What Do You Want? What Do You Really Want?

This series of posts is from the SpiritualLead.com article, Correcting Ministry Performance.

    The real proof of effective leadership is not in the words spoken, the goosebumps raised, the promises made or even those kept.  In the end, the proof is in the end product--the quality, completeness, and timliness of whatever your ministry or enterprise was created for.  In the end, effective leadership is judged not on good intentions but rather on what got done--not so much by the leader but by those who follow the leader.  And so, if the question is, What is the measure of a leader?, the answer can be found in another question, What did you ask and expect of those who followed you?

    Effective leadership is a careful balance between coaching, mentoring and managing.  The proportions vary based on risk consequences and the emotional and skill maturity of those who are a part of your team.  The art of leadership is more about knowing the answers to key questions than it is simply possessing knowledge. So, if you know the measure of a leader what is your answer to what you expect of your team?  In other words, What do you want from your team, your staff?  What do you really want?

Six Levels Of Performance

When people are excited and motivated about an activity, they will work until all hours, talk about it for hours, go home and dream about it for hours and remember the time for years as “best time.”  Yet, as spiritual leaders we often kill such enthusiasm by making the effort fit inside our neatly drawn lines—by majoring on the minors. 

Or we kill the responsible self-correcting attitude of mature people by lumping them with those who haven’t caught the dream yet.  Or we make the mature feel humiliated by treating them as if they had no experience or original ideas.  Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. in their classic book, In Search of Excellence, quote a General Motors manager who summed up the typical correcting process.  He said,

Our control systems are designed under the apparent assumptions that 90 percent of the people are lazy ne'er-do-wells, just waiting to lie, cheat, steal, or otherwise screw us. We demoralize 95 percent of the work force who do act as adults by designing systems to cover our tails against the 5 percent who really are bad actors.[1]

We know there is more to work than simply having a warm body occupy a position, and particularly when ministry is the goal.  Yet what happens to grind people down?  What happens in a manufacturing plant may not be as serious in a church setting or a ministry, but discouragement, feelings of being used, demotivation, burnout, cynicism and withdrawal are all too common in the environment that should be the laboratory of relationships.

An anonymous worker at GM echoed the same thought as the GM manager from the worker side.

Are these men and women

Workers of the world?

Or is it an overgrown nursery

With children—goosing, slapping, boys giggling, snotty girls?

What is it about that entrance way,

Those gates to the plant?  Is it the

Guards, the showing of your badge—the smell?

Is there some invisible eye

That pierces you through and

Transforms your being?  Some aura or ether, that brain and spirit washes you

And commands, “For eight hours

You shall be different.”

What is it that instantaneously makes

A child out of a man?

Moments before he was a father, a husband,

an owner of property,

a voter, a lover, an adult.

When he spoke at least some listened.

Salesmen courted his favor.

Insurance men appealed to his family responsibility

And by chance the church sought his help….

But that was before he shuffled past the guard, climbed the steps, hung up his coat and

Took his place along the line.

(Anonymous – Poem from a GM worker, In Search of Excellence[ii])

So, when a ministry worker or staff person’s effectiveness drops below his or her potential and your ministry standards, what do you want the results of the correcting process to be? Most ministry leaders will say:

·       Compliance

·       Achievement

·       Innovation

·       Creativity

·       Empowerment

·       Legacy

Yet oftentimes they will settle for compliance alone. 

In Luke 18:18-29 (Matt. 19:16-30;  Mark 10:17-31) we read the story of the rich young ruler.  We don’t know exactly who this person was.  By his own admission he was an observant Jew and, no doubt, a member of King Herod’s court.  Jesus was teaching in the region near Jerusalem since it was close to the time of his arrest and crucifixion.  A number of Pharisees  had gathered and were following Jesus trying, no doubt, to engage him in discussion and hopefully catch him in some indictable heresy.  

A rich young ruler enters the story.  He may have been a disciple under one of those Pharisees and possibly came to watch his Rabbi make quick work of this radical teacher called Jesus of Nazareth (of all places!).  What prompted him to ask the question we'll never know.  Perhaps it was seeing the innocence of the children around Jesus and a desire for a more simple relationship with God that peeked his interest.  It's possible the ruler’s question was sincere since he fell on his knees and called Jesus, “good teacher” (Mark 10:17).    But perhaps he was going to mock Jesus through a series of questions.  Or perhaps he may have grown tired of a continuous and unsuccessful process of trying to obtain righteousness through works. Since he was probably a prince rather than a Roman officer he was Jewish and as such he had been taught that compliance was sufficient to be righteous.  Yet, you have to wonder, why the question if he didn’t doubt his own righteousness through his own works.  We see a compelling drama unfolding; a young man who, up to this moment, thought compliance was all that was necessary and yet realizing it wasn’t.  There has to be more…or maybe less.  As we look at the six levels of performance in the next six posts let’s look at the question, "What do you want?" through your eyes as a leader and also look at it through the eyes of the rich young ruler and catch a glimpse of perhaps the questions going through his mind as well.

Next Post:  Level 1 Compliance

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[i] Thomas J. Peters, Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence, Harper and Row Publishers: New York, 1982, pp. 57-58.

[ii] Ibid,  p. 235.

Comments

[Ron Kuest]

Thanks for your encouragement. In my mind it is impossible to separate being a Christ follower from being a person of influence (definition of a leader). Some, unfortunately, do it poorly and this is what the ministry is all about--helping people in ministry be more effective in influencing others for Christ.

[Tikina Simmons]

This posting is so crucial and necessary in these times where everyone wants to be a leader, but, unfortunately does not have the skills acquired.

Thanks!