On Sun, 06 Jul 1997 , Roxanne Abbas wrote
> Richard Heyduck wrote about his challenges with his small United Methodist
> Church In NE Texas:
> snip
> > > * I have great difficulty getting people to respond to what I say,
> > whether in my preaching, teaching, or board presentations. For the
> > most part they just stare at me. My conclusion is that I'm failing
> > to communicate. Their explanation is that they're just not very
> > responsive people.
> My thoughts as I read your introduction were that you may be focusing your
> communications efforts on speaking, when the greater need of your people
> is for you to be an excellent listener; to help them to be more responsive
> by asking questions that open them up and by being patient while they
> reflect and try to formulate their feelings and thoughts into words. I
> sometimes call into memory the people I've known who are the best
> listeners and reflect upon, or try to observe, what it is they do so well.
> This seems to help me model their abilities. I've come to believe that
> the skill of being attentive to others is perhaps the highest order skill
> of an effective leader.
While I entirely agree with Roxanne that moving toward listening (and
perhaps also inquiry, remembering the importance of balancing this with
advocacy) will help, I believe Richard has another challenge: the
inherent paternalism and stratified structures of Christian churches.
As a former pastor, I'm very aware of the extent to which the
institutional church has evolved into a system which makes learning and
claiming of personal responsibility difficult. Church goers are taught
from birth that the pastor/priest/designated leader is the source of
truth, as the one closer to God than "ordinary" folks. I'm not surprised
that Richard's finding lots of uncomfortable silence when he asks his
board to work with him in building vision: their mental model probably
has powerful assumptions about who's supposed to do this, and who isn't.
In the same way, most church structures in my experience are designed to
foster dependence on authority figures. Richard, if your congregation is
anything like the ones I know, you scared them to death: the internal
message is, "Well, if _he_ doesn't have the vision, who does?" Whether
such attitudes are inherent in Christianity or not, while an interesting
question, isn't the one that will help Richard; and I don't mean to slam
the Church.
Instead, isn't the more generic issue how a person with an incentive to
building learning capacity in an organization can begin to overcome both
leadership models based on dependency and paternalism, and structures
which re-inforce learned helplessness on the part of workers/pew-sitters?
For me, in addition to careful listening to people's stories and gentle
presentation of alternatives, there should also be helping them to learn
new skills in the context of what they're doing, whether it's a church
board or a manufacturing worker. Included for me would be
1. Skillful discussion techniques
2. Ladder of inference / suspending assumptions in safety
3. Root cause analysis and exploration
and the really "tricky bit" in Richard's situation is giving people
permission to believe they, in fact, are entitled to bring their own
beliefs, values, and ideas into the creation of shared vision. And the
potential "dark side," of course, is that because he is the nominal and
annointed leader, with the right to preach, and an expectation of all the
right answers, his actions will subtly invalidate what he's trying to
accomplish. Richard, if you don't know it already, check out Belasco and
Stayer's _Flight of the Buffalo_ for some good insights into your
situation.
Hope this is helpful. Comments from others?
Malcolm Burson
--"Malcolm Burson" <mooney@MAINE.MAINE.EDU>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>