Reflections on leadership workshops--
"It Doesn’t Have to be Lonely at the Top"

Michael Davidson

President, Governance Matters

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 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

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, New Zealand Management, Aug 1, 2005

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.

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