Lecture
In any leadership post eventually you’ll find yourselves supervising staff of some kind, maybe a half-time secretary. It may be a student assistant. But in Christian ministry, a dynamic tension has to be maintained in this whole relationship and in our continuing transactional tension between gift and call. We know from the New Testament that the Holy Spirit sovereignly gives to each believer a spiritual gift or two or three which He intends that person to use in the service of Christ. Often Christian leaders evidence multiple gifts. And some Bible scholars believe God calls these people into positions of so-called professional leadership in the church. But the concept of call is rather like the rudder that steers the ship. None of the spiritual gifts delineated in the New Testament carries any geographical or age-group connotation. No one has the gift of missionary work in Africa or ministry to inner-city youth. The gift describes the what of ministry. The call designates the where and perhaps the timing. So we should not be upset when a missionary who has been serving, let’s say in Germany, may decide at one point that God has called her to switch to a ministry among German-speaking people in Argentina.
Supervisory leaders have to recognize these crucial ingredients as biblical components. Sunday school superintendents or college deans have to consider the gift of teaching in their faculties and impress upon them the issue of being called to that specific ministry rather than to club work or parachurch ministry or youth leadership or writing or pastoring or whatever. Both Peter and Paul used multiple gifts for Christian ministry, certainly the gift of proclamation and prophecy. But God distinctly called Paul to utilize his gift as an itinerant missionary evangelist establishing new churches among the Gentiles, whereas Peter served almost exclusively among Jewish Christians. So the concepts of gifts and call, if taken seriously, have profound implications for the way we recruit workers in the church, the way we supervise them, and the way we evaluate their performance. And this study focuses on some of that.
In fact, I want to go back even beyond that here for the first one in your outline to talk about developing a Christian concept of work and ministry. Already in our course I referred to Abraham Zaleznik’s Human Dilemmas of Leadership. Zaleznik concerns himself with the relationship of an individual to an organization. He writes of course out of a secular, industrial management context. But perhaps the key concept of his book has to do with the acceptance of human tension and conflict as a condition of existence and an opportunity for change and progress in the interrelationships between the people and organizations. His psychoanalytical framework, he touches on Freud and Piaget and so on and wanders far from Scripture, but he does deal with crucial issues. One of those issues of course is understanding human nature. Zaleznik attacks what he calls the utopian view of human nature, denying that people are inherently good, rejecting the idea that the natural course of human life moves toward personal growth or self-actualization. He substitutes his own position. He calls it the “individualistic view” emphasizing human capability and the necessity for assuming responsibility in relationships. According to Zaleznik, the historic model of work comes in three parts: tension represents the need, activity results from the tension, and discharge results from the gratifications of the action. So both rivalry and equality afford developmental crises for the individual. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but it’s worth looking at some of the underpinnings of this stuff.
No organization can solve this problem, but we can foster ideas which make developmental gains worth pursuing. One sentence from Zaleznik, maybe the key sentence of the whole book, he says, “The unsolved problem in understanding man-in-organization centers around the inability of existing theory to grasp the essential dynamics of the individual and from this understanding to formulate a true [what he calls] psycho-social theory of organization and leadership.” Not at all difficult to switch that around and talk about understanding person and organization and centering around a genuinely biblical view of organization and leadership. So Zaleznik identifies the crucial problem as a failure of all existing secular theories to understand correctly the nature of people. He says they don’t understand themselves. These theoreticians don’t understand the nature of people. They don’t understand the relationship with each other. Unfortunately, Zaleznik’s neutral view also misconstrues the issue. And the Bible teaches very plainly that people are neither good nor neutral but essentially [have an] evil immoral nature. Isaiah 53 is clear on that as well as Romans 1, 2, and 3. Take your pick.
So the Christian view of people so often characterized as low rather is a very high view. The Bible teaches we were created in the image of God, and Christians are bona fide members of His family. Even Christian administrators and leaders involved with supervision in a secular organization must understand that the people they deal with are potential restored images and, therefore, deserving of genuinely Christian treatment. Part of this is understanding the reality of vocation. It’s another important factor in a Christian view of work and ministry. For Christians, there are no menial jobs. Many contemporary psychologists have shown us that the foundation for a sense of well-being and meaning in life depends not so much on external circumstances as it does on a deep-down belief that we are worthy human beings. In other words, rather than some menial job thrusting its impersonal clutches of despair upon us, we recognize the dynamics of gift and call and respond in a totally renewed way to whatever ministry God gives us (Colossians 3:22–25). Call it a Christian work ethic if you will, but don’t identify this whole business with puritanical capitalism, because a biblical view of work and vocation transcends time and culture and certainly can’t be linked with any particular political point of view.
But there’s more at stake than just an attitude toward others here. That attitude influences administrative style and our methods of supervision. That’s where all this is going. Survey research at the University of Michigan once conducted a national analysis of more than 1,500 workers, and I found those results rather interesting. Construction workers and the self-employed fell at the top of the contentment scale with only about one in twenty registering job dissatisfaction. But in technical, professional, and managerial occupations, the dissatisfaction rate was 10 percent and climbed to 25 percent for workers in service occupations and the wholesale-retail industry. Among workers with low incomes, college experience emerged as a handicap to attaining job satisfaction. I mean these were astonishing. Generally, in the survey, women were more dissatisfied with their jobs than men, and age did not seem to be a significant factor in that dissatisfaction. Marriage, however, was a factor. Unmarried young people were twice as likely to be dissatisfied with their lives as their married counterparts.
Perhaps the most significant finding for those of us concerned with working with volunteers with a seeming lack of emphasis on the matter of salary. Of the five work features rated most important, only one had to do with tangible or economic benefits.
Higher than salary, people ranked such things as interesting work, enough help, equipment to get the job done, authority to get the job done, and so on. Now that sort of swings us back to our discussions on Maslow and Herzberg and the whole process of motivation. It also takes us to 1 Corinthians 12 again and reinforces the concept that there are no menial jobs in Christian service. Given the human value system and the cultural priorities of our society, certain ministries, like certain jobs, appear to be more important and prestigious. But in God’s value system, all parts of the body are equally important. All must function at acceptable levels if unity and collective health are to be maintained.
I could go on with various theoreticians and so on, but let me move to another heading here: Securing and Serving Volunteer Leaders. Notice the double emphasis in the heading. We know responsible team leaders have the task of recruiting. We’ve already dealt with that. But as I have repeatedly tried to show, a New Testament style of leadership requires that we see ourselves as their servants rather than their lords once they have become members of the ministry team. Truly the difference between paid employees and volunteer workers has no bearing here. It seems to me that we have adopted a distinctive kind of managerial technique which protects both productive outcomes and biblical norms. And if we haven’t, that’s something we need to do.
So here are some guidelines which I think represent a mixture of competent administration and biblical leadership. Evaluate your recruitment process. We’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth coming back to it again, because as you begin to supervise, you discover that people rarely perform above the level at which they were recruited. So supervisory problems may very well have already been created for you either by yourself or by somebody else who recruited these people you’re trying to train. How do you go about the matter of securing workers? Does your leadership largely depend upon what Andrew Halpin called “initiating structure” getting the job done, or do you emphasize the other end of the continuum, which he called “consideration.” According to Theory and Research in Administration, the most effective leaders score high in both dimensions of leadership behavior. They care about the task, and they care about the people who do the task. I think we have to avoid intensity upon getting a job done, such intensity at least that we forget we work with human beings, not machines. And if you don’t want to work with human beings, then get a job working with computers all day long. You won’t have all these things that we’re talking about here.
But we want to steer away from a leadership style which may ooze with the milk of human kindness but contributes little to goal achievement in the organization we serve. It’s a balance. This conflict of roles and goals will always be with us. Organizations and ministries structure specific roles with job descriptions and expected outcomes. People understand their own gifts, their own personal goals, and ponder whether they comfortably approximate what the job asks of them. And in volunteer ministry, it becomes essential for us to bring these two dimensions together almost like overlapping circles.
Emphasize strengths in followers. Drucker’s wonderful book The Effective Executive in the initial paragraph says, “The effective executive makes strengths productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths: the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities.” In that chapter, Drucker suggests that effective executives know that they have to start with what a person can do rather than what the job requires. And that implies getting the right person, which of course is a major Drucker string, getting the right person for any particular staff position, volunteer or otherwise. The creative team leader in a world of challenge can never be content. He can’t be like Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, who wanted to be lord of an island if it were offered to him “with little trouble and less danger.” But on the other hand, we don’t want to follow the frenetic neuroticism of Sancho’s lord and spend years of service tilting at windmills. Somewhere between lies that happy median ground of sane and scriptural ministry as divine power operates through the human instrument: the supervisor and the people we supervise.
We need to appraise potential leaders. Good leadership always breeds leadership. That’s the thrust of what we have come to call the Paul-Timothy approach or the reproductive approach. Effective Christian leaders assess and record how well each person performs in present position. What kind of ability does she demonstrate for other tasks? Which of the teachers in the primary department may become superintendents? Which of the missionaries would make a good field director? Which particular deacons or elders might give leadership to the congregation? An effective appraisal of potential leadership is possible only when we do three basic things and do them well. Number one, we have to help people gain a clear-cut knowledge of their roles in the organization.
Number two, we want to establish objectives and goals including reasonable timelines. And number three, we want to design regular opportunities for personal interaction to discuss mutual problems. Every good supervisor does all of those things.
Appraise potential leaders, and then develop adequate personnel policies. That term, personnel policies, is simply a handy label. It describes the guidelines affecting the dealings which leaders have with followers in an organization. Positive personnel policies, I think, center on a biblical view of people, a biblical understanding of the importance of individuals in the institutional framework, and the biblical commitment to the strategic place of that gift-call analysis of ministry that we have been talking about. Such policies should be clearly defined and clearly understood by potential leaders so that they don’t suffer from that organizational disease sometimes called in literature of leadership “normlessness,” which is the idea that your ministry will be insignificant and you will have to use questionable means to achieve important goals.
In volunteer organizations, we do not deal with, primarily at least, the pay raises, promotions, and retirement packages. We do, however, face the problems of isolation, self-estrangement, the inability of an individual to achieve his own goals while helping the organization. Positive team leaders emphasize meaningful relations, competent administration, participation in the decision-making process, and a high level of flexibility in roles and expectations.
Let’s get even more specific. How do you function in the role of supervisor? Supervision simply means directing other people toward the accomplishment of ministry goals. That’s a leadership function. It links with staffing and delegation. These distinct people and processes account for success or failure in leadership and administration. So at the heart of supervision lies a concern for improvement in the continuous development of new leaders. You know I keep singing the same songs over and over again. In a large business or industry, we could probably separate executives from administrators, administrators from supervisors, middle management, line people, and so on. But in small ministry organizations, we all hold responsibility for these crucial functions. We attempt to build people into the leadership team, the central focus of our study all the way through. In reality, we don’t supervise programs. We supervise people. Pohly picks it up beautifully in the title of a very helpful book called Transforming the Rough Places: The Ministry of Supervision. He says,
My purpose in writing this book is to show that supervision offers a historic and effective means for equipping persons for ministry. I recognize that in doing so, I invite resistance because supervision is a term loaded with baggage. It carries an image of bosses and of someone in authority looking over one’s shoulder controlling every move, rewarding or punishing at will. It suggests a hierarchy of superiority-inferiority, dredges up threatening associations with the past. And for this reason, some people suggest abandoning the term and substituting something more palatable, but that is a false solution because it fails to deal with a condition that produces the resistance.
Good point, and that’s why we have not abandoned the term “the leader as supervisor.” Pohly develops very interesting concepts throughout the book including analysis of Jesus as supervisor and His relationship with the disciples. He talks about the transformational nature of supervision, its capacity for facilitating the empowerment of persons in their journey of development, great language. In short, Pohly sees supervision as a means by which leaders produce other leaders and, therefore, build the leadership team. Sounds good to me. Makes sense to me.
Moving on, practicing adequate administrative process. Universally recognized essentials to efficient administration do exist. They apply not only to executives at General Motors but also to pastors and district superintendents and academic deans and Sunday school superintendents and so on. What are they? Clear and well-understood chain of command, elimination of overlapping authority over staffing, duplication of function, delegation of responsibility and sufficient authority to carry out that responsibility, a simplification of functions and procedures, the ability to make the optimal decision in the shortest possible time, the ability to do things right and to do the right things, the utilization of bureaucratic and hierarchical structures only to serve both the stated goals of the organization and the satisfaction of people who make that achievement possible, an awareness of team needs (you’ve heard that more than once and will again), the capability of the supervisor to accept and deal with criticism (that’s a standard component of supervisory leadership), and the ability to deal with terminations when necessary. I don’t know any Christian leader who likes firing people, but many of us have had to do it. It’s part of the job, and you learn how to do it. Leadership is learned behavior; so is supervision.
Somebody could write another book just on those ten items that I just mentioned, and I may return to a couple of them before we close this study. But let me say here that implementing these guidelines in a Christian organization will not necessarily lead to the abuse of executive power. We’re not talking here about the kings of the Gentiles again. When we practice these things in love and concern for developing brothers and sisters, this kind of supervision can produce a blend of spiritual fervor, that’s good, and ministry competence. That’s good also, and that’s exactly what we pray for in team leadership situations.
What about placement? Supervisors usually have a voice in the initial appointment of leaders to their tasks. In the properly functioning Sunday school, the authority for the appointment probably comes from the board of Christian education, but the Sunday school superintendent makes the personal contact and asks the person to accept the task. That could vary, but that’s pretty normal, I think. Therefore, she becomes involved in a supervisory capacity in doing that right from the very first.
The second function is observation. Effective seminary faculty members can focus clearly on the importance of their roles only when their deans or department chairpersons make a specific point to observe them in the classroom with regularity. Certainly, one does not want to be legalistic about that either in colleges or in churches or any other kind of Christian organization. But I think the reality of observation and its importance can’t be overstated in our focus on supervision. Good supervisors know how developing leaders are doing. And they know that because they’ve watched them do it. In my own role as an academic dean, I have turned this function over almost exclusively to department chairmen. I have turned it over to department chairmen. But I spent many years as a department chairman, and I always looked in on my people and especially a new faculty member with frequent visits in the first year. Evaluation, that’s coming up in a later study; so we’ll not deal with it now. In fact, it’s coming up in the next study, number 21. It’s an objective, written measurement of the developing leader’s performance, and we’ll talk a whole lot more about that.
Resource, in addition to guiding new leaders regarding strong and weak points, supervisors serve as resource people for improvements. We need to be ready with ideas, books, and networking contacts. Hey, why don’t you go talk to Bill? He knows a lot about this.
And we need to be prepared to encourage all efforts that people make toward improvement. Team needs, supervisors, especially those who want to be team leaders, focus on meeting team needs. Keep in mind three elements we have talked about before: team, task, and person. Or we can reverse those for a better understanding. We’d start out with individual needs. Members of the developing leadership team, we supervise need or acceptance. They need to know we value them. They need to know our contributions are important, and theirs are too. They need to know that they are doing what we expect of them. So obviously clear communication and frequent communication is important. Task, members of the team need clear goals, reasonable standards, adequate resources, and complementary roles. A good weekly staff meeting can make sure that people are working together, not overlapping work. Team building, as people work together under your supervision, they should develop a common sense of purpose. A supportive climate makes that possible. They need to recognize their collective achievement is something much greater than any of them could do alone.
Following sound principles of supervision is our next section. Supervision must relate to specific tasks and specific personnel. Nevertheless, certain principles of effective supervision, if we follow them, may not guarantee success but will most likely lead us to perform our task of supervision a little bit better. Be open with your team. That openness especially counts when dealing in supervision, I think. Don’t prowl around in the dark looking for things to complain about and criticize. Explain to the entire staff how you view supervision and how you do supervision. Seek their cooperation. Ask them to pray for you. What if somebody reacts negatively in a public meeting or a private conversation? You have those problems. Welcome to leadership. That situation requires more time, more prayer, more personal counseling. It may be necessary for a time to leave that person out of the observation and evaluation system. But we don’t give up. We also predetermine what to look for in a worker. It does little good to go into a classroom and sit in the back of the room during the period. Unless we’ve organized a format for observation and evaluation, it may be necessary for us to take some training to properly evaluate.
Be positive in personal interviews. We never want to be dishonest with people by telling them they’re satisfactorily doing a job when we know they’re not. Surely though we can offer praise, and the interview should emphasize commendation as much as possible. Weaknesses can be described as areas that need improvement rather than things you are doing wrong. Language is really important in supervision. Finally, emphasize the collective nature of the task and the important role each person has on the team. We want everybody to improve, and we want to improve ourselves. And we assure them publicly and privately that we do not have negative control. We don’t want negative control of people. We only want to serve them and assist them to become the very best they possibly can.
Cut down on resignations. This is obviously the next level of responsibility in dealing with grievances. “I quit” are words heard too frequently in Christian organizations and particularly in the church. I am reminded of the words of Jeremiah that haunt me. They ought to haunt all of us in our present situations. “His Word was in my bones like a roaring fire. I was tired of trying to hold back, and I simply could not quit” (Jeremiah 29; a little bit of a paraphrase there). So the rate at which employees resign or are dismissed from jobs in some companies is more than 100 percent a year. Perhaps the even more pressing problem is the people who do not leave but continue at their jobs disgruntled, unhappy, and making themselves and everyone about them constantly miserable. I suspect that in churches and Christian organizations this is hardly a majority group, but it doesn’t take many of these kinds of people to upset the apple cart and mess up this climate of leadership that we have been talking about for so long.
In a way, this entire study helps us confront the problem of resignations. The key to retaining good leaders can be summed up in three words, and I’ll get to this more in the next study. But those three words are challenge, recognition, and reward. We need to understand that people need opportunity to pursue individual goal achievement as well as assist in institutional goal achievement. They need participation in decision making. They need a recognition of importance in the organization. Team members have to understand that their gifts and call are very much a part of the functioning body, and the roles that they fulfill are strategic roles. All we learn from administrative science, and it’s a lot, needs to be filtered through a theological sieve before we apply it in the life and ministry of Christian leadership. Perhaps the key concept of a genuinely biblical attitude toward service is found in the words of the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6:6–7. Here’s the Living Bible rendition: “Don’t work hard only when your master’s watching and then shirk when he isn’t looking. Work hard and with gladness all the time as though working for Christ, doing the will of God with all your hearts.” If we can get the people we supervise to incarnate Ephesians 6:6–7, we have made huge strides forward.