Re-inventing Leadership 4: Leadership Must be Redefined with Humility

To achieve a decentralized system, the right leader must be in place.  The character required of the person that can allow such a decentralized and messy organization to exist is great.  It requires a person who is not worried about his own success apart from the success of those around him.  It requires a humility that not only realizes that the leader does not have all the answers, but also that the answers can be found in the creativity of those around him.  It also requires that the leader share the spotlight.

Leadership like this is leadership modeled.  That modeling is reflective of the character of the leader.  If the leader is not humble, he will not model humility.  If he does not have a genuine love for the success of others, he will not model it.  However, if humility is modeled, if shared success is modeled, and if the leader allows others to be part of or fully in charge of a creative solution to whatever issue arises, that modeling actually inspires and invigorates creativity within the organization.

Unfortunately, the contemporary models of leadership elevate the star, the one who had rocketed up the leadership ladder.  These men look good, talk well, and have a personality that can light up a room.  They are charismatic, charming, and powerful.  Sadly, many of them have little substance to compliment their style.

The ideal candidate for decentralized, messy leadership is one who heeds the words of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 4:13:  “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”  In this passage, Paul gives us the ingredients of leadership in a decentralized culture.  Those ingredients are courage, confidence, and humility.

Paul says that the Christ-follower can do all things.  A Christ-follower exhibits confidence that all things can be done.  This is not an expression of arrogance, but of confidence.  The courage to attempt “all things” comes from the strength of Christ.  The person’s confidence is rightly placed, not in his own efforts but in conjunction with the Other.  His courage comes from the strength drawn from the Other.  Paul then defines the Other as Christ, and when one realized nothing can be done except through Christ, not only has he found the secret to living, but the ingredients for effective leadership.  For Christian leadership, the emphasis is placed on a God-developed charisma, not the transient aspects, such as personality, looks, and intellect.  It is based around substance not style.

In this model, a person realizes that apart from others nothing gets done well (humility).  Confidence is placed not solely in oneself, but realizes that others can accomplish great things as well.  When a leader appropriates these two ingredients, he can muster the courage to risk, experiment, innovate and even fail.  Modeling that confidence, humility, and courage often leads to an emboldened organization free to be creative and responsible.

Meditation

I missed blogging on meditation last tuesday as part of “Blogging the Spiritual Disciplines”. I had some good things going. But here are a few quotes I wanted to pass on to you about meditation:

Meditation, according to Whitney involves, “filling your mind with God and truth. For some, meditation is an attempt to achieve complete mental passivity, but biblical mediation requires constructive mental activity.” ¹ He goes on to define mediation as “deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer. Meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing as a means of taking in God’s word.”² One of the images that may best describe meditation is the steeping of tea.

Eugene Peterson, in his book “Eat this Book” speaks of meditation as part of the act of reading scripture. He says that it is the “discipline we give to keeping the memory active in the act of reading. Meditation moves from looking at the words of the text to entering the world of the text. As we take this text into ourselves, we find that the text is taking us into itself…Meditation is the aspect of spiritual reading that trains us to read Scripture as a connected, coherent whole, not a collection of inspired bits and pieces…Mediation is the primary way in which we guard against the fragmentation of our Scripture reading into isolated oracles…Meditation is the prayerful employ of imagination in order to become friends with the text. It must not be confused with fancy or fantasy”.³

Peterson goes on to say that “meditation is not intrusion, it is rumination - letting the images and stories of the entire revelation penetrate our understanding. By meditation we make ourselves at home and conversant with everyone in the story, entering the place where Moses and Elijah and Jesus come together. Participation is necessary. Meditation is participation.”⁴

“No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation in sky and ocean, tree and flower, Isaiah and Mary, and, finally and completely, Jesus. Meditation discerns the connections and listens for the harmonies that come together in Jesus.” ⁵

1 Whitney, 43.

2 Ibid, 44.

3Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, Eerdmans, 2007, pg 99-101.

4Ibid, 101-102.

5Ibid, 102.

Re-inventing Leadership 3: Leadership Must Become Decentralized.

Apache leads the way in web server hosting.  In their June 2007 survey, Netcraft estimates that over fifty percent of all web sites run on apache web servers.  It was as high as seventy percent in 2006.  In other words, the software that powers the majority of the web is not a corporate development, but a product of collaboration and choice.  While a core set of code exists for apache, developers and systems engineers can customize the exact implementation of the apache web server.  In addition, while a foundation oversees the project, no one really controls the code; code can be added to or taken away.   Apache represents the movement into decentralized leadership.  The development of open source software is representative of the change and transformation of leadership.

Leadership has for years been centralized.  Some of this is a result of the education gap that existed early in the previous century.  Leadership in the organization was likely the most educated within it.  With knowledge and information comes power.  This gap appears to have created positional leadership.  The leader was the one in charge, not the one who was most influential.  However, the broad base of knowledge and information available to people in an organization through the internet has closed the gap.  Instead of positional leaders being the most knowledgeable, people inside the organization have access to the same knowledge base and are often more knowledgeable than those within leadership positions.

The measures of success affect how an organization is led.  The church seems to have associated success with the same measurables an industry uses.  The church finds success in large churches, budgets, number of people baptized, and books sold.  While all of those are indicators of activity, they are not effective measures of success.

One result of using numerical indicators is that the church, and those searching for a community to worship with gravitate toward those who can draw a crowd, who have a charismatic personality, or who pastor a large church. The humble, faithful servant who has been obedient to his calling while eschewing the greener grass is not recognized.  Is a pastor successful when he labors faithfully for years in a small, rural community where he is literally the pastor to the community?  In the current method of measuring success, he would not be successful. To the people whose name he knows, however, he is incredibly successful.

To maintain the measurables necessary to keep up with the image and reputation, leadership can be tempted to objectify people and ministries.  The member is not valued through relationship but is seen as a tool for achieving the leader’s goals, objectives, and plans. Achieving those centralized goals and objectives determines how valuable a person is to the organization.  Failure to meet those goals and objectives results in removal or transfer.  Those goals and objectives come from visions and strategic plans determined by the executive leadership within the organization.  One benefit of decentralized leadership is that when the huddles help determine the what and how a shared vision often emerges.  When people take ownership for the direction and leadership of the organization, leaders can facilitate and resource them in addition to building healthy relationships.

Centralized leadership has abated creativity and attempted to increase control. Moving to a decentralized system of leadership will expand the creativity of the organization as it frees people from the constraints of control that hamper centralized systems.

These open systems do not rely on a police force.  On one hand, there is the freedom for a person to do what he wants; on the other, a person has added responsibility because there is no police maintaining law and order.  Everyone becomes a guardian.  A person becomes responsible for his own welfare and that of those around him.  In open systems, the concept of a “neighbor” takes on more meaning.  Open systems rely on relationships rather than rules.  In order to have decentralized leadership, trust and relationship are at a premium.

The reality of an open system is that within it there will be a few oddities; that will be normal.  However, it will also allow people to unleash a world of creativity and innovation.  It appears to be chaos, and to those who struggle when structure is absent it will feel chaotic.  It is not, however, anarchy.
Rules, laws, structure and centralization develop when an organization loses its ability to trust those within it.  It is then that leadership develops into coercive leadership.   Because a small group of people have become bad apples, the whole organization goes on lockdown.  Creativity is stifled.

When a system is decentralized, creativity has the ability to flourish and have issues resolved by the whole organization rather than relying on the creativity and abilities of one person. Consider a toy manufacturer who sells teddy bears. The manager tells them that profits were down twenty percent because the arms kept falling off the bears.  The proper information given to the employees could allow those employees to look at their processes and quality control and then determine what changes could be made to keep the arms from falling off.  The ability to decentralize the problem-solving may not only lead to a correction of the problem of the arms falling off, but a more effective production process that could save money for the company.  The ability to allow others to develop the solution inspires trust, creativity, and increased moral with the organization as a whole.

Ubuntu Rocks

For some time now I’ve been wanting to put a version of Ubuntu linux on a machine and play with it.  The other day, while waiting on some multimedia to be processed for our worship on Sunday, I pulled my wife’s old laptop she bought in  2003 and installed ubuntu on it.  In the first couple of days, I’m reading some sites giving info about best programs to have running, etc, so I’m just tweaking the system.  But I gotta say, so far, it’s easy to use, good software, and I really like it.  That means that I now have a laptop with Mac OS X, Ubuntu 7, and my wife’s XP machine.  I have a win2003 server in my basement and a linux machine running trixbox for my phone system.  Talk about diversity!!!

Leadership is Messy, Not Ordered.

The world today is all about getting things done.  To be productive, one must be inherently organized, able to clean off his desk, and have an empty inbox.  Highly productive people should have action plans, strategic plans, visions and values that keep them moving towards the accomplishment of a predefined goal.  Task and workflow management has become all the rage, while the number of websites created to help a person achieve plans and visions, goals, and task management are arriving to the web on a regular basis.

Being a leader means getting things done, and getting things done means that the leader has to be able to establish goals, plans and strategies that move the organization forward.  Task and workflow management, values, and action plans are necessary to achieve the leader’s vision and see success within the organization.  Stakeholders in the organization demand results. The bottom line must grow appropriately, whether that bottom line is defined in terms of people or dollars.  That is all within the function of leadership.

The way to keep on task and achieve high productivity and results is to avoid distractions, plan the day, do the most important tasks first and overall just manage time to the minute.   The ultimate in time management will allow the leader to get things done which should equal results, growth and success.  The stakeholders should then be happy.

Sadly, this highly productive, always on task, vision-driven, and results-oriented image of a leader has become a staple of leadership writing over the past several years.  The aspiring leader is told to develop a vision, develop core values, hire the right people and get them on the right seat in the bus and all will begin to flow along smoothly.  There is a term for this philosophy in the south:  Hogwash!

Leadership is messy.  It is not a clean, clear-cut process.  It is not a science; rather it is an art that takes in the distractions and uses those distractions as teachable moments.

Structured leadership is an attempt to control the resources and direction of the organization.  It also seeks to limit the uncertainty in the life of the leader as well as the organization.  However, that is not leadership.  Leadership is not so much about minimizing risk as it is about challenging the process .  It is about creating dissonance, not resolving it.  Leadership is as much about influencing people in crisis as it is in influencing people in peace.

Leadership appears most evident within a crisis.  Compare the crisis in New York City on September 11, 2001 and the crisis in New Orleans in September of 2005.  Major distractions to both cities forced leadership to respond to the mess.  There were no plans to deal with the magnitude or type of crises each city encountered.  One mayor demonstrated grand leadership; the other demonstrated abysmal leadership.

Structured leadership is completely inorganic.  Values and plans leave little room for distractions to create a new path and new direction.  Changes in the market and changes within culture are happening at such a frantic pace that ignoring those adaptations because of a strategic plan or a set of values that drive the organization can lead to organizational suicide.  The organization must be flexible and organic enough to adapt and be creative; structured organizations stifle such activity.

From a Christian perspective, structured leadership can hamper obedience to the movement of the Spirit.  The biblical model shows Jesus only doing what he heard his Father tell him to do.  He majored in interruptions.  He welcomed them and acted on them, using the opportunity to instruct his followers or chastise the religious rulers of the day.  In contemporary ministry, however, positional leaders search for just the right technique to manage their ministry as opposed to leading their ministry.  They seek to balance saving their jobs with doing what is necessary to move their ministries forward.  Often times those are diametrically opposed to each other. Instead of doing something to keep empowering change and adaptation, these leaders settle for the path of least resistance.

By minimizing distractions, however, leaders often miss the opportunity for the Spirit to do a new work within the organization.  It also could be the suppressant that kills the fire of the Spirit within the leader’s own life; the church finds it hard to follow the wind if it’s leadership is tied to a tree.  It is within the movement of the Spirit that the creative power of God can be poured out.

Orderly leadership has a tendency to stifle creativity.  The creative genius within someone will struggle to subsist in a highly structured leadership environment.  Creativity requires that instead of simply thinking outside the box, the box may need to be blown up.  Creativity requires experimentation and failure.  While job security for a leader often requires the minimization or total removal of risk, the reality is that without the creativity coursing through the veins of the organization the organization will eventually die.  Results will wane and leadership must then be changed in an attempt to stimulate better results, sell out and/or merge with another organization or simply die a slow death.

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