LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP (5)

The role of being a leader comes to each of us in many and varied ways. We are all leaders in one way or another. As Christians it comes through our baptism. As parents it comes with the responsibility of parenthood. In our various vocations or jobs, it comes with the role we are called to play within that situation. Leaders are always to be role models if the leader wishes those over whom he or she has authority and responsibility to be good followers. We do not always lead as well as we should, but lead we all do.

We are also all followers. As Christians we follow Jesus by trying to live the life the way he role-modeled it for us. We don’t always follow the way we should, but we are all followers. As children we did not always follow the good examples our parents set for us, did not always obey their commands, but we knew, nevertheless, who was in charge. As students we did not always follow the sound advice of our teachers, but, fortunately, we still learned even if it was often the hard way.

As Anthony B. Robinson in has article in The Christian Century (01-12-12) notes, a habit that is essential for leaders to be good leaders and followers to be good followers is for both to know and understand their roles. Both leader and follower need to know, understand and accept what tasks, what businesses, have his or her name on it and which ones do not. Leaders need followers to complete the tasks at hand and followers need leaders to point the direction.

Leaders cannot be micromanagers. Those who try eventually lose their followers because of the followers’ inability to do their job with any sense of freedom and self-worth. The follower will simply find another leader who will allow him or her to use the gifts he or she possesses and, in truth, which the leader needs to get the job done even if the leader believes no one can do it as well as s/he can. If the follower’s name is on the task at hand, get out of the way.

Leaders must also be open to other ways of doing business even when that business is about how to follow Jesus or how a church is to be a church. In other words, leaders must listen to their followers who just might have a better idea, a better way. No one is in possession of all the knowledge and skills and whatever else it takes, for instance, for a church to be a church. Even the lowliest of followers often has a better idea.

While it is important for a follower to follow and not often or even always believe s/he could do a better job at leading – and sometimes that is the honest-to-God’s truth: s/he can – good followers must still do the best they can even when the leader is less than the best and may not even be qualified to lead. They are ways to remedy bad leadership, but not doing one’s job is not one of them.

For any organization to be successful, especially a church because it is a totally voluntary organization, leaders and followers must work together, often taking risks, trusting one another, giving and receiving honest feedback, always being open to new ways of being, and doing the best each can in the role or roles each is given and accepted.

LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP (4)

When we were young, we were encouraged to follow the leader and we did so willingly and fearlessly. We were without fear because we trusted our leader, trusted that he or she would not lead us into harm and would get us safely to whatever destination we were being lead. Good leaders must always be trustworthy, otherwise sooner or later they will have no followers.

Yet, a trustworthy leader is only as good as the leader’s followers. They, too, must be trusted to follow the lead. One cannot lead with one’s head either in the rearview mirror or by waking backwards to see if those who are following are indeed following. Followers trust the leader to lead and the leaders trust the followers to follow. It is a mutual trust without which there is no movement.

Trust, as Anthony B. Robinson in his article in The Christian Century (01-12012) asserts, is essential for parishes to function properly. A trusted leader keeps the congregation focused both inwardly and outwardly, on their ministry to one another and on their mission to share the Gospel message of love and concern for the wider community in service to those outside the parish.

Mission and ministry take work. Sometimes we do not want to hear that truth. That is why we need trusted leaders to remind us especially when we do not want to be so reminded. Yet we know from our own experience when we are in positions of leadership that our role is necessary, important and often difficult. We also know that no matter how great and experienced a leader we have or we are, no leader has all the answers to all the questions that arise and for all the decisions that must be made.

No one is that wise. No one. That is why, as Robinson avers, that leadership and followership both involve ongoing education. Life itself is a learning process from the moment of birth to the moment of death. When we stop learning we die. When we refuse to learn, we are dead even if we are still breathing. Yes, many of the lessons we have to learn as leaders and followers are often difficult to implement, but they are important and necessary for continued growth individually and collectively.

Learning is an art even if much of our learning comes from osmosis. We learn as we go and as we grow. But there are times when we have to be deliberate about learning, making and taking the time to learn through classes, sermons, practice. It means being honest with one another, giving feedback when it is necessary, even when it might hurt, as it often does. No one likes to be corrected, to be told that there is a better way or a better answer or that our answer and our way happen to be wrong.

Continual learning has to be or become a habit both on an individual and on a parish level. We learn from our mistakes and we learn from our successes. New ways are not always better ways nor are old ways, even successful ones, always the better way. Trying a new way and failing is often better than not trying at all. At least when we have tried and failed, we can learn from our failure. To not try at all is an even worse failure.

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In any grouping of people, parish congregations included, there needs to be good leaders and good followers. Absent one or the other or both, that group of people will slowly and surely disintegrate, probably into chaos before finally disintegrating altogether. That is simply the nature of the beast. There are times when each of needs to be lead and times when each of must follow because no one of us goes it alone in this life, not for long.

Anthony B. Robinson in an article in The Christian Century (01-12-12) notes that there are five habits that congregations need to develop in order to be healthy. First of all, the members need to recognize that truth that leadership is necessary, is important and is difficult especially given the diversity of people who make up most congregations. Leadership is work and always a work in progress.

Secondly, while each one of us joins a congregation because of own particular needs and wants, it is vital to both realize and accept the fact that the mission and the ministry of the whole body is not directed solely to us, to the individual. Even more, it is not directed solely to the wants and needs of the gathered community even though collectively the primary purpose for joining a church is to have personal needs met.

If a congregation turns in on itself and does not look outside, it will fail to fulfill its baptismal mission to seek and serve and evangelize those who are not members. A good leader helps keep the congregation, the followers, on track so that they never lose sight of their real mission, something that is easy for followers to do especially when personal needs begin to consume or very being.

In order for a leader to be able to keep the followers on track, that leader must cultivate a good relationship with the people who have called him or her to be in such a position. Not only that, insists Robinson, the leader must build up the trust that is needed in order for the leader to lead and the follower to follow. If we cannot trust our leader to show us the right way, then we will soon look for someone whom we can trust.

The truth is, when we call someone to lead us, we automatically want to assume that that person is trustworthy; otherwise we would not have made the call. But, humanly speaking, in the beginning we tend to keep a wary eye on the leader. We have all been burned once or twice over the years by someone who betrayed the trust we had placed in him or her. The pain remains with us today.

Trust is vital. But it is also a two-way street. In order for a leader to lead and lead well, those who follower must themselves be trustworthy. We, too, when we have been in position of leadership have been burned by those whom we expected to do their part and who even said that they would, who, in fact, did not and we were left to pick up the pieces and, worse, shoulder the blame. That pain, too, remains with us today.

Trust is easy to come by and easy to lose but it is vital for leaders to lead and followers to follow.

LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP (2)

According to Anthony B. Robinson in his article in The Christian Century (01/11/12), if a congregation wants to have a good leader, it must be a good follower. That means, first of all, that the people recognize that leadership involves a lot of hard work at times and that the work to be done by the leaders is necessary and important and often difficult for many and varied reasons, not the least of which is the truth that each member has her or her own idea of what a leader should be like and what that leader both should do and how it should be done. Any volunteers here?

Each member of a congregation has a personal interest and investment in that congregation. Churches are voluntary organizations. The funds that keep the parish operating are all faith-based. The funders, if you will, even if they make pledges, can take their funds and leave any time their hearts so desire and for any reason they choose to do so. If too many walk away and the needed financial resources dry up, that church will close sooner or later.

It is not only the need for sufficient financial support that allows a congregation to exist and minister, what is even more important are the ministers themselves, namely, the people of the parish. Yes, each of us belongs to a particular church because of particular needs. We join that church in the hope, not always articulated or admitted, that those needs will be met. Even so, it is not just about nor all about “me”.

It is about all of us, all the members. What is? As Robinson asserts, what a parish is all about is a shared commitment to a larger congregational purpose and not each parishioner’s own personal need and even agenda. That is, again, important, to be sure. We do need our needs to be addressed or we will find someplace else that will meet them or keep shopping until we do.

Yet, while our needs are being met, we also, as a congregation, must try to meet the needs of both one another as well as the needs of those who are not part of us. As our baptismal promises remind us, we are to seek and serve Jesus in everyone, minister to them as best we can. That is our larger congregational mission. Those who only serve themselves eventually wither and die.

One of the demands on those who lead is to keep those who follow on track, to never lose sight of what the mission and ministry of the congregation is truly all about. That is not always easy for both leaders and followers. We all seem to have too much on our plates these days, some things we’ve chosen to place there and some dumped on us without our even asking and certainly not desiring, but there they are.

Thus, in order to keep our priorities straight, both personal and parochial, leader and followers must work together, must often ask the hard questions and make difficult choices. That is an on-going process that needs to become a habit. It is something that we must and just do on a regular basis, this asking the questions about what we are doing and why we are doing what we are doing or not doing what we should be doing. Are we?

LEADERSHIP AND FOLLOWERSHIP (1)

Over a year ago I read an article in The Christian Century by Anthony B. Robinson, a pastor in the Northwest who knows a thing or two about how parishes function, titled
“Five Habits of a Healthy Congregation”. His basic premise is that if a congregation wants a good leader and that leader wants to do a good job, the leader needs to have good followers and those followers need to be practitioners of five healthy habits.

We are now in the beginning stages of a search process, the culmination of which will be the calling of the next leader of this parish whom we will be asked to follow. Over the next five weeks I would like to reflect and expand on each of Robinson’s five habits to, perhaps, allow each of us to personally reflect on not only what it means to be a good follower but just what kind of follower we might be.

First of all, good followers must realize and recognize the truth that the work of leadership is necessary; it is important; it is difficult. It is work even if the leader does not consider it to be work but rather sees it as a vocation. My brother-in-law Dennis always kids me about only working weekends and my comeback is that I have never worked a day in my life. When what I do becomes work, when it simply and only becomes a job, I am done.

We all need leaders in those areas of our life where we are called to be followers; otherwise there would be chaos all around in general and in our personal lives in particular. That is why having good leaders in our lives is so important. We cannot live without them even if at times we find it difficult to live with them especially when those leaders are telling us some things we simply do not want to hear but, of necessity, truly must hear.

That’s risky business, this duty of a leader to sometimes impart unpleasant and difficult news to those who are followers, truths they do not really want to hear. It is even more risky when the followers do not have to follow, when their association with the leader is purely voluntary (as in a parish), when the followers can simply walk away with no repercussions of any kind. Speaking the truth can be a risky business for a leader.

Followers, too, must take risks, especially those who belong to voluntary organizations. Choosing another to be your leader is always risky. One never knows what kind of leader that person will be in this new circumstance. His or her leadership track record may be wonderful, but every situation is new even if it is similar to the previous one. Why? Because no two groups of people are identical. We all know great leaders who have laid an egg or two over the years. We just hope our new leader doesn’t lay one on our watch.

Not only is it risky in making a call to someone to lead us, followers must also be willing to take further risks. While it is always comfortable to continue doing what we’ve always done in the ways we’ve always done them, new leaders will inevitably challenge us to step out of that box and try something new. Are we willing to take that risk? If not, the new leader will have a more difficult time. If we are, the future will be bright.