Through my experience of being on both sides of the desk, hiring, exiting, and leading a staff; there are 5 seemingly simple yet at the same time monumental questions that have continued to come up that are placed squarely on the shoulders of leadership to answer for the team.
While building the culture of the Church ultimately begins in the heart of God infused into the Senior Leader, it is quickly transferred into the Staff, and ultimately replicated into the Local Body that you find yourself leading. The culture that you end up building, whether intentional or not it is never neutral. It either supports what you want to do or it interferes with and undermines it. You can do your best to attempt to ignore culture, but you cannot choose not to have one. It is a powerful force, which when properly harnessed, can help you to become the kind of Church God has dreamed about in eternity past. The culture of your church becomes reinforced and further ingrained into the DNA of the Staff and the people each and every day you stay at your church and is expressed through:
Peter Drucker once said that, “The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.” If he had the opportunity to express this concept in today’s language he may have chosen to phrase it like this, “There is a shift in leadership that is taking place from 1.0 Leadership to 2.0 Leadership.”
Autocratic Leadership has been the commonly exercised style of leadership used by most businesses and even churches of the past. The Autocratic Leader is typically only interested in results, or the right answers that get them to the desired bottom line. They bark out orders and directions to their employees with the goal of maximizing the return on investment. Their interest in their employees has more to do with their productivity and what they can contribute to the organization than it has to do with the employee themselves.
Collaborative Leadership by its very nature is an invitation to ownership and the development of the people in the organization. The Collaborative Leader is more interested in asking the right questions that drive the right conversations. They are skillful at bringing people along with them through engaging conversations and allowing them to come to the right answers. This leader is after buy-in, ownership, and the heart of their team. Collaborative Leaders invite their team to the table and are genuinely interested in relationships, developing and investing in their people, and engaging in dialogue that is not merely about getting greater productivity out of the work that is being accomplished, but also about the work itself.
While there is a time and a place for an autocratic style of leadership, a younger generation entering the workforce is longing for more than just direction and dictatorship from their employer. This new generation entering the workplace is demanding 2.0 Leadership. And while it’s true that each leader does have a style that comes most natural to them, the best leaders have the ability to assess the needs of the organization and its employees and then adapt by setting aside what may come natural to them. In essence setting aside their own preferences and natural inclinations for what is best for the needs of the organization and the team.
This post is part-2 of a conversation that we began together last week. It would be worth checking out part-1 of this post to catch up. So let’s go ahead and dive back into how you can know you’re heading towards burnout.
This past week we kicked off a new series that found its roots in a book called “The Prodigal God,” written by Timothy Keller. This talk is the first in a series of three leading us up to Easter. Together we tackled the question of why we run from the Father and wrestled with irony that we so often find ourselves running from the very thing that our souls long for. So, what is it going to take for us to come to our senses? How long and how far are we willing to run until we wake up and realize that we were made to be at home with the Father?
I help churches make vision real. I am a pastor, speaker, strategist, and ministry consultant at The Unstuck Group.
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