We're off (Uniting Church in South Australia) on "leadership" - again!

Why are we in the SA Synod of the Uniting Church off on this "leadership thing" again?
There are leadership books galore wherever you go. There are literally dozens of training courses and seminars to attend, and reams of newsprint devoted to this skill, this vague concept, this largely mythological entity known as leadership.

In part, I believe, because we all recognize, deep down, that we cannot control our organizations, our working lives even our congregations. It’s this lack of real control that makes us so desperate to find something or someone that we just hope might improve our ability to influence events by growing the church, developing worship and all the rest. We want to "get a handle on things and events"; we think we ought to be in control—or we believe someone should be—and so we place that duty on someone and hope it might be true.

There’s also the human tendency to want a scapegoat when things go wrong. Whom can I blame? If someone is to be blamed, that person must have been in control—or ought to have been, if they were not. Look at how regularly CEOs in businesses or football coaches are removed when things go wrong, even though they probably had not a lot to do with it.

Our mythology of the hero-leader, working 70 hour weeks with his or her hands on all the levers of the organizational/church machine, is so much fanciful nonsense. Trying to achieve such a picture is killing people—quite literally. It’s all for nothing too. Why are some many of our ministers "down", "feeling low" with respect to the future of the congregation they serve? Instead of "pop psychology" how about giving leaders/ministers serious opportunities for fun, and proper "time off"?

So what should leaders do?

Truly successful leaders don't even try to control events. They recognize that the only way to direct a large group of people is through some over-arching idea. That’s what they supply: a vision to believe in; a set of ideas to guide the thousands of individual decisions being made every day without any direct input from them.

“Without a vision, the people perish.” These biblical words sum it up. What we should be doing is seeking out leaders with imagination: people who can think and produce fresh visions for others to follow. Naturally, such people will need time and space to do their thinking. You can’t expect anyone to come up with strong strategic viewpoints if their days are filled with pointless meetings and administrative trivia. Nor if they’re exhausted by crippling work schedules and church "stuff".

We need to eschew the myth of leader as “man of action”. Thought without action has long been the stock-in-trade of ivory tower management, but action without thought—one of the hallmarks of the current idea of macho managers—is far worse. Plenty of people can take action, but it requires someone (or some team) with real wisdom and insight to guide that action wisely.

Let’s drop the mythology, forget the unreal versions of corporate leadership, and start allowing people of wisdom and understanding space to think, speak and have fun!.