Faith Venture

Someone was recently talking with me about leadership in an organization. “Problem is,” he said, “that too many only know how to work on their own. They can’t build teams.”

This is part of Jesus’ leadership legacy. He had a mission. He recruited disciples (people who shared that mission and wanted to learn and contribute). He taught them about the mission and how to do it. He created teams. They almost always went out in groups.

later, when he was gone and they were in charge, they still worked as teams. Paul even worked as part of a team. He just wrote individually.

Part of growing a team is common purpose. Part is trust. Part is having roles where each team member fills a role and the team succeeds. There is a humbleness like I have talked about where people think about the others. Yet each excels.

I have formed a few teams in my career. When they succeed, it is a beautiful thing. They are easy to destroy, though. They take work. But the result is worth it.

For some reason, I’ve been contemplating servant leadership. Several years ago I met a company president who proclaimed that concept. He supposedly followed a book by that name. The model was Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. He often gave gifts of a model of a sculpture from that scene.

I met the author of that book at a conference once. To be blunt, he left me a bit cold or put-off. That president? He didn’t look very much like a servant leader when he sold his company and promptly disappeared without telling anyone at the company that they were most likely all going to lose their jobs.

This was perhaps the wrong model, anyway. People probably don’t want that type of leadership in the extreme.

Let’s take two other examples.

Moses had a mission. God told him to take the leadership of moving the Hebrews out of Egypt. They had been there a long time. It was all they knew. Moses had a mission and a vision to change that.

So, they left Egypt. One day in the desert, Moses’ father-in-law showed up. He saw a huge queue of people waiting to get a few minutes of Moses’ time in order to settle various complaints. Jethro says, in effect, “Moses, you’ve forgotten your job as a leader. You keep the people focused on the mission and train other people to handle all these details.”

Jesus started a mission. He recruited and attracted disciples to help carry out the mission. He trained them through teaching, having them observe him, and then also providing practical experience.

I have seen far too many so-called leaders who have no clue about all this. Either they are ego-driven (and thus not thinking of others which is the foot-washing example) or they are, especially in the business world, totally driven by numbers. Church people and educators get driven by fads and programs.

The leader reminds people constantly about the mission. Maybe it’s providing a product or service that people need. Maybe it’s about giving people meaning in their life. Or maybe it’s about serving people with food and comfort.

The leader then recruits a team. Teaches them, guides them, reminds them constantly of the mission.

A leader cannot afford to get lost in the weeds. A leader must remain firmly focused on the mission. There is a mission. A team forms. They change the world.

I’m in Hannover, Germany. My room overlooks the beautiful Machsee (a little lake) with the sunrise streaming over the lake. Beautiful morning. I’ll probably be walking several miles at the famous Hannover Fair (Hannover Messe) with about 23 buildings on the fairgrounds filled with exhibitors talking about the latest technology for industry. Always cool.

My meditation this morning included the latest Andy Stanley leadership podcast. This one on trust.

There are at least two points-of-view to look at the trust issue.

Trust is essentially doing what you say you’ll do. Living up to your commitments.

Do you say you’ll make the 9 am meeting, yet you don’t arrive until 9:15 or 9:30? Or you say you’ll be somewhere and then fail to show? Or you promise a report by end of day Wednesday, yet when Friday rolls around, no report?

In this gap between expectation and reality, how do those affected react? Do they suspect your motives, or do they give you the benefit of the doubt.

Suspicion is one real problem in an organization where there is often this gap.

Have you ever worked in an organization where people are suspicious of others’ motives? Constantly?

I have. Many times. I’m sure you have too. It’s never healthy.

A leader needs to perceive and deal with this attitude quickly. Have a conversation. Do some fact finding. Discover the cause of the gap. Deal with the facts. And if the facts are that the individual just cannot perform or be relied upon, then deal with that.

If you are the one who creates the gaps, transparency is your friend. Address the gap before anyone else has a chance to react. Let people know that you are aware and will change.

Suspicion in a church or any organization is like a cancer. It starts small and then it eats away at its health. Stop it before it can start.

Leadership in the past age.

I just picked this image yesterday a little at random while surfing the Web. But it seams to represent the old “command and control” leadership developed with the industrial age.”

Churches have that, too. Catholics have had that a long time–although not without bumps along the way. Protestants thought they got away from it a few hundred years ago, but they just have fewer levels of hierarchy.

It’s still often a one-to-many style. There is a place for a good teacher who can teach to many. I listen to a few of these people every week–Bill Hybels, John Ortberg, Andy Stanley. They keep me grounded.

But even among Catholics, the idea of entering the “full-time Christian ministry” as a profession is weakening. They are consolidating some parishes in our area due to lack of priests. Seminaries are hurting all over the country. The high price they charge is seldom seen worth the reward. I look at some of the curriculum from time to time and cringe. Not from a liberal v conservative v fundamentalist v whatever point of view. More from a “they’re charging this much money for this type of class!?” point of view.

Leadership mentors promising people. Providing education as the need arises.  But also practical work of helping others–either in ministry or missions (inward to the brothers and sisters or outward to the world).

Except for those teaching times, that picture should be more like all blue and one grayed out.

• Empower people to do ministry
• Develop teams
• Collaborate on projects
• Mentor others (or seek a mentor)
• Get out of the building
• Do ministry and mission you’re passionate about
• Be passionate in living with-God every day
• Leaders say, “How can I help you”

Leadership in the past age.

The empty tomb. The realization slowly penetrates their confused minds. The ministry is not over. It has only just begun.

The eleven leaders and however many other disciples realized what the message was. It took a few days to digest. I don’t blame them. I like to digest new ideas for a little while until I see all the possibilities.

I wrote recently about succession planning. Sometimes people do not grow into leadership until they actually have to be leaders. Their mentors may have seen the potential. Potential cannot turn into reality until one actually goes to work on it.

Walter Russell Mead is a thinker. Mostly he writes on politics. He’s sort of conservative, but I’m not always sure. This is a good thing. But he has a Christian heritage and writes on the church. Recently, he wrote on the state of Christian leadership–pastoral education. The eleven, he writes, could not have gotten a job in most any church today. You see, they didn’t have a piece of paper telling the world that they had graduated from a seminary.

Their seminary was part from a mentor (OK, the best mentor) and part from the “school of hard knocks” as we used to say. But over the past many years, we have developed the idea that priests and pastors (and Christian educators, music directors, missionaries, and so on) must be educated. It’s like an MBA for churches.

And Christian leadership has become a salaried staff position. Salary, benefits, position in the hierarchy, perks. Once upon a time, I was on the Ohio state Board of Trustees for a Protestant denomination. While attending my first meeting with the others trying to gage who I was and being a young man, most asked me, “What church do you pastor?” None, I replied. I’m a product development manager in industry. Hmmm, they thought.

Mead writes, “It’s time for new leaders with vision and imagination to take the church beyond the blue [his term for an old way of thinking, big institutions, etc.]. Since the colonial era, the genius of American Christianity has lain in the ability of new generations of Christian leaders to reinvent institutions, find an authentic theological stance and voice that appeals to each new generation, and put Christianity in the forefront of individual lives and social challenges from age to age.

“Theology can be debated; liberal, conservative, protestant, catholic, fundamentalist, modernist. There is much to be said for each of these positions, and the debates need to continue.

“But there’s a much more critical difference: the difference between life and death. There is a lot of dead wood in American Christian institutions today, and the carters are coming to clear it away.”

Is it time for people who have talent and are nurtured to assume more leadership in the Christian movement? People like most of us who read this blog? Time for us to stand up and be the leaders we should be–and nurturing and mentoring the next generation–to proclaim the resurrected Christ to the world? Just do it.

Jesus was an enigma to his contemporaries. No one figured him out. Even today, people have a tough time figuring him out.

Sometimes he was a teacher in the Wisdom tradition. Many of the sayings he taught came straight from the book of Proverbs. Sometimes he gave sayings with a twist–as in adding “mind” to the Shema, and then adding the second commandment “like the first” to love your neighbor.

But he didn’t look like a Wisdom teacher when he acted out his inner Old Testament prophet. As in his last week. He cursed the fig tree that was barren. Like the prophets of earlier time, this was a prophetic act of pointing out the barrenness of religious life under the leaders of the day. And the symbolic act of driving out the money changers and merchants from the Temple.

Sometimes a person just has to be strong. Send a message. He was thoroughly disgusted with the state of religion in his day.

We can learn from this. Even today, we have religious leaders who are exposed as shallow chasers of power and wealth. Who bow to prevailing political winds rather than living out the Gospel of Jesus.

Worth pondering as we approach Easter. What do we place above having an intimate, passionate relationship with our God?

I will be taking a few days to hike in the hills of southern Ohio. There is no Internet at the lodge. They say mobile phones work only intermittently. I’ll take a Sabbath for reflection, if you will, before the Easter celebration.

Who knows where those thoughts emerge from? Is it just me?

Listening to the outstanding Palm Sunday cantata by our choir Sunday that traced through some of Jesus’ last week, the thought popped into my mind–succession planning.

Yes, this is an essential leadership function. None of us last forever. We need to plan for the next generation of leadership. It’s on my mind relative to the soccer referee association that I have led for many years. Now, I’m about to take on a new ministry at church and among my first planning thoughts are how to recruit a successor.

So, Jesus. After that thought (we know from the Gethsemane story) about “what did I get myself into?”, must have come the thought “did I do a good job of succession planning?”

After all, he knew they would scatter. He told Peter that he would deny knowing him three times that very night. John seemed to be more steady, but he was more the intellectual and less the blustery, forceful leader. The movement needed both.

He devoted the better part of three years in succession planning. Now he was facing death. Would they be ready?

We’re the next generation that’s preparing yet another generation. Are we ready? Will they be?

I’m sure the doubt was momentary. Of course he did a good job. And we know that people usually grow into their new leadership roles. Unsteady at first until they find their footing and voice. That first generation went from cowardice and uncertainty to be powerful. They set the pattern.

I’m encouraged by the early leadership of Pope Francis. I pray that many, many other Christian leaders emulate that leadership. Which seems to be of a piece handed down from the master leader.

Newly elected Pope Francis.

Congratulations to the Roman Catholic Church for such a quick consensus around a new leader. Such a quick consensus shows that Pope Francis is well known and highly regarded by his colleagues. He’s not a Vatican insider. Reaching out signals a willingness to try to change the Church.

I have been traveling and in meetings the past two days, so I’m a little behind in news and study. But following a page from Bill Hybels and my schedule that I wrote about recently, I put on my schedule meetings with Wyatt and Arianna (5 and 3 years old, respectively). Gotta do that once in a while. Oh, had some business meetings, too.

Most of my information comes from unreliable sources–ABC, CNN, The New York Times–but the consensus of the reports about Francis’ lifestyle and leadership are heartening to me. I have great respect for Benedict. He has a brilliant theological mind. But he also was a Vatican insider.

What I’ve read about Francis is that he exhibits a humble leadership by example and a passion for bringing the Church into the 21st Century. Certainly there is a crisis of confidence in the Catholic church as there is within all most all Christendom. Whether we are Catholic or not, the Pope is a leading spokesperson for the faith. He’s an important leader.

We read and write much about new styles of leadership, but humans being humans, we just can’t seem to bridge the gap from the old authoritarian models (“Teamwork means you all doing what I say”) with the trappings of wealth and power to a model of humble leadership. At 76 years of age, I would think that Francis should be pretty well comfortable in his style and remain uncorrupted by the pomp and circumstance foisted off on leaders by the bureaucracy.

I grew up with the mantra that if only women gained power in organizations then things would be different. I have yet to see that happen. The difference between women and men when achieving great power in large organizations seems negligible right now. Maybe a 76-yr-old celibate male priest can show the way.

I hope so.

Would you follow the leadership of someone who is consistent, has a consistent message, who keeps confidentialities? Or a micro-manager who manipulates, cannot make a decision, is emotionally volatile?

The second (and last, really) good point Simon Sinek makes in his book “Start with Why” is the value of trust.

He uses two stories from the airline industry–Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and Gordon Bethune of Continental (now United). He also uses the examples without the irony of time.

Kelleher posited the notion “that it is the company’s responsibility to look after the employees first. Happy employees ensure happy customers, he said. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders–in that order.”

Bethune shared that notion. When he became CEO in 1994, he said, “I could see Continental’s biggest problem the second I walked in the door. It was a crummy place to work. You can’t have a good product without people who like coming to work.”

And Bethune succeeded. (Note: I fly Continental/United, in fact I’m Premier Platinum this year.) The company’s performance improved dramatically and it was a good enough place to work that a loyal passenger like me noticed.

But… The board of directors eventually decided that they needed a cost cutter CEO and moved Bethune to retirement and brought in a finance guy (I call them “bean counters”) Larry Kellner. It didn’t take an entire year for him to begin to reverse all the policies and attitudes that made Bethune successful. He was succeeded by a mergers and acquisitions attorney Jeff Smisek when the board moved toward a merger/acquisition with United–a failed airline that was as bad as Bethune’s “crummy place to work.” And Smisek drove employee attitudes further down. Although neither could succeed in making it as bad as United.

Trust takes time to build. It can be destroyed in an instant.

When you are building a team in your church, parish or organization, better to study Bethune and Kelleher (same story with Sam Walton and his successors, by the way).

And for Biblical inspiration, study Nehemiah. He was a leader.

Great leaders inspire by communicating why the organization exists. So says Simon Sinek in his book, “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action.” Actually the book is surprisingly poorly written–should have been an article, rather than a book. Or, yet, it’s better as a short talk–as his appearance at the TED Talks generated millions of views.

His idea is insightful. Why do you work in the church? In fact, why do you work anywhere? If you are a leader in your church, why does your function exist?

I was reflecting on Paul’s letters–yep, all of them. He was the consummate organizer. Think about it. He had a “why”.

Micromanaging kills enthusiasm. Just filling a spot in a program kills enthusiasm. Just heard a story about a many who was moved by guilt and other manipulative tactics to take on leadership of a children’s class at church. He really didn’t like working with kids. He really wasn’t a teacher. Although a successful businessman, he failed miserably as a children’s teacher. He didn’t have a “why”, just a “what” that was filling a spot and reading the curriculum.

This week, define your why. If it doesn’t inspire, find something that does.