Adaptive Leadership (Part 3): Raise the Heat (A Guest Post)
Over three decades, Dale Matherly has successfully led faith communities and not-for-profits in retiring debt, reorganizing governance structures, and developing leaders who transform their communities. Known as a leader, coach, mentor, and facilitator, Dale is frequently invited to help others realize their aspirations through speaking, teaching, and coaching.
Dale earned a M.A. in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity from the University of Notre Dame, a M.Div. from Emory University, and a B.A. in history from Centre College, certificates as a Leadership Coach and Teach Leadership from Kansas Leadership Center, and ordination in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
This post is Part 3 of a four-part series. You can read the first post here and the second post here.
Leadership is uncomfortable.
Sometimes, it’s too hot. Sometimes, it’s too cool. People want to be comfortable.
Summer heat is scorching here in Kansas where I live. The heat index already approaches 110 degrees. Six months from now, the temps will be at the other extreme.
One way we manage these weather extremes is by managing the thermostat in our homes and church buildings to create a manageable space where we can relax, work, and worship.
Managing the “Thermostat” of Your Congregation
Engaging in Adaptive Leadership involves adjusting the communal emotional thermostat.
If it’s too cold in the system, people are stuck in work avoidance.
If it’s too hot in the system, people respond with the pre-programming in the brain often described as the “fight, flight, freeze, or appease” response.
At both extremes, sustainable change and development leading to transformation are not happening.
Finding the Right Temperature for Productivity
People want to be comfortable.
“We all want to be comfortable. To make progress towards transformation, we will have to be uncomfortable. ”
Preaching is one of the primary tools Adaptive Leaders have to adjust the temperature and make progress towards your congregational and personal aspirations.
This progress requires getting the system’s temperature above a threshold of learning, and then keeping the temperature below the limit of tolerance. The modulation of the system’s temperature requires a skilled touch, learned through experimentation and practice.
When your congregation is operating in this productive zone, transformation unfolds towards progress on your purpose, accompanied by the engagement of others.
When Progress Stalls
I hear often from fellow clergy that they feel their congregations are stuck.
Like you and me, they keep trying to make progress. They use all of the tools they have learned and willingly experiment with new tools, hoping to generate that progress. Still, they feel stuck.
I notice two things that tend to happen in this stuckness.
One, an event cranks the heat up quickly and high.
Suddenly it feels like a crisis.
For example, the event might be:
An important leader, who always took care of a key ministry, dies or moves away unexpectedly.
A local crisis in the community unexpectedly touches the congregation.
Or, as a leader, you deliberately generate the heat by preaching about the challenge that everyone knows but no one wants to talk about.
Heat is important in the system.
Gut-generating heat in the system needs to be intentional and conscious so that it is aimed at making progress by moving into the productive zone. Just adding heat to the system without purpose will not create sustained transformation.
People want to be comfortable. So even when there is purpose, they may react by trying to drive the heat back down.
two, people avoid the work
The impulse to avoid the heat and return to stasis is strong because we all want to be comfortable.
It is easier to avoid the potential conflict and uncertainty so we stay put and try not to rock the boat.
Topics are avoided, discussions squelched, and variations of “we’ve always done it that way” or “we tried that and it didn’t work” stop any hope of progress.
How does this relate to your congregation? A quick exercise.
Why does any of this matter?
Think with me for a moment about the concerns you have for your congregation and your ministry.
Take 2 minutes and write your concerns down in a column on the left side of a piece of paper.
Review your list and see if you included everything you need to name.
Now, do the same thing and describe your aspirations for your congregation and your ministry. Write them on the right side of your sheet of paper. Be specific. Take 3 minutes.
Now, review this list and see if it is sufficient.
On the left side, you see the challenges and concerns you live with. On the right, you see the aspirations.
Leaders live in between these two. You live in this gap.
Adaptive Leadership skills, including preaching the messages your congregation doesn’t want to hear, can help you make progress in this gap toward your aspirations.
It is not a linear process. It is dynamic: you name the concern, you engage in learning, you experiment, you assess learning from the experiment, and you begin the process again.
We all want to be comfortable, yet to make progress towards transformation, we will all have to be uncomfortable.
Adaptive leadership skills aid you in modulating the heat to stay in the productive zone to make progress on your purpose along with engagement with others.
Applying Adaptive Leadership skills aids you in diagnosing the situation, managing yourself to deploy yourself most effectively with conscious intention, and energizing others because this work is not work to be done alone.
You keep turning the thermostat dial until you find the ideal temperature for your congregation’s progress.
gauging the Temp for Preaching: What’s Talked About? What’s Taboo?
Preaching is one place we can turn the heat up or down.
But first, we must recognize the current temp of our congregation.
A good start for gauging the current temperature is noticing what is discussed and what is forbidden to be discussed or preached about.
For example, some congregations welcome diving deep into Scripture’s history and social norms, like what it meant that Mary Magdalene was the first apostle, or that King David wasn’t exactly a model father.
Many are not.
Some congregations welcome getting pulled out of their nostalgia and pining for a return to a mythical era of yesteryear when the congregation was in its glory days.
Many do not.
Some congregations are comfortable hearing sermons about social issues like racism, climate change, or the place of guns.
Many are not.
But we can’t move together towards a freer, more just, more incarnational reign of God if we’re determined to pour on the glue to keep us stuck in our comfort zones.
That’s true for both leaders and members.
Being able to recognize and articulate the topics your congregation is willing to name, discuss, or hear from the pulpit gives you a good sense about the current temperature.
Then we’ll know whether we need to comfort the afflicted and turn down the heat, or afflict the comfortable and turn it up in our sermons.
That’s adaptive leadership in action.
Gauge. Experiment. Reflect. Preach again.
Ever striving to set the thermostat of our preaching at the just-right temperature for progress and transformation.
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