Leaders and Leadership #6: Agency and Priesthood

In my last blog, I shared my 10-80-10 principle. I discussed the first “10” representing the Natural or Instinctual Leader and why many times they are unteachable. My additional comment is that even an instinctual leader can commit to being a life-long learner.

In this blog, I want to look at the “other 10” and who this represents. This I call Agency and this topic will lead us to our next blog about an issue that effects all clergy leaders and is underestimated in our development. This is Habit.

To get at Agency, let me start with some experiences that I had working with clergy in the Diocese of Texas. That diocese is large both demographically and geographically. Because of this, many clergy there spent almost all their ministry within the diocese. This also means that we had information from each of their parishes during their tenures. This was significant because “past performance is the best indicator of future behavior” as many managers know.

In several situations, clergy were struggling in leading their congregations and we found that they had a history of leading congregations into decline. This sometimes led to conflict with the lay leadership. Unlike previous administrations, and sadly a widespread practice at that time, such conflict would be resolved by the diocese simply moving them to another parish. We found a better way. This was to use their history to show them the need for a re-evaluation of their leadership. We used the Clergy Development Center, an ecumenical ministry, that helped pastors understand themselves better and to apply this to future ministry.

I was the point person in these interventions and was the go-between the clergy and the Center. During this process, I learned that a predictable pushback to receiving this re-evaluation was “What would I do if they tell me that I shouldn’t be a priest?” What I would say was that this is not the purpose of the re-evaluation. The task of the Center is to help you understand how and where you would work more effectively. In several situations, this led dramatically to a significant change for the clergy and introduced me to what the Center called Agency.

Here is what they meant. For some clergy, the parish is a frustrating and complex place. They arrive and discover that ministry in a congregation involves more than they expected. They wanted to be an agent with a manual and instructions on how to celebrate communion or how to make hospital visits, or how to take communion to homebound people. There are many clergy who are good at these tasks and act as agents of the Sacraments, pastoral care, and/or spiritual direction. When the boundaries and the tasks assigned are clear and there is a structure provided for them, they do just fine. 

There are places where this happens better than in a parish. Take, for example, a hospital visit. Hospitals have very regimented schedules. If you arrive too early to give communion, the patients are busy being fed, clothed, cleaned, and given treatments such as X-rays and/or tests. A minister needs to adjust to this and come at a more convenient time. If surgery is scheduled for early morning, then the best time to come is the night before surgery. Notice how the institution creates structure, and if you learn and follow it, you can function well.

Parish ministry has some of this structure with Sunday and weekday services, regularly scheduled vestry meetings, etc., but what is a clergy person to do on Monday mornings or Wednesday afternoons? Much of parish life is unstructured. In fact, clergy must learn to self-structure in a mostly open system with little supervision and direction. These skills are mostly leadership skills and doing them in order to help the whole community accomplish its purposes and goals is what leadership is about.

In the interventions that I mentioned above, the Center helped the priest understand that priesthood for them meant being an agent and the best places for that were chaplaincies in institutions like hospital, schools, and the military. In each situation, we helped them transition to such a ministry, and in EVERY case they did well. Some clergy with this view of priesthood find this truth by accident.

In summary, all ministry involves some Agency, but ministry in a congregation where that priest is the only ordained person has little of this. If a priest enters expecting all ministry in a congregation to be agency, problems quickly arise. This creates a void in ordained leadership, and moving to another parish never resolves the problem.

What all this shows us is that Agency may be ministry but is not leadership! It is a function or a task which can have great meaning, and some clergy thrive on this. However, the openness of leadership in a community has its own demands for self-structure (discipline) and such areas as vision casting, goal setting, and creating strategy. For ordained leaders, as professionals in the best sense of that word, we “must attend,” meaning function as an agent, but for leaders this is also an opportunity to open doors for relationships and influence. Agency is seldom for a leader an end in itself.

This whole topic leads us to the important issues of self-disciple and habits. In my next blog, I will explore the habits of ministry and leadership further and particularly how healthy ones can empower us, and bad habits can hinder us as leaders in our effectiveness. And as a bonus, you will learn why it is so hard to help clergy become more effective after the age of 55! 

Looking More Closely at Leaders Post#5

How Clergy Learn to Lead: Part 1 - The Natural or Instinctual Leaders

In this section of my series on Leaders and Leadership in the Community of Faith, I look more directly at clergy as leaders by addressing such topics as different types of leaders, leadership styles, and the formation and growth of clergy leaders. I will also be posting a blog on what I look for in a good clergy leader. To get into this topic, I will first share with you what I call the 10-80-10 Principle.

This general rule is based on years of observations while teaching leadership to clergy. The first for me was at The Leadership Training Institute at Evergreen. The second was my nine years as Canon for Mission and Congregational Development which, at its core, was leadership development. Following these experiences is what I observed while doing seminars and consulting with clergy.  which I still do. What I observed is that current clergy can be divided into three groups. (Note that these are intuitive guesses)

1.    10% are what I call “Natural or Instinctual Leaders.”

2.    About 80%, I call “Teachable Leaders.”

3.    The third 10%, I call “Agents or Chaplains.”

In In this blog the first group addressed is Natural Leaders or Instinctual for two reasons. First, they are often held up by themselves and others as the “real” leaders. Second, they dominate much of the discussion today about leadership both in and outside the Church.

     This is the way I would describe the Natural Leader. They are mostly intuitive guessers who tend to be dynamic, often charismatic, inspirational, and successful. The majority that I have known are primarily unteachable   

      If you go to Amazon and search for books on leadership, you will find that almost 50% of the thousands of books on leadership are written by one of these leaders or by a fan of one of these leaders. This is as true about clergy as well as the leaders of other organizations, businesses, and institutions. These books follow a simple premise. It is “I was a successful leader. The proof is that I built a successful, large organization. If you want to be a great leader, you should buy this book, do what I did, lead with my style of leadership. You will then become a successful leader too!"

     Let me advise you DO NOT buy one of these books. The premise is faulty. This is not because these leaders were unsuccessful, quite the contrary, because leadership is not just about the leader. It is about the organization, the timing, the style, and the personality of individual leaders. It is also about the context. When a Natural leader finds or creates the right organization and it fits into the right context, it works! They look like examples to follow. Sadly, few have become successful by following their example and advice. If that were possible, there would be a thousand Joel Osteen - like congregations across North America. For us Episcopalians, we would have hundreds of congregations the size of St. Martin’s, Houston, across Church. I could also mention, for older readers, Bill Hybel’s Willow Creek congregation in Chicago.

    There are several dynamics that make this style of leadership hard to imitate. The first you have already figured out. You are not that person. Next, you are not leading that organization. Further, you are not leading an organization in their context.

     More importantly, an inherent flaw in natural leaders is how little insight they have about their own style and why it works. Add to this, the organization that they use as an example may not work the way they think it does. There is often a gap between what the leader thinks worked and what actually worked.

     At the Leadership Training Institute, we ran weeklong teaching events. The teams were made up of the three leaders from our ministry and one from the outside. This outside person was an outstanding parish leader. That guest leader always gave the initial talk “The Power of Vision.”  When we had an instinctual leader, the talk was essentially, “I have a vision for ministry. It is this.” Then followed the leader’s own vision and examples came from his parish. Those talks were interesting and often inspirational. The talks could easily have ended with an altar call based on “Commit to this vision and follow me!”

     What did the leaders who were like most of the rest of us talk about? They talked about how they discovered God’s vision for the ministry of their congregations and how others could do that. They talked about their failures and what they learned from them. They talked about God’s blessings on the vision. They talked about, how over time, this vision became clear and how they matured. In other words, they helped other leaders learn how to lead better.

     Let me end with two observations about these Natural or Instinctual leaders. First, what happens when what they have always done stops working? Mostly, they keep explaining to their followers why it should work. This involves repeating their intentions and not listening to important feedback. They fail to hear from their leaders about the difference between their intentions and what is really happening. There have been some colossal failures by such leaders. This gap between a leader’s intentions and their actual behavior is a topic I will take up again later.

     My second observation relates to my statement that they are usually unteachable. It is this. Can an instinctual leader continue to learn and grow? My observation is sometimes yes. While I was Director of The Leadership Training Institute, I worked with such a leader on a proposed cooperative venture in ministry. This involved meeting with that leader and his lay leadership. After talking to his leaders, their instinctual clergy leader would always ask something like this, “How are you feeling about this idea? Or “Are you feeling comfortable with it?”

     It was apparent to me that this leader was, in Meyers/Briggs terminology, an ENTJ leader. What struck me was that he would ask such feeling questions. He did not ask what would have been natural to his personality, “What do you think about this idea?” At the end of the visit, I asked him about this. Here is what he told me. “Well Kevin, after being the Rector here for 12 years, I faced a crisis. Finally, I learned that I have to pay attention to my leaders’ feelings. After all, they are not all like me. In fact, few of them are.” Sadly, many instinctual leaders do not learn this valuable lesson, and even if they do, they do not know how to apply that learning.

     Let me ask you. Who are the Natural or Instinctual Leaders you have known in the Church?