Christian Leadership Alliance

My first introduction to Patrick Lencioni's leadership work was when my boss at Willow Creek Community Church assigned us to read the first thirty pages of The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by our next meeting. We've all been in that situation. The next, best, extraordinary leadership book has been written and we will all read it and it will change our lives. Then, two weeks later, the book sits on our desk, overlooked in the midst of the urgency of our jobs, and over time we are left waiting for the next life changing book to read.

I had been inoculated enough times to be skeptical. So, I smiled, took the book, nodded my head and left with absolutely no intentions of reading that book. The night before the meeting a sliver of guilt crept in to my mind, and since my husband was already asleep, I begrudgingly cracked open the book to skim the contents so that I could at least participate in a cursory discussion the next day.

I read the book cover to cover. Couldn't put it down. I was captivated by the leadership principles and focus as well as the view of the dignity of people. I sensed that I had just read one of those rare books, where, if I could implement this, it would be a template for my leadership for many years to come. I loved it.

The second book of Patrick's that I obtained I read much more quickly. My associate director of Axis (the postmodern ministry I led for five years at Willow) Steve, came into my office one day and said:
"Your meetings suck."
I worked very hard to try to discern the good news in that sentence, and when I wasn't coming up with anything, I asked for clarification.
"Tell me more Steve."

Actually that isn't what I WANTED to say, but it is what I said. I wanted to get defensive and rationalize. But somewhere lurking in my head and heart was a voice saying, "what part of what he is saying is not true?"  So I listened.

Steve went on to tell me that when I first arrived in my leadership role, I designed and delivered great meetings. There was a lot of energy and focus. People liked them, even looked forward to them. But something had changed. The way Steve put it was:

"I don't know what else is taking your time and attention, but it isn't your meetings."

I bought Lencioni's Death By Meetings book the next day. Read it cover to cover. Couldn't put it down. Loved it. More importantly it helped me get our meetings (which are a large part of the work of leadership) back on track, better than ever. Which brings me to the book that Lencioni wrote that I think may be, to date, his hallmark work, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. What I found in this book was a model for leadership that could bring health to our team as well as effectiveness. It fit in a postmodern setting and focused on the role of the leader in bringing a team together to do its best work. And it worked great in a ministry context.

Lencioni talks about teams, but that's just business lingo for community. Healthy leadership happens in teams, and teamwork is not just a slogan or a buzzword; it is a strategy … a choice. It is a declaration that our best work will come out of doing it in and through teams … healthy teams. Having said that, knowing that teams are made up of people, there will be dysfunctions encountered. Often in my consulting work we will get a call from a prospective client who will hesitatingly say, "I think we might have some dysfunctions." My diagnostic question is always the same, "Do you have people on your team?"

If the answer if yes, then you do.

Understanding that, then one of the key roles of a leader is to move their teams out of dysfunction and into health. The resulting product will be a team that is aligned with their gifts, makes great decisions, gets great results, and loves working together. That is an attractive outcome in any setting.

1. Absence of Trust.  This is the first dysfunction, but the most important one because much of what happens on a team is predicated upon trust. And while trust is composed of character and competency, Lencioni pushes our thinking to say that the most important kind of trust on a team is vulnerability based trust. That can be pretty counterintuitive for leaders who think in terms of presenting an image of omnicompetence.

Vulnerability based trust makes a team great; without it, people position themselves and teams become what Lencioni calls a "Petri dish for politics."  When a leader admits to his/her weaknesses, first of all, they are only stating what everyone else on the team already knows. In addition, they are then inviting others to participate in leadership to fill in the gap of what the leader cannot do. No one can do everything, and vulnerability based leadership allows for everyone on a team to contribute in meaningful ways.

I have worked for leaders who led from this fa&ccedit;ade of omnicompetence and the best I could hope for was to be an implementer of their vision and their decisions. I have worked for leaders who, because of their appropriate admission of weakness have invited me to participate at a peer level and really lead. I'll take the latter any day.

Trust isn't just some 'touchy-feeling' erudite concept; it is a practical, actionable component of leadership that allows for teams to make better and faster decisions, directly affecting results. If any teams ought to be building and maintaining trust, it is church leadership teams. The kind of community and leadership that exists at that level will inevitably replicate itself throughout the church. Doing the work of the ministry ought to result in the work of Christ being accomplished in us.

2. Fear of Conflict.  Of all the organizations we work with, churches tend to be the worst at engaging in conflict. Somewhere along the way we turned Jesus into this Mr. Rogers character in a white robe, with softly permed hair, who goes around blessing people. One look at the gospels will tell you that Jesus was a walking defining moment. His call for transformation was often imbedded in rather terse and direct language.

Les and Leslie Parrot, Christian psychologists who work primarily in the area of marriage, have written:  "Conflict is the only way to intimacy."  Pretty startling statement with enormous implications in the context of teams. Our avoidance of conflict almost guarantees that we will fail to build relationally deep teams AND that we will be unable to make the best decisions for the organization.

When teams don't engage in healthy, passionate, unfiltered debate around the most important issues, they inject more politics into the organization and make mediocre decisions which deliver mediocre results.

Conflict is basically energy, and when it is not dealt with directly, it goes somewhere. We learned that in our high school physics class. Unaired conflict goes into "meetings in the parking lot, or behind closed doors", it becomes "malicious compliance" (much like I was doing when I shook my head 'yes' about reading the book and left with no intentions of doing it … are you starting to see that part of my draw to Lencioni's work was that I was guilty of all five dysfunctions!).

If we are passionate about our churches, it will look that way in our meetings and in our engagement in conflict, in order to move the church toward the vision. Conflict also enables us to "disagree and commit," a phrase coined at Intel, but applicable to all teams.

3. Lack of Commitment.  Ever gone to a meeting, and left, not really knowing what, if anything got decided?  Ever led one of those meetings?  Healthy teams know when it is time to make a commitment and they do it. There are no perfect decisions, but there are good and great ones. At the end of an appropriate amount of debate, there comes a time to plant the flag.

I attended a leadership conference once where I heard a speaker say, "A mediocre strategy well implemented, is better than a great strategy poorly implemented." I think I snapped to attention because I am often guilty of waiting for the perfect strategy. It was a great reminder that not only is there NOT one, it is in the great decision and implementation that a strategy works.

When people leave a meeting unclear on the decision, they will go back to their jobs focusing on whatever is urgent or easy, since they lack clarity on exactly what it is that they are supposed to be doing. Commitment helps direct us to translate vision on to the pages of our daily calendar, aligning our activity with our strategy. I have seen people on church staffs whose primary role is leadership development, but lacking the clarity on that, fill their days with computer time, meetings and event planning not associated with leadership development.

Focusing on clarity and closure can drive a team toward the kind of commitment that begins to produce ministry results that in turn, move a church toward vision.

4. Avoidance of Accountability. Holding people accountable is hard work, and it's not usually fun. No wonder we avoid it.

But we need it. And, healthy teams find a way to move from simply the leader holding individuals accountable, to peer-to-peer accountability, where everyone on the team is holding each other accountable. That is a very powerful place for a team to get to.

Holding each other accountable is another way of living out our mutual investment in the cause. I may be responsible for one particular area in my department, but I'd better care and expect that each area is being well led and holding to their commitments. Avoiding this can cause an organization to quickly become a series of silos. Often in churches they may have well run departments, but I want the worship leader to care about the parking lot attendants, and those that lead home groups to care about the sermon, and the children's minister to care about the serving opportunities.

The second year I led the Axis ministry, we were gearing up for our spring retreat. This was a big ministry event, and provided a way for us to take our people in to a deeper teaching/worship experience, as well as connect people who were relatively new to our ministry. It was one of the hallmark events of our year, and we were in the final week before the retreat. We held our leadership team meeting outside that day, I remember because that can be pretty rare in Chicago even in May. As we did a final check-in, it became painfully clear that one of the key leaders in this retreat effort had dropped some pretty significant balls regarding the retreat. Did I mention that the retreat was only three days away?!

I was first shocked, then, incredibly frustrated, and no one on the team said a word. I don't know that I handled it perfectly, but I asked this person, first for clarifications, to be sure I understood, then I asked him to leave the meeting for 20 minutes, and to please return at that time.

Then I directed my response to the team. I asked them how they felt about, in addition to all the work they had done on time, now they were going to all have to pitch in, working extra hours, to get all this done in the next three days?

As soon as they understood what this would cost them, they began to speak up. They began to talk about, not only the extra work they would have to do, but how this could jeopardize one of our most important ministry efforts of the year.

When this leader returned to the meeting, each team remember was able to express, in healthy ways, their frustration at what had happened, as well as which part of his job they would pick up to ensure the retreat went well.

We became a better team that day, more willing and able to hold each other accountable for the work we had promised each other we would do in pursuit of the cause about which we felt so deeply.

Leadership is about promises, and we make and keep them, and expect each other to do the same, we live out our leadership with integrity.

5. Inattention to Results. In a business setting, this might look like quarterly losses, in a church, it is "spiritualizing" away, "Well, I guess God must have only wanted six people to come."

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Of course, all of us called to leadership in the church need to understand that the results are not completely in our hands. We are not ultimately responsible for everything. Leaders will probably need to keep learning that most of their lives. However that is very different from saying that it is okay to rationalize and defend that the ministry is not moving forward because of our poor or quickly thought out efforts.

Few of us wake in the morning, only praying for our oatmeal. Most of us move to fix it.

Great leaders do autopsies on poor results. They are constant learners and students. They listen to God, as best they can, and relentlessly pursue doing things better and more effectively. They are passionate about results, because results affect people. Sometimes results ARE people.

"What could we have done differently?"  "What did we learn from this, for future decisions?"  "Has this effort been allowed to go past its prime, and is there, perhaps anew and better way?"  These are the questions of a leader who builds a healthy, high performing team.

Every church ought to be led by teams that are healthy: spiritually, relationally, and intellectually. Teams are community, they are the environment for great leadership. As a leader, I hope you will work relentlessly to overcome these areas of dysfunctions on your team, in yourself. It will take courage and perseverance, but it will be worth it. It will create a culture in your church, where teams are a place where people can come and do what they do best, with people they love being with. What a great combination. What a great picture of the kingdom.