THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT

During a recent talk at Washington National Cathedral, Garrison Keillor told a story about the songs he grew up singing in church as a child.  We didn’t sing those happy, “7/11” songs, he said.  “Do you know what I mean?  Songs with seven words sung eleven times.”  He shared his love of poetry and hymns, spiritual tunes set to beautiful texts.  Knowing he was an Episcopalian, someone asked, “Which hymn do we need to sing to help bring harmony to the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church?”  After thinking for a few moments, he said he could think of no one hymn.  But he suggested a song that can bring us back together again as a nation.  And he launched into America the Beautiful, guiding us line by line through all four stanzas.  He knew each verse by heart.

 

That’s not management.  That’s leadership. 

 

In a book called Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations, church consultants Alice Mann and Gil Rendle use the story of Moses and Aaron in the book of Exodus to explain how leadership and management, though different, are equally vital.  Here’s their wisdom:

 

The story of the Exodus can be instructive for a congregation’s planning.  In the wandering in the desert, it is clear that it was the journey much more than the destination that shaped the people.  Had Moses been a better planner and pathfinder and discovered a straight route to make the trip to the Promised Land in a matter of months instead of wandering for years in the desert, the people may not have been changed when they arrived.  They might have arrived much as they left Egypt – as a slave people.  It was the journey, when they had to ask questions of how they would form community and what was important about their relationship to God, that shaped them as a nation.

 

Allow planning and discernment to take the needed time.  An axiom of general systems theory is that a congregation (or any system) cannot learn faster than it can learn.  Don’t rush ahead, despite the reality that there will be those in the congregation or on the board – including yourself – who will be anxious to get to the “answer” and know what to “do.”

 

The story of the Exodus also reminds us that leadership is a dance in which we seek a more distant future that is both meaningful and faithful, while simultaneously managing the specific day-to-day realities of the trip.  A friend who is a rabbi once shared a more contemporary midrash (an ancient rabbinic way of interpreting scripture- Ed. note) about the relationship between Moses and Aaron in the desert that points to this dance of equal necessities. Moses’ task, of course, was to envision the future.  It was Moses who went off alone to encounter God face to face.  He would return with new energy, a sense of direction, and a visible radiance from the encounter.  Aaron, on the other hand, was the voice of management.  He structured the trip from day to day, organizing tasks, assigning responsibilities and making decisions.

 

In this midrash, the teller focused on the part of the story of the delivery of the commandments.  It was visionary Moses who, alone on the mountain with God, received the commandments.  It was Aaron who waited below with the people, organizing daily life and trying to address the needs and anxieties of the people.  The irony of this story was that just as Moses was receiving the commandment not to make graven images, Aaron was working below with the people who were busy creating these very same images in an effort to offer a visible leader (“gods…who shall go before us”) on their journey. (See Exodus 32:1-35).

 

The lesson of the midrash is that both Moses and Aaron were needed for the journey.  Leadership needs to search for vision and ask the big questions of purpose and identity.  Management needs to take care of the travel – determining the steps to take, giving people appropriate tasks and making decisions.  The only risk is to let Moses and Aaron get too far apart.  It was when Moses and Aaron, vision and management, got disconnected that things fell apart.  A planning process cannot be all vision and without structure and direction.  Neither can the planning process simply be a list of tasks or exercises that will magically lead somewhere.  The leader and the planning team must be willing to dance between Moses and Aaron – to slow down enough to allow vision to take shape while also structuring a plan that will assist the people to move toward a future.  Being flexible about the planning process, instead of rigidly following a set process, allows the congregation to be open to discernment. Structuring the planning conversation with appropriate questions and tasks allows the congregation to move ahead and make progress on the journey (pp. xvii-xviii).  

 

In Memphis I learned the expression “I’m going to be in a slow hurry about that.”  It has stood me in good stead.  As Christians, we need to be in a slow hurry, discerning and considering carefully when to lead, when to follow, when to get out of the way, when to manage and when to let go, on our spiritual journey with Jesus – who teaches us how to sing and dance divinely.                                                               

                                                                                                           - God’s peace, fathermom       

Is There An Eleventh Commandment?

God, we pray for the many

who are trapped by growing burdens of debt,

who see no way out, and who despair for their future:
give them courage to tackle the problems they face,
clarity in taking decisions which will turn their situation around,
and faith that, as they cry to you in their trouble,
you will deliver them from their distress;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

                                   (from the Episcopal News Service)

 

 

A priest once told me he thought that, for Episcopalians, there was an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt be nice.”  Sometimes we church folk think we need to be nice and polite, even a bit witty, so that we don’t have to talk about the not-so-nice, impolite, serious and more challenging things in life. 

 

Take the Ten Commandments, for example.  Today lots of us heard them in church.  The first four are about our relationship with God; the last six about our relationship with other people.  Preachers place all kinds of emphasis on most of them.  But you almost never hear a sermon about the last (Tenth) Commandment: “You shall not covet…anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

 

This commandment means, of course, that God wants us to resist the urge to want what other people have.  When it comes to coveting, however, we as a consumerist nation in an enormous financial crisis have gone way past the temptation stage.  We don’t just give in to the temptation of coveting.  We have moved past wanting what others have, all the way to expecting it, demanding it, even feeling entitled to it.  We want what we think we need – and we want it when we want it.  I don’t know about you, but I have come to believe that our consumerist coveting is perhaps the most seductive sin and sickness from which we need to repent and recover. 

 

Compulsive spending and debting are, I believe, the manifestation of that covetousness run amok.  Some say it is also an addictive behavior; others don’t.  In any case, there is help.  For those who want to consolidate and learn how to manage debt, I have had good experience with Consumer Credit Counseling Services in several cities of this country.  In Frederick they are located at 103 West Seventh Street, near the corner of Fairview.  Their local number is 301-698-0006, and their regional office is in Rockville, MD (www.cccswdc.org).

 

If your problems with money are indeed part of an addiction, perhaps you can also find help in the wisdom of the first three steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Step #1.  We admitted we were powerless over…(in this case, compulsive spending or debting) – that our lives have become unmanageable.  Step #2.  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.  Step #3.  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood (God)” (“The Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition, p. 59). 

 

Debtors Anonymous (www.debtorsanonymous.org), a 12-step recovery program modeled after AA, currently has no local meetings, but there are fifteen to choose from in the metro DC area, with the closest one in Germantown, Maryland.  Go to their website and select “find a meeting.”  For local AA meetings, visit their office at 2 East Church Street; call 301-662-0544; or go to www.westcentralaa.org

 

Christians find the God of our understanding in Jesus Christ.  But where’s Jesus in our country’s current crisis?  Is there any Good News here?   I am reminded of the suggestion that, before we can hear any Good News, we need to acknowledge the bad news.  Barbara Crafton suggests where the Good News of Jesus might be found amidst our bad-news financial fiasco in her blog reflections on today’s Gospel reading:

 

RAGS TO RICHES, RICHES TO RAGS

 

Have you never read in the scriptures:

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;

this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes”?

– Matthew 21:42

 

This is the righteous inversion of power for which human beings long.  It lives in the fairy tales we tell our children: poor little Cinderella elevated over her awful stepsisters, orphaned Hansel and Gretel prevailing over the wicked witch.  We read it in scripture: Joseph, betrayed and outcast, elevated to headship over all of Egypt’s wealth; Moses, defenseless in his little boat, plucked from danger by a princess and raised in a palace.  We love it when the rejected one becomes the most important one of all.

 

The words are already old when Jesus speaks them: he is quoting Psalm 118. When Christians use it today, we mean Jesus himself, stripped of everything, stripped of his very life, and then gloriously risen from the dead.  But he is telling his parable before those events take place, and he’s not talking about himself here.  Jesus means people outside the community of Israel, people who are not “chosen.”  People with whom an observant 1st-century Jew will not even eat. The people his people reject.  Do not think you are entitled to a special status where God is concerned.  God is free to choose and choose again, free to bless without borders.  Don’t be too sure just who is in, especially if you think it’s you.

 

We can rest in the love of God, but we can never rest in our own chosen-ness.  The moment we begin to believe in the inevitability of our own triumph, that moment marks the beginning of our decline.

 

We are experiencing this in a cataclysmic way at this very moment: businesses that were “too big to fail,” a market that would just take care of all our bad decisions by absorbing them, growing bigger and bigger, debt that need never be paid, that could just grow and grow — all these chickens now seem to be coming home to roost.  We seek to delay our own moral reckoning by accusing others — It was Wall Street that did this, we tell each other. And certainly, greed abounded there.  But it lived in us, too, showing itself in our enormous houses, our multiple huge cars, in the huge sums of credit card debt we accumulated because we had forgotten how to say “no” to ourselves.  Our actions have not been unrelated to what has happened on Wall Street.  Treating our own greed for more and more as if it were an entitlement, we have made it easy for corporate greed to victimize us.

 

God will not save me from the consequences of my own unwise or unrighteous actions. Sooner or later, I will pay for them.  And God will not punish me for them, either: the world will take care of that.  The fact that I am a person of faith does not mean I have inherited immunity from the law of cause and effect. There’s no such thing as a free lunch for me, either, not here.

 

And if I fail to govern myself, someone else will govern me.

 

(This reflection comes from Barbara Crafton’s “The Almost Daily eMo” from October 3.  If you go to her website www.geraniumfarm.org, you can also find “Ways of the World,” a helpful blog on financial stewardship by business economist Carol Stone.)

 

 

Finally: you can ask for help by replying to this blog.  Your reply will be held in confidence; no replies to this article will be posted.  Simply let me know how I can help and tell me how you’d like me to be in touch (phone number, e-mail address, etc.).  If I can do nothing else, I will pray for you.  

 

God’s peace,

fathermom