Reflections on leadership workshops– “It Doesn’t Have to be Lonely at the Top”

Aug 04, 2009 Recently I led two workshops
on leadership; one for Board Chairs at the Support Center for Nonprofit
Management with Sarah Holland and the other for congregational leaders with Bob
Zuber at the New York Theological Seminary. As a board chair I was struck by
the consistency among the two groups with my own experience.

For me, and for the leaders
in the workshops, the greatest personal satisfaction of leadership is
simultaneously the source of greatest frustration. The work is worth it when we
can engage with the board as a working team to support the mission of the
organization. The greatest challenge is
to engage the board in that work.

The Paradox of Leadership

In my experience, an answer
to this paradox can be found in how we understand the work of leadership. To
the extent that we see our role as being responsible to get the job done — the
‘buck stops here’ school of leadership — these frustrations will be
inevitable. The solution lies in taking the much riskier path of acknowledging
that we cannot do this alone. Our real job is to ask the challenging questions
that will engage our colleagues as partners in developing solutions.

With Governance Matters, for
example, the most personally rewarding work I have done has come from recognizing
that the challenge of organizational sustainability could not be met by my just
working harder. Once I presented the
question in a way that engaged the entire board, the work was no longer lonely
at all.

The leaders in both workshops
saw that solutions were to be found when they could accept that
style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'>the essence of leadership is to share
responsibility. Helping others to
take on more of the responsibility allows the leaders to have the time and
reflective space to raise fundamental questions of organizational direction.

When board chairs were asked
to describe, “the best thing about being a Board Chair,” they talked about the experience
of working with the board as a team in accomplishing important work.

When asked about the
converse, “the worst thing about being a Board Chair”, most prominent was the
difficulty of creating a team:

* Lack of other leaders
* Carrying all the weight
* Getting board members to follow though on their responsibilities

* Lack of motivation to work
* Differing points of view
* Personal agendas

A similar pattern emerged in
the workshop for congregational leaders.

Addressing the Paradox

The creation and nurturing of an effective team is the
leader’s responsibility. Individual
and group commitment cannot be presumed; it needs to be developed on an individual
and a group level.

It is developed through
personal and group conversations about the expectations that the organization
has of the leadership and by engaging them in developing the solutions to significant
challenges of the organization.

In the workshops, we used the
concept of Adaptive Leadership, developed by Ronald Heifetz, as a framework for
understanding the essential work of leadership.

* An adaptive challenge is one that requires people
to develop new ways of doing things.
It requires people to suffer the losses of sifting through what DNA to discard from their past.

* Adaptive leaders have to understand that today’s
plan is simply today’s best guess.
They must be able to deviate from the plan when they discover
realities that they hadn’t anticipated.

Loren Grey, Ronald Heifetz:
the Challenge of Adaptive Leadership,

In addition to building an effective leadership team, the crucial responsibility of leadership is to ask
the adaptive questions. The danger for leaders is when they focus too much on
technical tasks that, while time consuming, have relatively obvious
solutions. This happens at the expense of having the time and space to address the adaptive challenges that have less
obvious solutions but which, if not addressed by the leader, go unanswered.