children capacity remains consistently limited.
The second encounter was the unnamed disciple rebuked by the apostles for casting out demons because he was not part of the communitas of the apostles proper. Jesus made clear that the criterion of communitas is relationship not parochialism.  Capacity cannot be enlarged if room is not made within the leadership circle for new people who demonstrate an intimacy with Christ.  Capacity is limited when entrance into leadership is restricted to a false criterion limited by personal connections to the familiar rather than to Christ.  The central criterion is demonstrated intimacy with Christ as Lord not demonstrated connections with the right group or power structure.
The third encounter emerges from the rejection suffered by the apostles at the hands of a Samaritan village.  The apostles wanted to call fire out of heaven to consume those who had openly resisted them. Jesus made clear that the agenda of communitas was liberation not destruction. Capacity is never enlarged when the focus is how we are personally received. If leaders look more to their own feelings of rejection (the need to be right) rather than the need for reconciliation then capacity for what God is doing is constricted to the point a congregation becomes toxic rather than redeeming.

A Metamorphosis not a Destination

A capacity for dealing with complexity (the condition of being made up of many interrelated parts) is imperative to being a missional church.  Yet this capacity to being the missional church is reduced when one possesses a misaligned focus, a poorly defined criterion and a faulty agenda.  It is impossible to fathom engaging the complexity resulting from the works of Christ when one is more concerned; (1) with their role in the plan rather than knowing Christ in a more intimate way; (2) with who is like them and therefore in or out rather than seeing others relating to Christ as lord and (3) why outsiders should be judged and condemned instead of seeing what God is doing to liberate them.
For leaders who do pursue the concept of being a missional church two things seem unavoidable.  First they enter an engagement with the living Christ that irreversibly alters how they see the church and the community around them. Second, they enter a relationship with Christ characterized by exquisite transparency – the awareness of God’s penetrating gaze that simultaneously judges sin and frees the guilty.  Being a missional church is not a destination, it is a metamorphosis engaged by living a life style of repentance and discovery.

[1] Alan Hirsch. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 277.
[2] John 6:5 (NASV)
[3] John 6:6 (NASV)
[4] Luke 9:13 (NASV)
[5] Hirsch 2006, 23.
[6] Luke 9: 46-56 (NASV)
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Leading to a New Future: A Leadership Case Study

Facing Reality – Where Leadership Starts

The situation at San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH) in Upland, California had become critical. San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH) faced a loss of profitability in 2004 and endured a climate brutalized by conflict between the administrative and medical staff, pomposity on the part of key administrative personnel, a loss of trust throughout the system and a sterility in leadership from the administration as evidenced in their command and control perspective, opaque processes and squashed board and management interaction. With another year of operating in the red the board of SACH determined that change was needed immediately. So, in 2004 they fired their Chief Executive Officer, their Chief Financial Officer and their Chief of Nursing Operations. Simultaneous to these changes the board hired a new Vice President of Human Resources. They promoted the Nursing Director to Chief of Nursing Operations (CNO) and the Director of Planning to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) position. Then they began the search for a new CEO. Clearly the environment was favorably disposed to significant change.

Addressing Reality – Where Leadership Executes

In stark contrast to the situation San Antonio Community Hospital (SACH) in Upland, California faced in 2004 the hospital was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Thomson Reuters in 2009. The award recognizes excellence in clinical outcomes, patient safety, patient satisfaction, financial performance, and operational efficiency.

Steven C. Moreau, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SACH said, “This is a culmination of many years of hard work by our great physicians and staff who are dedicated to providing the highest quality of care.” What the statement does not reveal is the impact Mr. Moreau’s own presence and philosophy of leadership had on transitioning SACH from loss to profitability. “It is part luck,” he stated, “I was in the right place at the right time.” But luck had little to do with the transition SACH.

Attributes – How Leadership Actualizes Excellence

Three things became apparent in an interview with Mr. Moreau and those who work with him. First, successful organizations exhibit clear and simple values. How did Mr. Moreau’s leadership  philosophy contribute to San Antonio Community Hospital’s fast rate of improvement over a five‐year period? Mr. Moreau’s leadership of the 279 bed San Antonio Community Hospital created the synergy needed between the board, executive team, physicians and staff to develop long‐term strategies and execute them with the extraordinary skill needed to produce extraordinary results. He exhibits three critical leadership attributes:

  • Self‐Awareness – Mr. Moreau leveraged a growing self‐awareness and situational awareness to establish an environment and organizational culture needed to build momentum around three core values: excellence, engagement and execution.
  • Trust – Mr. Moreau modeled and established transparent processes that built trust and “ownership” for change by exposing employees at all levels of the organization to the information that makes the hospital work. This respect saw the board and the physicians as partners in the vision rather than antagonists and recruited them to create a new vision for the hospital.
  • Belief – the conviction and courage needed to commit to a preferred future with the tenacity and grace to insist on that future regardless of the apparent challenges and barriers to getting there. Mr. Moreau demonstrates that power of belief in others, himself and the opportunity presented in the challenges was a highly potent fuel to cultural change.

Second, successful organizations possess a deep commitment to excellence. The SACH board drove the commitment for change as seen in the removal of the previous administration. The board created a work environment predisposed to transformative change. If the only action had been to replace the CEO, San Antonio Community Hospital most likely would not have achieved the excellence it has. The conclusion here is not that boards should disembowel their organizations to get real change. Rather boards should possess the kind of internal commitment to change that the SACH board exhibited in taking the risk to create disequilibrium in the organization’s culture that they exhibited in shaking up their executive administrative structure in order to excise behavioral malignancies that impeded execution.

Third, successful organizations leverage the use coaches/consultants to focus and accelerate learning and change. Coaching was a significant factor in the focusing and sustainability of the changes that Mr. Moreau and the board sought to engender. Coaches engage executive leaders and managers from outside the organizational political and symbolic realities. As a result they are often able to intrude into areas in need of change or refinement without the imagined or real threat of retaliatory or marginalizing behavior.

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