Weak Leadership
Time and time again we see bad leadership decisions made by weak leaders. And the church – and parachurch organisations attached to the church -, are sadly some of the worst offenders.
And the worst repeat offenders. Not simply the same leaders in the same places making the same mistakes. But other leaders in other organiations, knowing all of this, making those mistakes as well. It’s as if such weak leaders have never read books such as Chuck de Groat’s “When Narcissism Comes to Church“, or “Something’s Not Right” by Wade Mullen, or “A Church Called Tov” by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer. Maybe they haven’t. That would be too “leadershippy” of them.
As I wrote about during my expose of The Crowded House abuses by Steve Timmis:
A national review is a good place to start. But if all it does is sweep the house clean, pare it down to order, then it will have failed. That’s all a legalistic process can do. It will simply prep the house for even greater problems. Do the leaders have the stomach to go the really dark, honest, self revealing places that they have learned to avoid over the past two decades? That will take a seismic shift in their collective will.
Narcissistic Systems
And that’s the problem with a narcissistic leader. He (and it usually though not exclusively is a he, especially in churches), creates and sustains a narcissistic system. That’s what empowers him. And often this involves some sort family system dynamic to make up for some sort of lack of his own in the past.
You know the way that plays out: “Hey we’re all in this together!” Until of course, you’re not, and you’re cut, and the water closes over you like the Titanic slipping under the icy Atlantic waters. Maybe you’ll get the odd awkward phone call, but it’s clear that no one wants to talk about the one thing that you want to address with them. It’s as if it never happened. It’s as if you never happened. You don’t matter. That’s what makes it so painful.
As my wife observes, it’s the secondary trauma of not being believed, or having the issue diminished that is sometimes even more painful than the initial wound. As she says “Imagine a mother hearing her son say that her husband is abusing him, and the mother not believing her son.” That secondary trauma embeds the primary trauma to an even deeper level.
Granted, not everyone in such toxic systems is a narcissist, but these people only stay within that system long-term, because they play a part in feeding the narcissistic dynamic. Oh they may do it unwittingly, but let’s face it, we don’t know the true self within ourself, lurking below with all of its foibles. This systemic problem gives rise to the enablers, the deniers, the insecure, and those who think that by staying and doing a great job they are something ameliorating, rather than exacerbating and prolonging the problem.
And that’s where weak leadership comes into the mix. If the narcissist is leader in all but name, and often they are, they will gather a firewall of respectability around them, by forming a facade, a leadership facade made up of weak leaders who will bend to their will. It’s the psychological and spiritual equivalent of money laundering. “Legit in five years.” All of that stuff.
Their primary concern is that if someone should come onto the scene and run a white glove over the furniture surface that there will be no tell-tale grubbiness on show. “Hey, I’m accountable to my board, nothing to see here!” and all that nonsense.
So the problem is not the narcissist per se, the problem is the weak leadership that refuses to deal with the problem . Which is why weak leadership makes for dangerous leadership. Why dangerous? Surely those weak leaders under the thrall of a narcissist are just as much victims that churn out of the mince-meat maker?
Well only partly. Here’s how they are a danger:
A Danger To the Institution
How does it go? “Deep painful change or slow painful death.” You don’t get to choose whether you have pain or not, merely the type of pain you are willing to accept.
And in my recent experience, weak leaders will kick the can of pain down the road for as long as possible before they ever gird their loins, take a deep breath and take some immediate and necessary pain.
And why is it necessary? Slow painful death of course.
Within a closed narcissistic system there’s a deep plausibility structure that has been built. It is self-affirming and has a narrative that anyone who has left, or who dissents is either ungodly or lacking in accountability, or doesn’t get the gospel. I’ve heard all of those. And had some of them said about me.
But others? They know the stories. They hear the horror tales. They see the detritus, the emotional wreckage, the spiritual abuse, the blind denial, the obfuscations. And they spread the word “Don’t work there!” “Avoid that person.” “Keep away from that leader.”
My experience of weak leadership is that the narcissistic leader cannot grow his organisation bigger than himself. He has to be the best, the smartest, the rightest (even when he’s wrong he’s right if you know what I mean). Hence the organisation gets stunted by his own stuntedness. By contrast, great leaders are able to staff bigger than themselves and the organisation grows in a healthy manner, rather than the boom and bust that narcissistic systems experience.
A Danger To The Gospel Witness
Surely that goes without saying. You’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts and seen the movie. Hey, you might even have bought the tee-shirt with a picture of a bus on it that reads “I survived Mars Hill and all I got was this lousy psychological trauma”.
But more seriously, we don’t have to go too far in the Scriptures to see how bad leadership among God’s people is so damaging to the witness of the gospel to the nations. The kings of Israel, the false prophets, the list is long and lurid.
So we read this sort of thing about King Manasseh:
The Lord said through his servants the prophets: ‘Manasseh king of Judah has committed these detestable sins. He has done more evil than the Amorites who preceded him and has led Judah into sin with his idols. Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I am going to bring such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. I will stretch out over Jerusalem the measuring line used against Samaria and the plumb-line used against the house of Ahab. I will wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes out a dish, wiping it and turning it upside-down. I will forsake the remnant of my inheritance and give them into the hands of enemies. They will be looted and plundered by all their enemies; they have done evil in my eyes and have aroused my anger from the day their ancestors came out of Egypt until this day.’
It wasn’t just Israel that saw how bad things were, the nations were exposed to the sin of the people of God. That’s why there are so many warnings in both Old and New Testaments about bad leaders, they bring disgrace on themselves, and an unhappy by-product is that they bring disgrace on the name of God as well. God will judge such leaders.
This risk of disgrace is ramped up by the speed at which social media and our modern forms of communication can shift news. It all gets out there pretty quickly. And it should. It’s been hidden for too long. That’s why I have a lot of time for Julie Roys and her journalistic work. She ends up doing a lot of the dirty work that churches themselves won’t bring themselves to do. And she doesn’t do so out of prurient interest, but in concern for the gospel.
The problem, of course, is not when the Roys Report or Christianity Today gets a wind of it, but when the likes of The New York Times or the Seattle Times gets hold of it. That’s the stage at which the church becomes a byword for all that is bad. As it says in Romans 2:24:
As it is written: ‘God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”
A Danger To Other People
The primary problem with weak leaders is that they are a danger to other people. And those people are either those working within the organisation, or those who are thinking of doing so.
Weak leaders will hide from their current employees or their potential staff or volunteers that there is a problem. To my shame, after my initial experience with The Crowded House I let other people go there from Australia without giving them the full story of what went wrong and why. Now I wasn’t a leader of the organisation, but I put those people in danger by not telling the truth, and by not exposing the lie.
But it all worked out okay, right? They avoided all the trauma right? Wrong! They got completely burned over. And it was at that point that I decided I would never keep my mouth shut again for the sake of expediency or for the sake of keeping some imaginary, non-existent peace.
Cos here’s the thing about narcissists and weak leadership: they assume upon your silence. And that simply makes you complicit in the problem. A passive compliance to be sure. But the result is just the same.
Weak leaders save their own skins in the end – at least for a time – and glibly allow other people to be churned up by the narcissist or toxic leader. That’s ultimately what makes them dangerous. People’s lives get wrecked. People’s spiritual lives get shipwrecked. And some people’s lives get ended, all because of weak leadership. And we see it time and time again in churches.
So What Should Weak Leaders Do?
I think the choices are fairly binary: Become strong or resign.
Become strong and stand up to the narcissist. It will be painful. You will lose sleep over it. You will even lose that supposed friendship you have with that person (which will, as you challenge them turn out to be no friendship at all, but a deeply transactional relationship in which you have over time been flattered by them in the very place the narcissist knows how to flatter you).
But, quite frankly, that’s your job. It’s your job as a leader to take a hit for the team independent of your allegiances to other leaders. If they are doing the wrong thing, then call them out and deal with the consequences for your sleep, your health, your friendship and your position.
And if you can’t be strong? Then resign.
And that’s pretty much it. If you’re reading this and making all sorts of excuses as to why this is not you – even though you know in your gut that it is, then you should be writing your resignation letter already. You’re a dangerous leader. You’re dangerous to the institution, to the cause of the gospel, and to the lives of other people. One day those “danger chickens” may come home to roost. So get out now, or get strong now. Those are your only options.
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