Lecture
A professor once told his class that he would place on the board the most important principle relative to the process of change. Thereupon, he turned and spent the next fifteen minutes etching out two words: Go slowly.
Good team leaders know and consistently practice that crucial axiom. To be sure, sometimes leaders are hired specifically as change agents. Organizations fall into disarray and perhaps even face questionable survival, so boards conclude that anything must be better than the present so they bring in someone with a mandate to overhaul the organization. Maybe that’s where you are now. Maybe that’s where you’ll be someday. Remember that’s the exception. One would not want to develop a leadership strategy for change on the basis of overnight renewal. Under normal conditions, team leaders ought to follow a simple guideline: Change nothing major the first year. Change nothing major the first year.
Some people fear innovation. They particularly watch the young, aggressive leader who comes dashing out of college or seminary with a briefcase full of ideas casting about for a group of people to experiment with. Phrases such as “We’ve never done it that way,” or “It won’t work here,” or “We tried it that way and it didn’t work,” characterize almost every organization to some extent, and such thinking throws up roadblocks of change, but change plays such a significant role in leadership. It has coined its own distinctive vocabulary: sacred cow, trial balloon, innovation experimental design, and of course, my favorite, it’s not in the budget. One pastor keeps a motto on his desk that reads, “Come wheal or come woe, my status is quo.”
Kinds of change: Bennett once identified four kinds of change confronting leaders. The first is change in structure. This has to do with changing an organizational chart, shuffling the positions and personnel or reworking the organization itself.
Such a reorganization of a company or committee is intended to change the relationships of persons so that work can be done more effectively and efficiently.
The second kind of change is in technology. We’re seeing an awful lot of that. That’s probably the major kind of change in our era. The introduction of electronic processes: email, Internet, telemarketing, laptops, that’s all technological change.
The third type has to do with behavior of people. Bennett points out a crucial question: “How can people be helped in the present to develop behavior which will enable them to be more effective or creative persons?”
And the final type deals with assumptions and values. People’s assumptions and values determine their behavior, so leaders must understand why people behave as they do before they can help them change. Indeed, we have to have this information for ourselves. Bennett points out the leader needs real insight into the assumptions and values guiding his behavior, and that’s why he has made his judgments about the importance of the change he’s seeking.
There are very important principles in the change process. You may know these. These are not uncommon. Perhaps you’ve read them in other books or seen them in some of my own writings in the past, but they’re worth reviewing here because they are, as I said, very important.
Changing principles or I should say changing people is more important than changing things. I’ve long appreciated Abraham Zaleznik’s classic book Human Dilemmas of Leadership in which he deals with the relation of an individual to an organization. Perhaps the book’s key concept is Zaleznik’s acceptance of human tension and conflict as a condition of existence, as an opportunity for change and progress.
He identifies four polarities of human existence relative to one’s individual development: giving and getting, controlling or being controlled, competing or cooperation, and producing or facilitating.
Personal development emphasizes how the individual learns to assume responsibility and to exercise choice. Zaleznik complains that the unsolved problem in understanding people and organizations revolves around the ability of existing theory to grasp the essential dynamics of the individual. He claims the act of choice, whether through conscious or unconscious mechanisms, places people in the forefront of organizational behavior, so in the final analysis people think and they feel and they choose and they act.
If there’s any organization in which an emphasis on changing people ought to be basic, it’s the church and the church’s parachurch organizations. General Motors and AT&T may want to change attitudes and behavior of employees, but they’re limited to natural means. Leaders in Christian organizations can depend upon a supernatural force who changes human behavior from the inside.
Principle two: Change begins where the leader has the most control. Nothing is too hard for God. Jeremiah 32 makes that clear. Therefore, any change is possible within a Christian organization, but on the human level, leaders have to operate within our own span of control. We have to be able to make reliable predictions about the consequences of our actions, have to try to ascertain what will happen when we change something. You should probably not innovate unless you have clear-cut goals relative to the direction the changes will take and some understanding of the ultimate results of the change. Since some resistance of change comes from fear of the unknown, provide as much information as possible about what will happen next.
Principle three: Change runs more smoothly when people participate in its planning. If leaders develop and hand down a report of what they want to see changed, the change will be much more difficult to implement then if people themselves have a voice in planning the change. Involvement in the planning process tends to generate the necessary force for the change itself. Facts personally researched are better understood. They’re more emotionally acceptable. They’re more likely to be utilized than those that are given by somebody else. Participation in analysis and planning helps bypass resistance which arises from proceeding too rapidly or too slowly. So by definition, change is dynamic. It’s not static. Consequently, the very involvement of the leadership team, the staff, as many people as possible feeds that dynamic.
It helps us counter the axioms of the change process. What are some of those axioms? People naturally feel somewhat awkward and self-conscious in a period of change. People first focus on what they will lose and feel a need to express that maybe to others, maybe to leadership, maybe to you. People believe others can handle change better than they can so the idea that everybody in the organization is involved doesn’t help them much.
People handle change in direct proportion to their experience at handling change. People tend to immediately turn to the argument of insufficient resources to thwart change which they find distasteful. All of these things are going on. They’re all a part of the system that we’re dealing with here. We’re trying to ascertain how much information we can provide because we know that the dissemination of information and the participation in the planning process is important if people are really going to be participants, willing, helpful participants in change.
The next principle sounds like this: Change includes overcoming resistance. Any leader who suggests change in effect implies that the organization is somehow not functioning satisfactorily, and that’s probably true, but at that point some people become uncomfortable. Vested interest or conflict of interest are both detriments in the process of change. People feel threatened by the thought of innovation in something of which they have long been a part. We call these people stakeholders. People on the periphery of ministry in any Christian organization may not even know a change has taken place, but stakeholders, people who have clear-cut involvement in what is changing, make up the key participants in the change process. Their lives have been directly affected.
An example in the church’s educational program is a difficulty which confronts some church leaders in moving adults from one class to another in an age-group Sunday school organization. Cliques have entangled themselves around the roots of the class, and people want to stay with their group and their teacher, and they want to fight the change of atmosphere that happens when you reorganize.
Next principle: Change success directly relates to the group’s maturity. Mature groups tend to change more quickly and more thoroughly than immature groups. That should be obvious, I guess. Maturity doesn’t describe the group members’ ages, though, or how long they’ve been together. It analyzes group dynamics.
Progress requires change. So Christian leaders have to learn how to bring it about with the least amount of difficulty. Team leadership which brings about the development of spiritual motivation, and it depends upon development of spiritual motivation, seems the best route toward achieving satisfactory change. What does this involve? It involves meeting and overcoming opposition, providing accurate and adequate information, all the way through, through all of the aspects and the dimensions of change.
Well, so much for principles. Let’s talk about positive approaches to leading for change. Strain and conflict arise between people and organizations when expectations and needs are not properly harmonized. We do well to remember our Lord’s words to His disciples just before the crucifixion. “I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his Master’s business. Instead I have called you friends for everything that I learned from My Father, I have made known to you.” That’s John 15:15.
Christians must have unyielding commitment in the service of the Lord, but that commitment is to the Lord and to the universal church, not necessarily to some given local representation, certainly not to some individual. So how do you and I as finite and failing human beings lead other people in change?
First of all we’ll resist beginning a new ministry with a preconceived plan. Occasionally a student will come back from a weekend interview for a new ministry position and rush to my office for advice. “Help, help, I’m being interviewed for a church staff position! They asked me what kinds of programs I would design for their church over the next five years. What should I tell them?” The answer to me is very simple. The answer is: I don’t have any idea.
Certainly every candidate for a church leadership position needs to know the status of the evangelical church as we approach a new century, the general layout of what effective ministry might look like, but to suggest that a candidate during the interview can correctly assess the needs of a given local congregation and map out solutions is ludicrous. In fact, since pastors and presidents and principals and directors and other types of leaders tend to come and go, the interviewing body should have a strong grasp of mission and vision to determine whether any new leadership candidate might fit. Without clear objectives and a sharp job profile, a congregational search committee could spin its wheels for months and then make a poor choice in a new pastor.
Whenever an interviewing group pushes you to design hypothetical ideas of what might happen in the future, two inevitable traps await. You’ll suggest ideas and programs that have worked in your last ministry, but I might add might not work at all here, or second, your guesswork will be so sketchy, it will be virtually impossible to follow through when you get there and they tell you, “Okay, go for it.” Ministry and churches or parachurch organizations is no longer universal within denominational or geographic boundaries. In this decade and the next and probably the following, ministries need to be tailored to specific situations and fitted to each organization’s distinctive call and mission from God. It’s time to stop mimicking what other ministries do well.
So you don’t go in with a preconceived plan until you figure out what the needs are and what’s going on. Second, you lead with a flexible agenda. Leadership is always situational. It’s relative. Truth isn’t relative, well some truth is relative, but there is absolute truth, but there’s hardly any absolute leadership other than the servant leadership style and the principles that are derived directly from Scripture. Leadership is situational. It relates to the task. It relates to the group, and it relates to the environment. Any one of those three could upset your leadership cart quickly if you approach leadership with an inflexible posture. Obviously the most likely trouble spot rests with the group. As change continues to accelerate every year, the ministries we begin working with now will look very different five or ten years in the future.
Third, move slowly into change. Here it is one more time: Inexperienced leaders believe churches are waiting for them to take charge and act boldly. They start new programs. They hire and fire people, they rearrange the furniture, or they change the logo. Some writers on this subject advocate rushing through as many changes as possible in the first year before the congregation catches on to you. That behavior of course defies everything we have learned in the research of how change takes place. Experienced leaders make changes slowly. They work through existing structures if they can.
In the autumn 1990 issue of Christian Education Journal, Perry Downs described Baby Boomers’ ministry needs. The thesis of that article argued that ministry needs of Baby Boomers are rooted in the philosophies of the 1980s and 1990s and our response must first of all be theological. Indeed, most church leadership problems are primarily theological not sociological.
Anderson, Gallup, Barna, these good people will help us immensely in describing broad generalities of the kind of people we serve, but only we can define biblical answers for their specific life needs, and we must do that.
One dangerous temptation facing congregational leaders approaching the next century is the radical restructuring of programs and services to accommodate the external sociological preferences of Baby Boomers. Trading in hymnals for worship chorus lines, exchanging organs and pianos for rock combos offering a message of languorous goodwill, these are Band-Aid solutions, and in some cases, they may very well draw people into public meetings, but these things alone don’t meet inner needs. It’s really important for us to avoid frenetic activity and to involve people in genuine long-term learning programs and ministry opportunities. Rearranging the furniture and changing the logo doesn’t solve any problem.
So effective leadership for the long term demands understanding the surrounding situation, coping with collective needs, and developing a climate of trust which makes it possible for us to stay in one place and serve for a long time.
Next, see yourself as a joiner, not always an impact. The trend in leadership literature, both secular and Christian, I’m afraid, leans toward a more aggressive, take-charge posture. We challenge seminary students to impact the church with aggressive, visionary leadership, yet as we read the New Testament, we get a firm sense that impacting takes place through joining. The apostle Paul and the ministry team involved themselves in the lives of people in various places and churches were born or they grew or they developed. Paul takes pain in his letters to explain carefully he didn’t move into a town as a thunderous and dynamic personality; he boasted the only two qualities he could truly call his own: weakness and suffering. Second Corinthians 11:16 all the way through 12:10.
I always find Schaller scintillating; I don’t always agree with him. In one article, he offers three options for leadership in what he calls the long-established congregation. I quote him now,
One is to rely on several compatible redundant and mutually reinforcing organizing principles to undergird the life and the unity of that fellowship. A second is to watch passively while existing organizing principles erode, fade away,
or become divisive with this erosion followed by a numerical decline, and a third is to find a minister with a charismatic personality who is able and willing to serve as the leader.
Transactional leaders develop ministry teams by joining the troops as servants. Surely those three options don’t represent the only choices we have. The joiner becomes an affirming leader because affirmation is a servant’s way of securing the importance of other people in their ministries. The servant leader provides needed endorsement and support. She leads the parade of celebration when a follower’s ministry succeeds.
Next, you want to make sure the people understand goals. There may be honest differences of opinion among the members of any group as to what they are supposed to do. One Christian worker often caught in this dilemma is the Christian education specialist. Perhaps he or she has been called to a church which never has had a person of skill and training in this area. Fifteen different church leaders expect focus on fifteen different aspects of the task. To some people, she’s really a youth director. To other, he’s the administrator of the Sunday school. To other, a children’s worker. So this multiplicity of role expectation greatly contributes to the short tenure of ministry associates during the last thirty years.
W. Edwards Deming, the TQM [total quality management] guy, identifies this “lack of constancy of purpose” (those are his words), and he says, “This is the first of seven deadly diseases which paralyzed business and industry.” It paralyzes the church in Christian organizations as well. The lack of constancy of purpose.
Here’s another guideline. Don’t be afraid to fail. An old cliché in leadership studies argues that success breeds success, but those in touch with the realities of experience understand that success does not breed success. Failure breeds success. Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, warns, and I quote him, “If you are over thirty and haven’t had a major failure in your business or professional career, time is running out on you. It needs to be a big failure. You can only fail big if you take a big risk, and the bigger you fail, the bigger you are likely to succeed later.”
Kouzes and Posner devote an entire chapter to Learning from Mistakes. You may have seen the illustration at precisely 8:01 pm on September 11, 1985, baseball star Pete Rose smacked his 4,192nd career hit. That was good enough to surpass Ty Cobb and quickly Rose was in the record books for “Most Hits Career,”
but Rose also deserves another baseball record, “Most Outs,” 9,518. The sin lies not in failure. The sin lies in refusing to learn from your failure and not picking yourself up and going at the task from a different direction.
Furthermore, don’t take yourself or your leadership too seriously. James T. Murphy, associate dean of the graduate school of education at Harvard University, recalls assuming that role with an amusing anecdote of something that happened when he first became associate dean. His first challenge came from a faculty member who asked, “By the way, what are you going to do about the odor strips?” Sensing Murphy’s puzzlement, he pressed on, “I’m allergic to the new odor strips in the fourth-floor bathroom, and something needs to be done.” He takes it to the associate dean.
Murphy refers to those moments as [he has a wonderful insight here] “the unheroic side of leadership, notes from the swamp.” He goes on to say, “Those who lionize leadership miss important behind the scenes aspects of day-to-day leadership. They depict the grand designs without the niggling problems. They assume that leadership is the exclusive preserve of the heroic boss.” If the truth were known, most of us holding leadership positions are just faithful plodders who owe every achievement to the grace of a patient God.
Final suggestion: Pray more and say less. I have frequently been asked what I would do differently if I chose to return again to a college presidency. I would do many things differently, but the most important is that I would pray more and say less. I would also pray more and worry less. My problem isn’t that I don’t believe in prayer or that my theology of prayer is somehow defective, I don’t think; my dilemma arises from the strange thinking that leads me to really believe in prayer but not make time for it in my busy life. That kind of crazy human behavior must drive the angels berserk.
Organization or individual? Who needs to change? We can read all kinds of stuff about this, and all kinds of patterns and backgrounds and guidelines are available. Amitai Etzioni, who carries something of a strange name but has written some brilliant things on this whole aspect, talks about this constant conflict between organization and individual, and he says it’s not going to go away. This is not something we solve. In fact, it’s not a problem to be solved, as Zaleznik, whom I quoted earlier, also talks about this and says,
“This business of understanding man and organization centers around the inability of existing theory to grasp the essential dynamics of the individual and from this understanding to formulate a truly respectable theory of organization and leadership.” We might ask from our perspective, “Is it possible to be both spiritual and competent? Can the Christian leader be biblical as well as tuned into contemporary thinking and administrative science?” It’s my contention that not only is it possible, but it’s necessary. The biblical pattern of balance between task and individual is essentially the best approach to leadership.
In management science, there’s still a great deal of research with respect to changing either the person or the organization, but many experts have decided upon the transactional approach, the nomothetic dimension and the idiographic dimension. I’ve used those terms before, and they are in your glossary. In reality, those dimensions exist in constant relationship. They’re in constant interaction with one another. They’re not on separate spheres. Individual values ultimately determine behavior unless people compromise their values for some item of secondary importance, so organizational values must somehow be integrated with those of the individual. The best model of course on this is the Getzels and Guba Model.
I’ve talked about the idiographic dimension. Let me emphasize a little bit more the shaping of the idiographic dimension, maybe I should say shaping an idiographic ministry. The Scripture speaks frequently o the church as a building and of its members as various blocks of stone in that framework, so as we pull together the various aspects of this idiographic ministry, the tasks of the human architect are considerably complex. Qualities of human materials only partially known are notoriously changeable. Some people reject the organization because they feel they have given without receiving. Others pose the opposite problem in taking but wanting to give nothing in return. Both result in a sterile organization which becomes a liability rather than an asset in the ongoing ministry of God’s work in the world.
As Christian leaders, it becomes important for us to mobilize human resources in the church or Christian organizations. There is an enormous amount of human resource not being used, and it has to be mobilized and developed and trained. Immaturity must become maturity or at least maturing. The undeveloped must be developing and the small increasingly large in outlook and perspective.
You’ll recognize the name of Douglas MacGregor, who says,
We have not learned enough about the utilization of talent, about the creation of an organizational climate conducive to human growth. The blunt fact is that we’re a long way from realizing the potential represented by the human resources we now recruit into industry. We have much to accomplish with respect to utilization before further improvements and selection will become important.
Again, what can be said about business and industry goes tenfold for the church and Christian organization. We simply need to substitute the word ministry for industry in the above MacGregor quote, and we certainly agree with MacGregor’s words. The organization is not an end in itself but rather a means to accomplish the tasks of the worldwide program of Christ.
So Christian leaders who are going to be change leaders must become aware that physical properties can demand such an inappropriate amount of time and talent and funding that they’re really no longer instruments used for God’s glory but obstacles to be hurdled so in the process of change as we move forward with small steps; we recognize that we’re “after small wins,” as Gilmore puts it. He elaborates the research of Weick. Small wins are defined as concrete complete implemented outcomes of moderate importance. They can be either important changes and unimportant variables or unimportant changes in important variables.
Weick argues that the overwhelming feelings of helplessness, frustration, and anxiety associated with the complexity and interdependence of today’s problems have the effect of reducing our creativity. He suggests framing problems in ways that make us better able to achieve creative responses, and “the satisfaction gained from real progress early on,” Weick says, “can provide the momentum for tackling further problems down the line.”
Small wins. A focus on program instead of people. A focus on program is an albatross of earlier years of ministry. In our success-oriented society we tend to see a large church with a large program as the model with small churches running along as fast as their tiny legs can carry them. Result is sometimes fatigue and disinterest and disillusionment. All the information we can gather about restricting administrative forums, leadership styles, human relations, needs to be gathered.
Then it should be carefully compared and run through the grid of special revelation, the Bible. Perhaps what we have left will be a desirable integration of God’s truth revealed in natural forms of order and design. We can’t baptize secular research and stuff it still damp into organizational potholes on the road the church we have to travel. Rather we apply biblical principles of leadership better understood because we’ve taken the time to grapple with the secular research.
We lead institutions made up of people. Our needs are both similar to and diverse from those of secular organizations. But one thing seems clear: Unless we learn how to be laborers together with each other and with God, the complexities of change will trip us up, and that could happen just when the world is beginning to see the super dynamic of the Lord’s body in the darkness of our contemporary pagan culture.