Three Tips For Closing the Leadership Gap

Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill – Better Call Saul _ Season 6 – Photo Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The Ministry Leadership Gap

In my last blog post I wrote about “Minding the Gap” in one’s personal life as a Christian. The gap between public assertions and private actions.  The growing distance between what we let people think we are like (or even convince ourselves that we are like, versus what we are actually like).  Hence the picture above. But hey, it’s all good man!

But the individual problem is no more worrisome than the corporate problem. I speak to a lot of people burnt by the leadership gap in a ministry they either work for or participate in as a lay member.

And the biggest heartache for such people is the obvious gap between what the organisations espouses for other people, or offers as its teaching or training,  and how the organisation treats its own people.

I’ve had the tough privilege of working in a setting where the gap between the stated beliefs of an organisation are not merely far removed from the behaviours of those who lead, it, but in some cases diametrically opposed to those stated beliefs.

How do we avoid that in our organisations? Here are three quick tips – by no means exhaustive – that will help.

Ruthless Self- Examination

In the case of The Crowded House network of churches in the UK I made this observation at the outset of an external review:

If you are smart enough with your words and your intelligence, you can gaslight just about anybody and show how it’s really them at fault for questioning your non-adherence to your own values list. They come to you with a concern that you in the leadership are displaying an opposite value to the one listed, and lo and behold you leave that meeting having been shown how you were the one who had failed to keep that value.

What was missing? A level of ruthless examination that would determine whether there was any truth to what was a common complaint by many people over an extended period of time.

Now, granted, with The Crowded House there was the complicating factor of a leader who should not have been a leader of anyone, but there was a certain smugness further down the food chain that the problem was someone else. Always someone else.

If the gospel gives us any freedom, it gives us the freedom to assess our organisation honestly. Our identity should not be tied up in the perceived success of the organisation at a surface level. Ends do not justify means.  There should be a corporate version of “Search us Oh God and know our hearts.”

Yet it is hard to back-engineer ruthless self-examination into a system. That must be done at the outset. Before patterns of behaviour are ingrained in the culture. At the very least that means ensuring that any external review committee that you establish has the powers to speak to workers and members off the record about the health and culture of the ministry.

If, as a leader, all that you do is game the system by setting up a distanced review board, made up of a hand-picked group whose tendency is to affirm you from that same distance, instead of getting into the grit of the organisation, then it’s not worth a jot.

Yet that was my experience as a member of a review board that never was asked to meet, never was given any intel on what was truly happening, and was little more than an exercise in allowing the leader to acknowledge our existence as a way of excusing his ongoing behaviours.

What is more, the results were on the board – the leader was “getting stuff done!”  Yet what stuff? And how was it getting done? Those are serious questions to ask.

That I ended up being the senior leader of that organisation for 18 months after it went pear-shaped, showed up the huge gap between the public assertions and the private actions of that leader.

Listen To The Black Hat

Every organisation requires at least one black hat. And that black hat should be listened to. You know what I mean by a black hat: a person who – while being for the organisation and its well-being – can speak a hard word into it when he or she sees something amiss. And to do so and not get fired!

What that means of course is that those superior in the organisation have to possess the personal internal security, and the corporate external vision, to realise that they need such a person – or persons – within the organisation to ensure corporate, cultural and Christian hygiene.

And that’s a much harder thing to do. We never want to hear what might be wrong. We want to shut that down. So it behoves governance members and boards to ensure that they employ a CEO who has passed the sniff test of not only competence, but of personal internal security, and a desire to be transparent and accountable.

Many organisations end up with the leaders they deserve because there is no one on the board brave enough to ensure that someone involved in the executive functions is a “no-man” rather than a “yes-man”.  An organisation full of “yes-men”

It would be easy to use the whipping boy of The Crowded House at this juncture again, but I won’t. Sadly I have seen that here in Australia, and indeed my experience working briefly in one such organisation bore that out.

The gap between the values espoused the values of the founder, and the machinations of the on-the-ground organisation appeared far too wide. Resulting actions when this was pointed out displayed a refusal to close the gap.  The result of course is an organisation that loses staff and wider credibility.

Which, naturally, brings me to the third tip:

Expose It, Don’t Hide It

At nearly sixty years of age I am probably a little over organisations that hold the name of Christ high, but drag that same name through the mud with their internal behaviour.

And I also believe that hiding it generally results in a poorer outcome for the organisation in the long term. There might be a quick fix for the short term, in that the crisis is sent back underground, but it will inevitably surface again. Meanwhile staff who leave because of such issues, end up working elsewhere, and they are generally less “schtum” about it than their former employer is.

I’m not looking for the Salem Witch trials, but I am looking for leaders who call out the problem for what it is. The alternative is “launder-rinse-repeat”

The aforementioned group that I worked for was happy to undertake a private review, but when it came to a public announcement about the result, it was described as “growing pains”.

That’s not good enough. It felt like a snow-job. No one who should have left was forced to leave. Many who should have stayed, left. That’s a lose-lose right there.

That church denominations have had to debate the merits or otherwise of NDAs tells us that when it comes to the gap between private and public, we are often no better than secular organisations.

Indeed because of a faux-spirituality  (we’re all Christian here, right?) we assume that the gospel is our safety-brake on bad behaviour.

Not true. People who make tough decisions about bad leadership, or about the growing chasm between public assertions and private actions, these are the safety-brakes on bad behaviour.  Yet the impulse reaction for the sake of keeping peace is to say “Shhh.”

A true leader is someone who recognises that peace needs to be made before peace can be kept. This is a challenge to those at denominational leadership level.

If we promote people into senior roles who are good at managing in peace time and cannot lead through conflict, and cannot make the hard calls about someone they may have known since theological college days, then they should not be leaders.

It is the role of our senior leaders in organisations and denominations to lose sleep at 3am in order that others down the food-chain do not have to.  Yet if  I had a dollar for every subordinate or junior leader who has approached me privately to ask how to deal with a difficult or plain ungodly leader, and who is receiving foggy responses from denominational leadership.

When the process they have to endure from the organisation is almost punishment enough is it any wonder that many good people cut and run? The solution is not to move the problematic leader onto another part of the org or to another ministry position.

The solution is to tell them “You cannot be a leader in this organisation or denomination.” Secular workplaces do it all of the time, because they often are more realistic about the bottom line. If poor leaders result in people leaving, or sales being lost, then it’s a no-brainer.  But sheep being hurt?  Under-shepherds being bullied by other under-shepherds?

I wrote this yesterday on Facebook, so I will close with it. It’s a call for us to overlook the fleshly marks of success in our leaders, and instead seek the kind of secure leaders that are looking forward to a reward beyond this age:

Gospel leadership will not primarily be judged on the last day by quantity. Let’s remember that. Remember that every time you hear about a dubious leader “But he gets stuff done!” Remember that every time you hear of someone with an ongoing reputation for burning other leaders and being obnoxious or proud, that the quality is the litmus test of the Last Day. No good bowling up to the Chief Shepherd declaring “Hey Lord I had to tear down my barns to build bigger, in order to accommodate all of the wood, hay and stubble that I had accumulated!” A faithful ministry that produced a tiny handful of gold, silver and precious stones will receive a reward beyond compare.