Leadership Reflections

I was struck by a description in Jim Collins’ book, How The Mighty Fall, of the administrative burden caused by poor employee performance:

Any exceptional enterprise depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people – the #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline… If you have the right people, who accept responsibility, you don’t need to have a lot of senseless rules and mindless bureaucracy in the first place.

Marcus Buckingham, in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, talked about how poor performers stunt the results of top performers.  He said that star performers are often neglected by their managers because underperforming staff drain all the manager’s time away from their better-performing peers.  The best managers, however, support their winners with their time and help them do even better.  Underperformers must earn the right to have more of their manager’s time by improving their performance.

In Managing For Results, Peter Drucker addressed the opportunity cost of problems such as poor performance.  “Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems,” he wrote.  He said that the best one can do by solving problems is to restore normality.  Solving problems won’t take you to a new level of results.

These three observations raise concerns about how we as Christian ministries deal with underperforming staff.  In this post, my focus is on the cost of underperformance.  Sometime later I’ll write another post and discuss how we can work to improve staff performance.

I call dealing with performance issues supervision in distinction to leadership and management.  Leadership deals with vision, goals, values and culture, shaping corporate identity and mission.  Management deals with ways and means, providing resources and coordinating action.  Drucker said that both leadership and management are important because leadership is about doing the right things and management is about doing things right.  Leadership decides which wall to scale, and management ensures someone brings a ladder!  Leadership without management is chaos, and management without leadership is pointless.  The two go together.

So where does supervision fit in?  Hmmm.  Maybe it doesn’t.  The dictionary claims that  ‘supervision’ means oversight, but maybe it’s really just a polite code word for dealing with performance issues.  In Leading Self-Directed Work Teams, Kimball Fisher wrote that the job of supervisors is to control subordinates by telling them what to do and then making sure they do it properly (as opposed to team leaders, who facilitate, train and equip).

I associate supervision with old school Theory X management and lack of trust.  Surely we expect better from our staff than this!   I don’t want to supervise people this way and I can’t imagine that anyone wants to be supervised this way either.  If after training and coaching, you still can’t trust your employees to do their work correctly, well, you either haven’t done the staff development work very well or you have the wrong employees.

When performance issues persist and people don’t learn, there is a terrible cost of supervision:

• Their managers must invest time coaching them for better performance, checking up on their progress, and sometimes even fixing their work, instead of using that time to find new opportunities for the organization;
• The organization needs to put detailed rules and procedures in place for how to do things the right way, which starts to make the work environment seem heavy-handed, stifling and overly bureaucratic to those who perform well and don’t need those systems;
• Whole new systems are created to do nothing but ensure the results of poor performance don’t make it outside of your organization  (such as quality control);
• Organizational performance can start to drop as people settle for mediocrity and the environment becomes less motivational; and
• The salary and other expenses related to underperformance and supervision is wasted budget that could have been used to fund those opportunities that are now lost.

In The Wisdom Of Teams: Creating The High-performance Organization, Jon Katzenbach shows us a better way.  Teams don’t need supervisors, he says.  Rather, they need leaders to equip and resource their teams, manage the team boundaries (how a team relates to everything outside of itself), and then get out of the way and let the team do its thing.  To support such teams without having to have supervisors, Katzenbach says the organization needs a strong performance ethic that drives everyone in the organization to relentlessly pursue common performance results.

Stop for a moment and realize the significance of that last sentence.  Katzenbach is not giving team members license to do whatever they want.  There is an obligation for all team members to live up to a strong performance ethic.  When you hire, you hire people who have the same performance ethic as the team. (See my post Hiring with the Team in Mind.)

So if the organization’s leaders choose which wall to scale, and its managers make sure there is a ladder to get up the wall, then team leaders train their members to climb ladders.  But you shouldn’t need supervisors standing by the ladders making sure everybody climbs the right way.  All you need do is provide your staff with the goal (scale the wall) and the means (the ladder) and then let them do what you’ve trained them to do (climb).

While it may not seem too inconvenient to chip in and cover for poor performance, underperforming is a very serious problem.  Jim Collins (in How the Mighty Fall) writes:

“If I were to pick one marker above all others to use as a warning sign [of an organization starting the downward death spiral], it would be a declining proportion of key seats filled with the right people [those who take responsibility and are self-managing/self-motivating].”

Collins says one notable distinction between the right and the wrong people is that the wrong people see themselves as having a job while the right people see themselves as having responsibilities.  Certainly in your key positions, the ones the public sees, or the ones who achieve direct results or who represent the ministry to others, these positions must be filled with people who perform well.

I’ll talk about improving staff performance in another post.  Until I write that, if you have staff reporting to you, I suggest you begin working on defining the performance ethic of your team.  If you already have one, work at getting the team members to firmly adopt it as their personal performance ethic too.

At CCCC, we have two sets of statements that provide a very strong performance ethic that sets standards related to everything we do.  Our team values include:

• dependability, productivity, and quality,
• knowledge,
• competence, and
• initiative.

Our aspirations include:

• to provide accessible, practical and relevant services that offer high value to our members, and
• to be respected educators who create, source and share expert knowledge as we model how Christian charities should operate.

A final thought.  Everyone on staff is a team member and everyone reports to someone else (even the senior staff person reports to the board).  Why not take ownership for your own results and lead and manage yourself?  Make it your business to supervise your own work.  Make the team values your own values at work and be sure you work by them.  Study the organizational culture as promoted by management and adjust your work habits to fit it.  You’ll have a far more enjoyable work experience and be far more valuable to your employer.  Be self-directed and self-motivated and take responsibility for your results.  Your manager will love you!

Last winter, someone mentioned in passing that a local ministry leader had to step down because of a moral failure.  I replied, “Wouldn’t it be great if there were an early warning signal which alerted people that they were near the edge of the slippery slope that ends with loss of integrity, so they could nip the problem in the bud?”  Something like a trip wire in a prison yard, or the ‘fence’ of rules the Pharisees built around God’s law.  These are supposed to keep people safely away from the true danger point.  So I wondered, “Is there a point at which the disastrous long term consequences of an apparently innocent choice are not obvious?  A point where people would choose differently if they could see ahead where this would take them?” 

I remember 28 years ago now driving home from our cottage and the highway was stopped dead.  No problem.  I had a map  showing a side road that went all the way down past the slow area.  It went through a few tiny towns and over a river, but it sure looked good as an alternate route.  So off my wife and I went.  Maybe I should have been concerned that no one else had the same brilliant idea.

We drove along a two lane paved road that became a two lane gravel road.  Hmm.  We went through a tiny town that reminded me uncomfortably of the scene where Dueling Banjos was made famous in Deliverance.  Hmm again.  But on we went, and the gravel road became a single lane.  Eternally optimistic, I knew we were close to getting back on the highway and whizzing home.  But, fixated on my goal, we drove obliviously through miles of forest with no sideroads and no driveways until it became a cow path, two ruts with high grass in the middle.  It didn’t help that my wife said repeatedly that she was enjoying the drive and seeing places she’d never otherwise see!  However, by this time even I was thinking, “Something’s not right here.”

According to the map we were almost at the river and all we had to do was cross over it and we’d be back in civilization, but it was looking doubtful.  And then a hill arose in front of us, and we climbed up it slowly driving on smooth boulders poking through the earth, finally stopping when we came to outright rocks.  Climbing up the rocks I had a glorious view of the river below, a paved road on the other side, and absolutely no bridge at all!  The map showed a bridge, but there obviously had never been a bridge here.  I had to back up for miles before I could turn around! 

I wish when I first turned on to the gravel road I had realized that the roads were  deteriorating in quality and unlikely to be through roads.  At that point I could easily have turned around and got back on course with no significant loss of time.  In the same way, when people make those first choices that set them on a questionable course, before they lose their integrity, surely at that early point if a person recognized the significance of  the present choice in terms of how it can lead to lost integrity, they would gratefully make a different choice and preserve their integrity.  I thought someone should research that, and I discovered accidentally while perusing a bookstore this week that someone has.  (I did my usual checking out of the book before deciding to buy it.) 

Every person in Christian ministry should read this (secular) book called Integrity: Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason.  I’ll warn you though, it is a frightening read because the author, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, found that the earliest warning signals are things that I think every person already has to a degree in their psychological make-up: the desire to perform well.  In fact, society honours and rewards those who exhibit the related behaviours of producing good quality work and having a good work ethic, even as we say we want to avoid their logical extremes, perfectionism and workaholism.  The author, Barbara Killinger, says the problem is that these two behaviours are really just socially-acceptable diseases. 

For example, workaholics are overly responsible idealists who have compulsively competitive natures and they seek fulfillment in work.  Being responsible is good.  Having ideals is good.  Being competitive is good (it leads to better value for your ‘clients’).  Finding fulfillment in your work is good too.  But there can be too much of these good things.  You can feel so much responsibility on your shoulders that you feel only you are carrying the weight of the ministry and you become resentful and curmudgeonly, as though the ministry owed you something.  You can be so idealistic you will continually be frustrated with the reality of the world around you, so you become angry and bitter.  You can become ruthless in your competitive race to win.  If you find fulfillment only in your work, you have an unbalanced life and incredible stress as pressures mount in other areas.  Workaholism leads sequentially to chronic fatigue and no longer being able to relax or play, guilt over the parts of your life that are falling apart, loss of feeling which means loss of compassion and purpose, and finally character change as you become self-absorbed while leading a dead life of declining physical health.  Yet employers unconsciously (at least I sure hope it is not conscious) are complicit in their employees’ slides down the slippery slope because they give them laptops and Blackberrys so they can work 24 hours a day.  These are good tools, but need to be used responsibly.

Perfectionists have their own issues. They believe they are highly intelligent, superior people.  Their feeling of specialness, Killinger says, can foster arrogance or a feeling of entitlement, that they are the exception to the rule and are exempt from community standards. 

Perfectionism and workaholism are particularly insidious because they are related to the key threat to integrity: obsession.  Killinger says that “If I had to make an educated guess about who might eventually lose his or her integrity, it would likely be an individual who has become obsessively fixated on a thought, idea, or action.”  So what are the pre-conditions that lead to obsessive thinking?  It turns out that all the pre-conditions are related to the choices we make about how we think about things. 

If the choice was between stealing or not stealing, that would be an easy decision.  Will you cheat on your spouse?  “No, of course not!” you say.  But that is now.  How does someone get to the place where they can say “Yes”?  They get to that point when they have no empathy or compassion left for their spouse, when their intuition has become negative so that it is slow to speak up and the person becomes bored, impatient and impulsive.  You get to this stage through more innocent choices you make, such as the choice a perfectionist makes as to how to handle self-doubt.  The choice a person with chronic fatigue makes about whether to press on with work or give in to sleep.  The choice a creative person makes about whether or not to be concerned when it takes 12 hours to do what it usually took 8 hours to do. 

These are among the many conditions that Killinger says are pre-cursors to loss of integrity.  And that is what makes this book so scary.  We associate loss of integrity with the obviously bad choices people make, and we say “So I won’t do that!”  But the road to lost integrity starts with nothing so obvious.  It starts with apparently benign and unrelated symptoms that we choose to ignore because we don’t appreciate their true significance.  The choices we should be concerned about are not what we choose to do at the end of the road, but what we choose to think at the beginning of the road.  It is at this point that we can most easily avert what Killinger calls ”the predictable breakdown syndrome.”  But even if you have started to slide, it is still possible to grab on to a branch and keep from sliding all the way down.

Here’s an important point about integrity.  Integrity means being consistent and predictable, acting in ways that are consistent with what you say you believe.  Moral failure such as cheating on your spouse is one form of lost integrity, assuming you say you believe in faithfulness to your spouse.  That is an obvious sin.  But we must remember that any behaviour that is not consistent with our Christian view of life would also be a loss of integrity.  Skipping church.  Treating staff as objective resources rather than as humans made in God’s image.  Staying silent and insensitive to injustice.  You might not fail in obvious sin such as adultery, but you could still lose your integrity as a follower of Christ.

The solution is relatively straight-forward.  Killinger says we need compassion and a deliberate surfacing of the positive aspects of the personality traits that we have least of.  For example, thinkers need the emotional side to come out while emotional types need the rational thinking side to come out.  The point is to have a holistic view of the situation and make a decision that takes into account the needs of other people who would be affected.  She says, “Discerning integrity, I believe, requires a compassionate eye.  Informed decisions based on hard facts and figures, or stringent rules and regulations, rarely represent the whole story.  Our moral choices must also show a genuine concern for the welfare of others.  This is not to downplay the role of thinking in formulating opinions, but wise moral choices are made when intelligence, compassion, and maturity come together to guide our judgments.” 

This post is closely related to another post, The private life of a Christian leader, in which I wrote about how compartmentalizing life creates a condition in which moral failure is rationalized away.    It turns out that Killinger says the same thing.

I think the upshot of this is that everyone should have an accountability partner to whom they disclose what they are thinking and feeling.  This is a lot more important than disclosing what they are doing, because they won’t be doing anything questionable until long after they have been thinking and feeling that they are alienated, hard-done-by, or any of the other pre-cursor attitudes that Killinger identifies.  Accountability relationships should be focused on our attitudes and feelings.

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.
Philippians 4:8

At the same time that many senior staff leaders have been hired to provide organizational leadership to Christian charities, most of these leaders have also been excluded from the organization’s highest leadership body, the board. Exclusion could be due to the law, a governance model, or even just sensitivity to the public’s demand for greater staff accountability. Whatever the reason, senior staff leaders who are not chairing their boards or even sitting on them have often raised the issue of how they can generate organizational results when they do not control the board. Executives who do sit on their boards wonder if they would lose their ability to lead if they ever came off. The issue they are all concerned about is: How can a senior staff leader who is not on the board lead the board? The practical issues for leaders are related to:

• Having a voice at the board table,
• Guiding the board’s agenda,
• Moving ahead in a timely manner, and
• Setting strategy, while at the same time
• Respecting the board’s authority, and
• Earning the board’s trust.

Here are some ideas that will help leaders better serve their boards and organizations by providing visionary, strategic leadership to the board within the parameters of good governance.

Voice at the Table

Senior staff leaders need the right to speak at board meetings if they are to provide organizational leadership. Since the board wants them committed to the ministry’s mission and to organizational success, staff leaders must ‘own’ the directives that come from the board. It should never be an “Us vs. Them” scenario, but a partnership where staff leaders can speak of the board-staff relationship as “We.” The more that leaders participate in the development of board directives, and the more they feel they have truly been heard, the more they will take ownership of the board’s decisions.

Another benefit of having the staff leader at the board table is that they have much to contribute to board discussion. They were hired either because of their professional expertise in the ministry’s business or their ability to lead an organization, and the board should benefit from their knowledge and skill. Staff leaders are also immersed in the affairs of the ministry, living close to its activities and making it their business to be intimately aware of all of the major factors that could affect its success. In short, this person is an expert the board cannot afford to leave on the sidelines.

The ministry’s bylaws or constitution should therefore provide that the senior staff person has the right to attend and fully participate in the discussions of all meetings of the board and its committees, except for matters that would be a conflict-of-interest (such as the compensation and performance review committee). This ensures that the pastor or executive director is able to speak to all issues that come to the board and present their perspective.

Guiding the Board

The board is responsible for its own work and should not be subservient to staff. However, the board and staff together are responsible for accomplishing the ministry’s mission, so it only makes sense that staff contribute to setting the board’s agenda. This is part of the board-staff dialogue. The board speaks to staff through policies and motions, while the staff speak to the board through reports and assistance with setting the agenda. Only board business should be on the agenda, of course, but the staff are in a great position to know what the board should be spending its time on, based on their knowledge of risks, trends, opportunities and other factors that could affect the ministry’s future.

Agendas should be developed by the chair with the support and advice of the senior leader. The staff leader should always be thinking about what issues the board should be aware of and which ones need board discussion.

From time to time boards should invite the senior staff leader to have a ‘fireside’ chat with them. Leaders can use this opportunity to share with the board their dreams and concerns, to paint the picture as they see it of the organization’s future, all without the pressure of having to pass a motion or approve anything. These meetings are like background briefings, helping the board to understand the context in which the staff are working.  This type of meeting gives the leader a ’sounding board.’  The board can consider this meeting as a consultation with a stakeholder.

Many times with volunteer boards, it is the staff leader who provides the corporate memory for the board, and the leader should also watch to ensure that the ministry’s values and culture are respected by the board. The board will benefit from leadership in these areas.

Moving Ahead

Many leaders who are not directors fear that the board will slow them down by process or by second-guessing their decisions. This does not have to happen, and when it does, it might be the leader’s fault. If leaders keep the board fully-informed about their intentions, listen to the board and understand its concerns, and do their due diligence before going to the board, staff proposals should get a good reception and a quick answer. The key is that both staff and board are thinking alike in terms of mission, risk, stragegy and vision.  Good planning leads directly to fast action. If the trust level is high enough, the board might be willing to delegate more authority to the staff leader and further speed up the decision process.

Boards sometimes become paralyzed due to a negative political climate, or because of an ineffective governance model or a model that no longer fits the circumstances. The way forward in cases such as these is to do board development. Staff leaders can take the initiative and suggest books or consultants that might help directors see a brighter future. It is in the leader’s own interest to have the best board possible, and leaders should do whatever they can to help their board become a model of governance excellence.

Setting Strategy

The board’s role in strategic leadership is best described by Richard Chait, who wrote in Building Effective Boards for Religious Organizations: A Handbook for Trustees, Presidents, and Church Leaders that “No governing board can, in effect, spin the whole intricate web that constitutes organizational strategy….The board is best positioned to ensure that organization leaders think strategically and devise an organizational strategy in the first instance. At a basic level, the board can gauge whether the plan contains the elements of an identifiable, consistent, competitive, and realistic strategy….The board is also well positioned to evaluate whether the plan makes sense, both literally (Is it understandable?) and conceptually (Is it viable?)….The board leads largely by questions and not by answers….The board can constructively challenge the executive and senior staff to articulate the plan clearly, explain their reasoning persuasively, and confront squarely the plan’s feasibility, including its downside and its blind spots. In particular, the board should assess whether the plan serves the long-term welfare of the organization as a whole or the short-term indulgences of various constituents….Boards are not well designed to conceive, draft, or edit strategic plans. Instead, they should ask questions, examine the data, express concerns, state objections, suggest alternatives, and when necessary, ask the chief officer to return with a better plan” (pages 161-62).

Chait’s solution keeps the board in charge, exercising its fiduciary duty, while allowing the expertise of staff to guide the ministry’s strategy. Staff remain accountable to the board, but take the lead in suggesting what the strategy should be. Together, the board and staff create the ministry’s strategy.

The board should have an opportunity to contribute to the leader’s thinking before the planning process occurs. This could be done at a board-staff retreat or at a regular board meeting that discusses strategy. The leader can then consider the board’s issues and suggestions as the plan is developed.

Board Authority

A leader who does not accept the board’s authority is not likely to get far with the board. Rarely does a staff leader show outright disrespect for the board, but far more often their disrespect shows up in more subtle ways, such as not having all the board information out for pre-reading, not giving the board valid choices to consider, and not advising the board of negative information.

Staff leaders need to accept that the board is responsible for approving the strategic statements (i.e., vision, mission), for determining the strategic initiatives, and for ranking the strategic priorities by approving the strategic and annual action plans. The board is also responsible at law for the assets and mission of the ministry. In essence, the board is like the Canadian Senate: a chamber of sober second thought.

A senior staff leader shows they respect the board’s authority when they:

• Are teachable, willing to accept the board’s correction or ideas for improvement;
• Do what the board asks them to do;
• Respect the board by submitting well-documented reports and proposals far enough in advance of meetings that they can be read and thought about; and when they
• Follow board procedures and don’t use the old adage, “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.” This is highly disrespectful of the board!

Board Trust

Senior staff leaders who are not on the board have no position authority over the board. They therefore must lead the board through moralsuasion, the use of argument and persuasion. A staff leader is in no position to force the board to do anything. Instead, they must rely on their personal credibility to inspire people to want to follow their advice. They must be accepted by the directors as a person who provides quality input to the board that is persuasive and compelling. A leader with credibility is:

• An expert in the ministry’s mission;
• Highly-conversant in both the environments in which the ministry operates and in the key issues that relate to its success;
• Close to all the stakeholders and in regular conversation with them, willing to absorb different points of view from their own to develop a realistic view of the present and future;
• Operating on a “no-surprise” policy, keeping the board fully-informed;
• Constantly thinking deeply about the ministry’s mission and about the future of the ministry as an organization (i.e., thinking not just at a program level, but also for the holistic health of the organization);
• A person who accepts responsibility for everything that happens in the ministry, whether it was delegated to another staff member or not;
• Ensures that everything presented to the board is done ‘first-rate;’ and is
• A leader who has internalized the mission and lives a life that manifests the best of what the ministry is all about.

It really helps the board have confidence in staff leadership when the senior staff leader thinks like a director.  Boards will have fewer worries when they know their interests and concerns are being addressed at the staff level without the board having to intervene.

Ministries will thrive when staff and board work together, respecting each other’s roles. Staff provide visionary leadership and boards provide them with an accountability partner that protects the organization and its mission.

Do you have any comments on this post? Why not leave a comment!

Facts and logic can engage the mind, but if you want to motivate people so that they act enthusiastically and with real commitment, if you want to persuade them to adopt a particular course of action or way of being, you have to engage their hearts, and a great way to do that is by telling stories.  Stories can be incredibly useful because they are much more memorable than plain facts or logic; they draw your listeners into the topic so they become personally interested and emotionally involved, and they help people understand what you really mean.  They connect people’s aspirations with your ministry and the future state you are called to create.  In another post, I talked about how stories keep your ministry’s Christian identity alive.  You still need facts and logic  of course, but augment them with stories to add the sparkle and zip that inspires people to take action.

So how do you tell a story well?  There are lots of books that promise to let you in on the secret.  If you check Amazon for storytelling books, you’ll find just under 20,000 of them!  I haven’t read them all; in fact I think I’ve just read one.  The good news is that after reading just this one, I felt no need to read anything else.  Often the first book whets your appetite and then you read others to go deeper, or to get a fuller understanding.  The book I read left me feeling I knew enough and what more could be said?

Many of the storytelling books I considered reading are quite generic.  They might tell you how to tell stories that you could use around a campfire, or with your kids or friends, but will these books help you at work?  I picked one that was written specifically for organizational leaders, and the table of contents includes the kind of stories that I, as a leader, want to tell. 

In The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, Stephen Denning walks you through the different kinds of stories that organizational leaders use, tells you when you should use each type, and shows how you craft a story to suit its particular purpose.  Here’s just a brief summary of the story types:

• Sparking action stories help bring about change;
• Communicating who you are stories build trust in a leader;
• Communicating who the organization is stories establish your brand, building trust in the organization;
• Transmitting values stories help ingrain the corporate values so that people understand “how things are done around here;”
• Fostering collaboration stories develop a shared perspective among group members;
• Taming the grapevine stories work with the flow of office gossip to present an accurate understanding of what the gossip is about;
• Sharing knowledge stories spread knowledge about what works and does not work among staff; and
• Leading people into the future stories prepare people for change.

As an example of when you might tell stories, when I came to CCCC I was a complete outsider.  People naturally want to know who the new ‘boss’ is, and they want to know the person well enough that they can predict what the person wants from staff.  This book wasn’t published then, but I know now there is a name for the type of stories I told.  I shared a number of “Communicating who you are” stories about key points of transition in my life, about critical incidents that formed my approach to leadership and so on.  These stories were one way of conveying to the team my values, my beliefs about leadership, the culture I’d like us to have, and how I make decisions.  I’ve told lots of stories since then, particularly “transmitting your values stories” to staff (for emphasizing our team values), and “communicating who the organization is” stories to external audiences. 

You’ll discover that stories are usually quite short and to the point.  Some people may think of them more as anecdotes than stories.  I really found it helpful that Denning gives examples of everything he talks about, so you can always get an idea of how to apply his ideas.  And for every type of story, he provides a template so you quickly know how to create it. 

I think Denning’s book is great, and if you want to learn how to tell stories, this is the book for you.

A ministry leader told me that he bases his leadership style on R&R.  No, he’s not taking it easy all the time.  I’m sure he gets an appropriate amount of rest and relaxation, but he defines R&R as “Require and Relate.”  Requiring happens when a leader sets out performance standards and evaluates to see if the standards are being met.  Relating happens when a leader connects with staff members in a caring, supportive way.

When a leader requires without relating, the leader is seen as autocratic, demanding, hard-nosed and a bunch of other not-so-nice attributes.  When a leader relates without requiring, not much happens, but everyone has a really good time as the ship goes down.

I suspect that some leaders feel the tension between requiring and relating and struggle with doing both.  Some leaders may have difficulty with the relating part, believing that if things get mushy and touchy-feely the organization will fall to pieces.  And other leaders may not have the intestinal fortitude and confidence to insist on performance, so they avoid confronting poor performance in a misguided attempt to be nice.

This leader made two points about R&R that should help you lead with both strategies.

1. Don’t settle for an either/or approach to the two Rs.  The concept of requiring and relating, of demanding performance while at the same time showing care and compassion, is thoroughly biblical.  John 1:14 says that Jesus came “full of grace and truth.”  Randy Alcorn, in The Grace and Truth Paradox: Responding with Christlike Balance, shows how Jesus demonstrated grace towards other people while at the same time not compromising the truth at all.  He welcomed the woman caught in adultery, but also said, “Go and sin no more.”  Grace is like relating, and truth is like requiring.  Jesus showed how grace and truth work together seamlessly to produce his desired result: they drive people to a decision point – will they, or will they not, live for God?  Requiring and relating can likewise co-exist in your leadership style to produce your desired results – accomplishment of your ministry’s mission.  So don’t be squeamish about insisting on performance, and don’t be shy about building strong relationships with your staff.
2. Requiring performance by clearly setting out the expected activities and results is simply good stewardship.  I thought this was a brilliant insight, connecting performance with stewardship.  After all, if you had a program that did not perform well, you’d either cancel it or redesign it to perform better.  You wouldn’t knowingly continue a program that was inefficient or ineffective, would you?  Of course not.  So why would you knowingly put up with inefficient or ineffective performance?  Both programs and salaries are funded by donors who expect you to make good use of their hard-earned donations.  And as a leader in ministry, you are accountable to God for good stewardship of everything entrusted to you.

But employees are accountable for good stewardship too.  Any paid worker in Christian ministry has two kinds of stewardship to think about with respect to their incomes.  First, in their personal capacities, they are to be good stewards of the cash they receive.  That is the normal way to think about stewardship.  But second, in their work capacities, they are to be good stewards of the time they traded for their income.  I don’t often hear people talk about stewardship of their work time.  Most often when stewardship of time is discussed, it is in the context of volunteer service.  But every person should think about how they are using their work time and ask the question, “Am I right now being a good steward of the time I have sold to my employer?”

And if leadership needs to help some people become better stewards of their work time, then that too is good stewardship on the leader’s part.  If we don’t address performance issues in order to be nice, well, just hear what Randy Alcorn has to say about that!  According to him, we’ve redefined Christlike to mean “nice” and with that definition, Jesus himself wasn’t always Christlike, because he confronted people with their sin.  Requiring that work standards be met may not always be seen as nice, but done well it is good stewardship.

In Shepherds After My Own Heart: Pastoral Traditions And Leadership In The Bible, Tim Laniak discusses the protection, provision and guidance that the Lord gave to Israel while he led them through the wilderness.  These three words are a pretty good description of leadership responsibilities, but it is the word guidance that I think is most closely related to the R&R style of leadership.  There are three Hebrew verbs used in the Bible that are translated ‘to guide.”  The three nuances Tim gives these words are:

1. gentle leading (which is shown in several verses as the Lord carrying Israel in his arms, or leading the nursing ewes of his flock);
2. leading, even against the will of those being led; and
3. capable, visionary leadership guiding a group toward its destiny.

Perhaps the best way to encapsulate what is meant by Require and Relate is that leaders should provide gentle leadership guiding people towards their common destiny, even when some prodding is required.

By the way, on a completely different topic, Alcorn’s book has a statement that just leapt off the page at me.  As a bonus thought, here it is:

“Most sinners loved being around Jesus.  They enjoyed His company, sought Him out, invited Him to their homes and parties.  Today most sinners don’t want to be around Christians.  Unbelievers tore off the roof to get to Jesus.  Sometimes they crawl out the windows to get away from us!  Why is that?”

Alcorn asks a great question that we all should carefully consider.