In difficult financial times, organizations tend to fall back on default leadership styles, drawing on old, autocratic and authoritarian methods to make hard decisions. We may wonder "what's wrong with that?"
My colleague Scott Williamson has discovered a fine new book by a couple of educators that helps make sense of this dilemma.
Stephen Preskill and Stephen Brookfield in Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009) have gathered stories from leaders of social justice movements and teased out the kinds of leadership that have been effective.
I found most helpful their image of conventional leadership from the work of Joseph Raelin ("Leaderful Organizations"). The value of directive, commanding styles of leadership assumes leadership to be "serial (exercised by one person at a time...), individual (only ever exercised by a single individual), controlling (fiercely pursuing the leader's vision of how others should live and how a community or organization should function), and dispassionate (viewing as necessary 'collateral damage,' the wrecked lives of those individuals, cultures or communities that are uprooted, excluded, or disenfranchised in the pursuit of desired goals)." [Preskill and Brookfield, p.3.]
It's so evident to me that this kind of leadership is well designed to defend and protect the status-quo. It works in a stable environment with a homogeneous constituency. The problem with this style is that we no longer have either a stable environment nor a homogeneous constituency! Change is rapid and comprehensive. Diversity is becoming the norm rather than the ideal. Organizations, and this includes churches and theological seminaries, that hope to survive the first quarter of the 21st century need to take change and diversity into account, and ignore the emerging of the future to their immediate peril.
Preskill and Brookfield suggest that learners make the best leaders when the future is at stake. Learning is about changing the learner as well as the context of learning. Learning is an investment in the future, not the past. Learning is translating the faith and traditions of the past into the parlance of the presence so we can move together into the future.
