Transformational Leadership – Half Empty or Half Full?
I experienced reading whiplash this week. Last week I am laughing it up with Meyer’s Culture Map and this week I was sobered and mildly depressed by Tourish’s The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership. I believe he meets his goal ‘to challenge its fundamental premises in a significant way and scrutinize its contradictions.’[1]It is remarkable to me that someone has spent most of his career studying the dangers of something for which I have only heard lauded. It was like drinking a tall, cool glass of transformational leadership half-emptiness when all I have known is half-fullness. Shocking, to say the least.
And yet for all my surprise, I am not wholly unaware of the dangers of visionary, charismatic leadership though I’ve never read of the pitfalls and abuses before in such a scathing and academic fashion. I have lived through the dark side myself as a follower and perpetuated some of them as a leader so it is a challenge to be succinct and impersonal.
Part of my early formation was with an extremely charismatic youth pastor that took a great deal of interest in me. He believed I was ‘the one’ and told me so – the one that would usher revival into our city and he would use to grow our youth ministry. We did experience some glory days and saw our youth ministry grown from 20 to over 500 in the mid 1990s. I was at the forefront of this move of God and he was easily the loudest voice in my life. He did, however, eventually become disillusioned with me. I did something stupid, not immoral, but stupid, as a 16 year old. He laid into me and threatened my position in our booming youth group. I was devastated. He ended up apologizing but things were never quite the same after that. I couldn’t pray long enough at the altar to keep my status, although I tried. Some of my friends’ attendance to our gathering slacked. I somehow understood that I was only as good as the number friends I brought with me each week. Activism runs deep.
By the end of high school, we were still close but he was disenchanted. My classmates and teachers voted for me to give the graduation prayer and opening statements. But his retort to a mutual friend was that I ‘chose popularity over the presence of God’. After I rejected his offer to lead the new Master’s Commission program (a discipleship and church internship program) and went to the Philippines instead, we reached a new low. He didn’t veil his disapproval and disappointment of me. I did not fulfill my end of the bargain of being ‘the one’ and he moved on.
This accounting provides insight in to my personal research interest and the deep conviction that God is not a ‘user’. As His creation, should this theological truth not extend then to us? The people of God are also not ‘users’. We do not exploit others in order to gain – no matter how worthy the goal. And that when we do so even for ‘Kingdom’ purposes, something fundamental and intrinsic is violated.
May we not allow ‘spirituality to become another control mechanism for getting individuals to work harder in their paid jobs, often at the expense of avenues toward meaningful and fulfilled lives such as family and voluntarism’[2]. I know purpose and work are God-given but when it violates the most primary meaning-making of life (which I would posit is relationship), it is dangerous. We must continue to struggle to find ways to work with others that echo and uphold each other’s worth and value, not deteriorate it.
I know it to be true that there is no darkness in God. His motives are pure and unadulterated in a way we cannot fathom. Our human experience makes it difficult to imagine or wrap our minds around it but it is true. Only God can all at the same time – love us thoroughly; desire true intimacy with us; and know how to partner with our precious, short lives to bring His Kingdom come to earth. May we understand this ever so deeply in order to perpetuate more light and less dark. And may we ‘never question the truth of what we fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders’. Amen.
[1]Tourish, Dennis. The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective. Hove: Routledge, 2013, 199.
[2]Ibid., 70.
[3]Buechner, Frederick, and George Connor. Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007, 24.
About the Author
Andrea Lathrop
I am a grateful believer in Jesus Christ, a wife, mom and student. I live in West Palm Beach, Florida and I have been an executive pastor for the last 8+ years. I drink more coffee than I probably should every day.10 responses to “Transformational Leadership – Half Empty or Half Full?”
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Andrea, I appreciate your post and the personal narrative you provide. After reading this book, I am more keenly aware of the situations in my own life when I was wrongfully coerced, as well as those times I have been guilty of using grand plans and inspirational words to manipulate. Unfortunately, the dark side of leadership has been realized by too many. Have you been able to find a space between inspiration and manipulation that provides healthy motivation?
Andrea . . . . thank you for sharing this deeply personal and moving season of your life with us. We are all blessed that you have been able to move through this, as you were unnecessarily harmed by the church. Grateful for your leadership.
Thank you for your kindness, Jacob. It was a difficult thing to share because I never want to over-play it. But I do want to learn and grow in my own self-awareness from it.
Andrea, I am so sorry for this painful manipulative experience in your life. No doubt these painful experiences fuel your passionate research to differentiate our Triune God as the loving head of our church from the “user” mentality of strong-willed communicators coercing others to fulfill their visions. My own reflections upon my own painful experiences (both those projected upon me and those I have projected upon others) has developed the following axiom. The end never justifies the means, therefore manipulative, abusive methodology never accomplishes God’s goals but is at best a golden calf, that is, what a man or woman thinks God wants. Thanks again for your courage and vulnerability to lead the church away from the dark side of transformational leadership.
Andrea, I can see that you have personally lived this dark side of transformational leadership. Instead of this leader helping you to be transformed into the image of God, he tried to transform you into his image of God for you. Herein lies the problem with transformational leadership. Tourish believes followers should have input in leadership and I agree. As a Christian, the Holy Spirit leads and guides us and I thank God for the Holy Spirit and His influence in your life. Thank God you found the strength to move forward in God’s direction for you! Your upward feedback worked. Thank God!
Andrea – your level of vulnerability extends into the words you’ve written here, and I’m assuming into what will become your dissertation. I am so sorry that this experience happened to you, but I am so amazed at your fortitude to take and learn from it. Thanks for being willing to invite us into this space!
Karen – thank you, my friend. I’m sure you can appreciate part of this story and my identifying as an Enneagram 3. It has been a deep work of love over years, initiated by God, for there to be any real separation of how good I performed and my worthiness of love. Grateful for this cohort on this leg of my journey.
Andrea, thanks for adding another case study to Tourish’s argument. The fact that you were sixteen only added fuel to my anger while reading and I am so sorry that was your experience. The major aspect of church leadership we fail to remember, emulate and have even discounted is Jesus’ title as chief shepherd and how often he spoke of sheep and shepherds and children. All of which give a very different ethos to leadership than you described about your youth pastor. Do we use people to grow ministry or do we use ministry to grow people? Important research you are doing!
Thank you Andrea for sharing your personal journey, its very helpful and has made me to examine my life as a leader and more so to question my motives in working with others. I like Tammy’s question as to whether we use people to grow ministry or ministry to grow people.
Hi Andrea. Given our previous discussions, I appreciate your thinking based on your experience. That awful idea that God uses people as a means to God’s own ends pervades the thinking of many. Christian leaders who subscribe to the ‘man of god’ leadership style can easily harness the idea the people are little more than sheep to thier greater caling. All that needs happen is to corral the sheep who have no personal agency. Those that will not be corralled are disposed of. My issue with Transformative Leadership is the same issue I have with all leadership models as mechanisms, and that is the underlying motivation that is rarely articulated: are people ends or means? For God, we are ends. We are the pinnacle of the created order, made in God’s image. As Christian leaders, our task is to know how to lead in different contexts and that’s part of what this course is teaching us. Perhaps more importantly though, are the underlying beliefs we have about the agency of people and their role in the tasks before us. Those beliefs determine how we choose to utilize the different mechanisms of leadership. You are doing some good reflection and thinking on an important theme.