Written by: gfesadmin on October 4, 2012

In Who Needs Theology by Grenz and Olson, I identified with a story Olson told about a student who was struggling with understanding the concepts of Theology in his classroom.  The student asked if she could talk with Olson after class. She said “Why don’t you just tell us what the truth is about every subject we study? It confuses us when you present several options and leave it up to us to decide what to believe” (Grenz, Olson 1996). As a leader like a teacher, is to mentor direct reports in such a way as to teach them critical thinking skills and help them to think through the answers on their own.

Apparently, Grenz and Olson, have teaching styles that cause their students to think through their options and come to their own conclusions. In their book, they argue everyone is a theologian. They believe that anyone who reflects on the ultimate questions about life that point towards God is a theologian (Grenz, Olson 1996). Grenz and Olson explore the many aspects of theology: the definition, the multiple levels of expertise, the history and traditions, the defense, the methodology and its practice. I applaud their teaching methodology which causes students to learn critical thinking skills and encourages them to become independent thinkers.

As a leader, I have often pondered the question “How do I get team members to think independently enough to reflect on a problem, make a decision and implement that decision?”  Education and robust dialogue have been great tools in my past experience to challenge leadership teams to grow beyond maintaining the status quo and reach out toward innovation.

This journey started when I was an Executive Director at a Retirement Community and I inherited a leadership team of 10 Directors. When I first arrived at my new job, I interviewed each direct report and discovered few had any formal leadership education. Traditional weekly leadership meetings were an hour long where each director reported about what they were planning to do that week. The one change that revolutionized the leadership team was to increase the weekly meeting to one and a half hours. The first half hour was dedicated to leadership learning and dialogue.

The first couple of meetings with the new format were awkward.  From my interviews, I identified a team problem, “There is not enough time in the day to get all of my work done.” I decided to model what I expected for the leadership learning time and I presented a book report about The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. We covered one chapter at a time over a few weeks with personal practical questions at the end of 20 minutes. The next phase was to have each director choose a book from my leadership library and sign up to present a book report to the group in future meetings. This assignment took a few months.

After the book report phase, we listened to leadership tapes, read leadership books aloud one page at a time with discussion afterwards, attended leadership lectures, etc… Anything that enabled us to discuss leadership ideas was our goal. A few common questions we began to ask were:

1.        What are the author’s key leadership principles?
2.         Do you agree or disagree? Why?
3.        What is your favorite idea? Would it work here? Why?
4.        Should we adopt this idea into our culture?

As I reflect back on the experience, I call it the half hour that revolutionized our leadership team. The key was to develop an open environment where everyone could discuss the ideas openly and fairly. The magic was in the discussion and implementation of new ideas.  The organization flourished and produced many leaders who were promoted to corporate positions at the home office.

I applaud Grenz and Olson and their teaching methodology that sparked critical thinking skills in their students!

Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson, Who Needs Theology: An Invitation to the Study of God (Downers Grove: Inter Varsity Press, 1996)

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