Leadership: Cast Vision, Raise up Other Leaders, Make Useful Change
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood… but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Gregg’s Reflection
In the last decade of my business career (the ‘90’s) I became a student of leadership. In the 70’s and 80’s I focused on management, and could not even tell you the difference between leadership and management. What I learned is that management is about maximizing efficiency, making the best of what is. Efficiency is about doing things right. Leadership, on the other hand, is about effectiveness, doing the right things.
In our family business, our father, like many founders, held a vision in his head, but he never shared it with my brother and me, despite our attempts to pin him down. Like many small businesses, the founder never focused on raising up other leaders. (See my post on Creating a Leadership Pipeline.) Many founders implicitly feel immortal, and never focused on equipping a successor. That’s why the vast majority never survive the founder’s passing.
As I did my Executive MBA from ‘96-‘98, I studied several theories of leadership, and found many definitions of leadership. The one that resonated most with me over the years is that the work of leaders focuses on three tasks: Casting Vision, Raising up New Leaders, and Making Useful Change.
When our father was running the business, a successful business model could run for decades. By the 1990’s, casting a new vision, and working to launch a new sigmoid curve of success was happening every three years. The financial meltdown of 2008 and the pandemic disruptions of 2020 taught me that no business is more than three years away from failure.
Churches, however, take decades to die. Perhaps that is why the sense of urgency to adapt is much lower in churches. Today we have whole denominations circling the drain, and turnarounds are unlikely. In our Lutheran tribe, 90% of churches were on plateau or decline by the early 2000’s.
At the Exponential Conference year ago, I heard that denominations need to plant churches at a rate of 2% of the existing number of churches to stay even with the church closures each year. At the time, we had over 10,000 churches in the ELCA, and were planting about 60. That is an unsustainable trend.
Jim Collins in Good to Great says that Level 5 leaders, upon taking a new role, “Get the right people on the (leadership) bus, get the right people in the right seats on the bus, and with the people on the bus, decide where to drive the bus (Vision).” So getting the wrong people off the bus, and the right people on the bus and into the right seats is the essence of building a strong team. (Raising up new leaders).
Casting Vision is a Team exercise in today’s collaborative environment. For churches, that is finding how all the gifts of the leaders work together to build a strong body of Christ.
Collins settled on the term Level 5 leader because he felt that Servant Leader was too wimpy a term. But Level 5 leaders serve their teams, and serve the mission, rather than being self-serving. That’s a long way from how we see so many leaders functioning today.
My friend Mike Foss puts it this way in a workshop in Visioning in churches,
You want to build a bridge from point A, your current reality, to point B, your vision. Most people fail to achieve their vision because they misdiagnose point A. They start building the bridge about twenty yards out into the river.
So, casting vision is the first and primary work of the leader. Adapting to a changing environment requires a new vision and strategy. While Purpose, Values and Mission are enduring, Vision is always evolving. It is time sensitive, and has the power to accelerate the future.
Most church vision statements I’ve seen describe a process, which is really a Mission. Mission stakes out what we do, and where we do it, and for whom we are doing it. Vision describes the outcome of living out the Mission well.
As we grew our business as a result of our vision, we realized we needed to create a career path that would help equip managers and leaders from the pool of high potential new hires coming into a growing business. See my post on creating a Leadership Pipeline here.
The hardest of the leadership roles in a church is to make useful change. You’ve probably heard the old saw, “How many Lutherans does it take to change a lightbulb?” And the response, “CHANGE???!!!” Organizations have a certain capacity for change, and most aging churches do not have the capacity to change enough to be relevant to postmoderns and millennials.
One of the eight marks of a healthy church in Natural Church Development is Functional Structures. Ministry Teams are replacing committees, Small Groups are replacing Bible Studies, providing the connective tissue of large churches, Pastors are becoming more collaborative in their leadership styles, recognizing that Spirit could speak through anyone in the church. Yet, the majority of churches are stuck in operating systems of the modern era.
Finally, if you think you are a leader, look around you. If no one is following, you’re just taking a walk in the woods.
Come along with me as we delve into leadership in the new millennium. Blessings.
Journaling Prompts
Where in my life or organization am I being called to cast a fresh vision? Who am I intentionally investing in to raise up as the next generation of leaders? What change have I resisted because it feels too disruptive—yet may be necessary? Am I doing the right things, or merely doing things right? What old models or structures need to be released to make space for renewal?
Scripture
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
Isaiah 43:19
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Proverbs 29:18. Rick Warren said, “Where there is no vision, the people find another parish.”
Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.
Habakkuk 2:2
Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.
Jeremiah 3:15
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…
Matthew 28:19. A call to raise up new leaders
Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.“
Luke 22:25-26
The body is made up of many parts… and God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
1 Corinthians 12:12,18
Ancient Writing
A leader is best when people barely know he exists… When his work is done, they will say: we did it ourselves.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
A nation is great not because it has many inhabitants, but because it has great leaders.
Herodotus, Histories, Book 7.
A leader must be a reader of signs and a student of change, or he will be swept away by the current he failed to see.
Cicero, De Re Publica and De Officiis
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
Seneca the Younger, Letters to Lucilius, Letter 104
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles, statesman of Athens, as quoted in Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans: Life of Pericles
You become a leader by serving others. You become great by lifting others up.
St. Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict, Jesus’ teaching echoed in Matthew 20:26
He who would govern others, first should be master of himself.
Philip Massinger (evokes classic Stoic and early Christian leadership themes)
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men (and women, Gregg) he has around him.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Modern Writing
Visionaries are the midwives of what is possible, opening the way for the future to enter long before it is born. They see great promise for humanity and the world, even in the face of the daily news.
Christine Valters Paintner, PhD Illuminating the Way: Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood… but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle
In the absence of leadership, organizations inevitably drift toward mediocrity.
Robert Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed, p. 24.
Most organizations are over-managed and under-led.
John P. Kotter, A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management, p. 4. Managers are about efficiency, improving what is. Leaders are about effectiveness, doing the right things vs doing things right.
At the very moment of its greatest success, an organization is most vulnerable to complacency and decline.
Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, p. 5.
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.
Warren Bennis, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, p. 2.
Leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less.
John C. Maxwell, Developing the Leader Within You, p. 1.
Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.
James Kouzes & Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge, p. 20.
Leadership is the process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.
Peter G. Northouse, Leadership: Theory and Practice, p. 3.
A leader is someone with the capacity to move from the front of the room to the center of the circle.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, p. 59.
Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.
Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, p. 25.
The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.
Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader, p. 7.
The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths in ways that make a system’s weaknesses irrelevant.
Peter F. Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times, p. 101.
Leadership is creating the conditions in which people can engage in the purpose and meaning of their lives.
Margaret J. Wheatley, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, p. 135
True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.
Jim Collins, Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great, p. 13.
Level 5 leaders… set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation.
Jim Collins, Good to Great, p. 39.
Your church cannot be great unless it can be great without you.
Jim Collins at a Leadership Network event with large churches pastors
Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.
Joel A. Barker, Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
Ralph Nader
Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
George S. Patton, U.S. Army General.
People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline (Doubleday, 1990), p. 94.
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
Peter Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times, p. 133.
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living, p. 26.