5minutesORLess

What we need are healthy systems

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend, who, like me, shares an unbalanced passion for leadership, and we were talking, among other topics, about the election of Barak Obama.  I asked him his thoughts and whether he saw the election through liberal or conservative lenses.  His answer was profound in it's simple truth.  He said he didn't care about labels.  "All I care about is if Obama can create and maintain healthy systems." 

What is a Healty System?  His point raises an interesting thought.  What constitutes a healthy system?  In my experience it would include but not necessarily be limited to the following elements:  sustainable, self-correcting, other/community-focused, self-healing, vision/morality/tradition driven, with a leader who understands and is capable of establishing and maintaining those elements.  And, most importantly, to use a post-modern term, it has a meta-narrative.  There is an ideology expressed through a communicated vision, and members of the community not only understand it, but believe in it because they've learned it through experience and the teaching of leadership and the "elders" of the community.

From a political view then, too big a government isn't healthy but neither is minimal government in times of crisis.  An unhealthy taxing system either creates too little or too much cash flow through a bureaucracy.  An unhealthy military system has either too much asset to be too easily deployed or used in lieu of other dispute resolution tools or creates an unwanted vulnerability and weakness.  A government whose people rely solely on it to be their security and safety net when unexpected crisis and those events brought on by poor discipline and choices occurs creates dependency.  Yet too little concern for its citizens creates unrest, disloyalty, cynicism and even anarchy.  A healthy system is asymetrical.  It is flexible to the moment yet does not lose it's "heart"; the reason for which it formed or was created.

Question for Reflection and Discussion:  What consitutes a "healthy system" when it comes to Christian community and ministry?  What do you think?  How many components make up a healthy system?  How do you know when the system is unhealthy?  What are your thoughts? 

"When am I a Leader?" An Issue of Context

Several times this month I've had variations of the same question from spiritual leaders.  The question, and it's a good one, is, "When in my role as pastor is it appropriate to be THE LEADER and when should I be pastoral?"

My answer is this.  Being a leader is never out of context.  You can shift functions from ministry manager to pastor to preacher, resource and staffing allocator, encourager, back to pastor, preacher, spiritual warfare battler and friend.  But you are a leader in all roles, all the time, 24/7.  Leadership is not a function.  It is a state of relationship. 

There are several reasons for this.  First, there are no leaders without followers.  And a follower's perception of a leader does not change throughout the day, at the end of the day or become different on weekends or days off.  A leader simply is, in the eyes of the beholder.  As a result, every thing you do is perceived through the leader focused lens of the follower.  The perception of the person being influenced is, "this person is my leader" no matter what they do.  A leader is never out of the context of the total role they play, even when they are at play.  

This leads to the second point.  Managing is about doing things.  Leadership is largely about conveying symbols and messages and stories to explain and demonstrate who we are as a team/group/people and where we are going.  The heavy mantle of leadership is that everything you do carries a symbolic message with it--a message much bigger than the task itself.

There is a common misconception that leadership involves the ruling of many.  In reality, leadership boils down to nothing more or less than influence--whether it be to one or one thousand.  There are leaders with positions of authority, but there are also many, many more leaders who simply influence others, as Warren Bennis points out, by their ability to create a shared meaning, through their distinctive voice, their integrity and their adaptive capacity.  

Questions for Reflection:  Who do I influence?  How has my influence as a leader made a difference in the lives of others--who they are and how they see themselves, and how they see God and reflect Christ to others?

On Becoming a Leader--Warren Bennis Competencies Part 4

In his book, On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis identifies four essential competencies that all effective leaders must possess. 

1.  Leaders are able to engage others by creating shared meaning.

2.  Distinctive leaders have a distinctive voice.

3.  The third key competency all effective leaders have is integrity.

His last is:

4.  The key competence is adaptive capacity.

Management is linear.  That is why and how we can establish policies, rules and procedures to keep an enterprise healthy.  The purpose of management is hygiene--creating order to prevent messes.

However, leadership is asymmetrical, amorphous , fluid and flexible.  Bennis says management wears square hats, leadership wears sombreros.  With leadership boundaries are ever changing.  There always exists a dynamic tension between management and leadership and while a good leader must also be a disciplined manager, the role of leading is to attempt to undue the neat square corners built by managing.  Effective leaders must be able to skillfully and successfully tolerate, embrace, navigate and arbitrate surprise, tension and paradox.   Barriers once thought impregnable suddenly become corridors through which the life blood of change courses.  For example, the bandwidth now being used by YouTube in 2008 is equivalent to the entire bandwidth available to the internet in 2004. 

Bennis says, “Life on this turbulent, complex planet is no loner linear and sequential, one thing logically leading to another.  It is spontaneous, contrary, unexpected, and ambiguous.  Things do not happen according to plan, and they are not reducible to tidy models.  We persist in grasping at neat, simple answers, when we should be questioning everything.” (page 18)

Leadership--the work of leaders--is certainly not about maintaining the status quo.

Next Post:  On Becoming a Leader--Warren Bennis   Engaging the World