This blog takes me away from the discussion of origins to another area of interest connected with things ecclesiastical.
Recently I read an article in Harvard Business Review by Henry Mintzberg (HBR July-August 1996:61-67 “Musings on Management”). It connects nicely with my comments on Diary of a Church Planter that mentions Mintzberg's remarks on the management failure that is implicated in the current financial melt-down (see right at the end).
I’ve attempted to adapt some of his ‘ten ideas designed to rile everyone who cares about management’ to the current near obsession with 'leadership' in some church circles (in the eighties I remember we were more concerned with 'ministry').
1. Organisations don’t have tops and bottoms.
Too much of church organisation is just that: organisation, rather than the growing of a community of faith: a body of believers mutually serving each other, and those around them.
But if you must have an organisation, then, rather than one that is diagrammed after the model of a triangle (minister, sorry, rector at top, parish council in middle, parish at bottom, etc.), model it as a set of concentric rings: service centre (parish council) in the middle, support systems (the various ministries and ministers, including paid and unpaid) in the next ring, all as individuals in the outer ring, and the surrounding ‘sea’ is the neighbourhood.
3. Lean is mean and doesn’t even improve long term profits
Getting rid of people to improve momentary profit, but hobble long term prospects is one of the dumbest moves a business can make.
For a church, though, it’s a different matter. Churches tend to multiply programs, services, ministries, activities, committees until their members topple from exhaustion. I suggest that the lean-making has to occur in getting rid of activities that take away from the mission of the church; the long term mission, not the flash in the pan connect09 type of mission. How the mission is done will emerge by the ‘service centre’ listening, watching and learning from what the outer rings of the church say, show and do, and what the surrounding neighbourhood provides opportunities for.
4. The trouble with most strategies is chief executives who believe themselves to be strategists.
See ‘3’ above. Good strategy comes from being in close touch with customers (the church has two sets of customers: members, that is the ring that’s in touch with the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood itself) and their needs, sensing and testing opportunities and equipping people to take the opportunities that come their way.
One of Mintzberg’s comments on the ‘grand gesture’ strategists is: “they issue glossy strategic plans that look wonderful and take their organisations nowhere with great fanfare.”
5. Decentralisation centralises, empowerment disempowers, and measurements don’t measure up.
As soon as someone in an organisation thinks they can ‘empower’ workers, or staff or members, they rip any capability away from them, including that they had in the first place; because the act of ‘empowerment’ betrays the notion that the empowerer has the power to give out to others.
Nothing in the Bible would suggest that this is so. The life of the church is organic, social, spiritual, charismatic, and above all loving: seeking the better for the other. The service centre and support systems of a church exist to help its real life work really and get on with sensing what it needs to be and do, because the people, in contact with their community and each other are the source of the life of the church and are both its ‘service delivery’ channel and its ‘market information’ source.
6. Great organisations, once created, don’t need great leaders.
“Hero worship reflects nothing more than our own inadequacies; such worship stops us from thinking for ourselves as adult human beings”.
7. Great organisations have souls; any word with de or re in front of it is likely to destroy those souls.
Replacing technique for thorough understanding is a recipe for disaster, or at least ineffectiveness. It seems that there’s an endless stream of people with church growth or church planting, or church development answers, techniques, approaches and magic potions. We hanker after these genies because we think they might give us the ‘magic’ that worked for them. But what worked for them was, in many cases, their hard work thinking out in community meeting needs and taking opportunities, stopping things that didn’t work and testing new things to find what might work in that setting, for that church, with those members. There are no genies, only people together (living and loving together, being committed to each other to the point of sacrifice, should that be called for) lead by the Spirit.
9. Organisations need continuous care, not interventionist cures.
Styles that fail: the ‘boss’ style: boss (pretends) knows and control everything, has all the ideas, is the final filter and arbiter of action, calls the shots; the ‘professional’ style: the professional has been trained, has been to Moore college and knows everything about everything that is important, including the community that a church has been in and part of for generations, this professional can waft in and ‘do the job’ that no one else had the wit to do.
Styles that work: Mintzberg discusses ‘nursing’ as a style of helping organisations perform strongly: observing, being involved, orchestrating, nurturing. Mintzberg sees this as a more typically feminine approach to action; maybe we miss out by neglecting women in the service and support centres of our churches because we’ve missed the point of church and regard churches as organisations, rather than the body living out the love of Christ.
I’ve made a diagram of church ‘organisation’ that reflects these comments, here.
Along similar lines, a quote from a recent article by Mintzberg, A Crisis of Management not Economics, in the Canadian Globe and Mail.
“In the United States [and the Christian Church, or so it seems-me] particularly, they just make such a huge fuss over leadership, it has become an absolute obsession. Everything is leadership, leadership, leadership.
It is not coincidental that the more fuss that Americans make about leadership, the worse their leadership is whether it is corporate or political or anything else. Their leadership is dreadful in recent years and with all of this fuss on leadership. Leadership is about individuality, leadership is about me. Even if leadership is designed to encourage and to bring along other people and engage other people, it is still the individual driving it. So, show me a leader and I will show you all kinds of followers and that is not the kind of organizations that we want.
That is not the way that we build things up. I think that we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word 'community-ship', which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities. People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution.”
