Biblical Warrent (with interpretation) for Collaborative Leadership



Captain Chelsey Sullenberger
(from Wikepedia)

 Growing up in a Presbyterian church in a little town in southern Illinois, I was shaped by experiences of shared leadership. Since one or another of my extended family served on the governing board constantly, I overhead lots of stories of the excitements and difficulties among the leaders and the pastors. It was just assumed in that Presbyterian culture ministers had to work with the elders and that elders were important in the life of the congregation. Later on as a young pastor wanting to be up-to-date, I fell into the fads of leadership of the 1970’s and 1980’s which cast pastors in roles of management and executive leadership. Those fads fit nicely my graduate work in management and organization development. When the 1990’s rolled around, the fashion for leadership shifted to the term “visionary” by which the leader was imagined to be the head of the organization, where the eyes are placed up on the head so that the leader could “see.” It worked well as far as it went, but I can see now, the mistakes I did make arose from failing to make full partnership with the elders and members of the congregation. For someone like me who fancies himself a student of “leadership,” all of this shifting and changing makes for a story with shifts and tensions and deep ironies.


As you probably know the Bible is not necessarily a source of absolute and eternal answers, but offers us insights and inspiration to fit our current circumstances. So it is on the topic of leadership. There are lots of stories of leaders in the Bible, some good examples and some really bad examples. The only place I’ve seen the actual word “leadership” is in one of the lists of “gifts of the Spirit” needed for the church in the middle of the first century of the Common Era. For inclusion in the list, the Apostle Paul chose a nautical term which has been variously translated as leaders, administrators, government. There’s a lot to make of the word, which in the original Greek language is kubernesis. The literal meaning of the word is a nautical term for pilot or “steersman,” or “helmsman,” the one who handles the tiller, who provides the direction for all. It implies the kind of wise and experienced direction or governance needed for safe travel to get the ship where it needs to go. The gift of governance is given among the many gifts needed, including proclaiming the Word which was the sole domain of the original Apostles. Nonetheless, every human organization needs some order and direction in order to carry out its purpose to expand awareness of God’s grace and love as known through Jesus. And the overarching reason for the gifts of the Spirit is given in the introduction to this essay “To each person is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”

The problem with this word kubernesis is that it can mean different kinds of leadership and we have to interpret it. In contemporary American organizations we have what I call a “myth of leadership” by which leadership is what is done by a single person at the “top” of an organizational chart, who directs all the operations without relying on the help of subordinates or other members of the organization (Preskill and Brookfield, Learning as a Way of Leadership, 2009, p. 3). The leader in this American myth is all knowing, all powerful, everywhere present, and un-moved by the changes of time or the emotions of people (sounds like a description of God, doesn’t it—except I’m not sure I believe in that kind of God, either). Such a leader has all the charm of Donald Trump and all of the sensitivity of Leona Helmsly. One management expert has noted that the top-down, control and command style of leadership is the “default mode” for the way Americans expect leaders to behave. If it is the default, popular tradition of leadership (Sharon Deloz Parks, Leadership Can be Taught), it’s no wonder that even some “experts” in leadership got caught up in it.

But interpreting kubernesis in that straight-line, top-down, singlular way misses an important re-interpretation of the word taken in the 20th century. As scientists began to make sense of the new insights of the work of Einstein and other physicists, and realized how everything is interconnected, both machines and organizations, they discovered that there are circles or loops of influence at work all around. They took that circular and inter-related understanding of the way the world keeps itself in order and created new science called cybernetics. That term came directly from the Greek word kubernesis. Cybernetics, when applied to human organizations, helps us see that it is not enough to see organizations and organisms operate in simple cause and effect, organizational charts with straight line relationships. When we step back to see how there are also circular, relational dynamics, guided by great feedback loops of information and emotion, we can explain a lot more about how we work together in organizations, even the church. Thanks to cybernetics, it is now clear that a human organization is not a simple machine, but more like a living organism in which every part is connected to every other part and leadership is a shared enterprise. With the rise of cybernetics, the old myth of the lone, all powerful leader at the top no longer makes sense to us.

With those newer understandings of how things work, investigators in the1980’s started looking at crash landings of several major large passenger aircraft. Seeing how the circles of relationship work or don’t work helped them to find that a common factor in many disasters was a lack of communication among the members of the cockpit crew. Many black box recordings from those crashes contained stilted conversations in which the captain would not or could not ask for or hear the information, suggestions and even warnings of other officers on the flight deck. Without all of the resources available these captains made decisions that took the lives of hundreds of people including themselves. That was due to the myth of the “sky god captain” who had absolute power. From that point on, the aviation industry demythologized the sky-god-captains and a new culture of leadership in aviation was born. It is called “crew resource management.” CRM uses all of the loops and feed-back mechanisms of cybernetics to insure that in moments of crisis everyone in the cockpit of an airliner become leaders and every officer has major responsibility for the safety of the aircraft—not just the captain. In case you’re wondering, Captain Chelsey Sullenberger (Sulley) who safely piloted the disabled airplane into the Hudson River two years ago was himself a Crew Resource Management expert. While the media tried to make him a single-handed hero, he acknowledged publicly that it was a full team effort that saved the lives of 155 passengers and perhaps countless on-the-ground individuals as well.

So to interpret Paul’s use of the word kubernesis for the 21st century we begin to see that the pilot can no longer be a lone, objective controller of the workings of a ship or an organization. He or she is an integral part of the ship as a whole, including the ships mechanisms, the ship’s crew, the resources aboard the ship, the information available to the steersman regarding weather and navigational directions. The steersman also has a set of feelings and hopes and dreams that also play into the loops of information about how to steer the ship and where the ship actually goes. In that fashion, the First Century picture of the helmsman is filled out by the 20th and 21st century image of the cybernetic leader. The winds and change and uncharted waters of this present age require more complex ways. Cybernetic leadership is collaborative leadership in contrast to command and control leadership. One source has defined it as “forming and sustaining relationships that lead to results in the common good.” (Preskill and Brookfield, p. 4). Instead of the top-down all powerful leader we have a leader who listens and shares. Instead of the visionary leader who does the seeing for the organization, we see that the leader is one who helps the organization to see where they need to go and what they need to do (Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning, 2007), 136).

To check this interpretation with other scriptural information, I would like to note that in the synoptic Gospels Jesus is hardly a loner, or a top down leader. He created a team of disciples, included more and more people in his circle, and was physically absent when his followers turned the world upside down. Paul was himself a collaborator, not a dictator. He found the human resources and invited, trained, nurtured and guided them to build Christian communities around the Mediterranean Sea.

Leaders of the 21st Century: I commend to you this new image of leadership by relationship, leadership that takes all the resources around it into consideration, leadership that brings a whole team to work to achieve the common good. I think this is the leadership that is gifted by the Spirit of God for this time.