Leadership and the Unwanted Journey
Unwanted journeys are imposed on us, plunging us into seasons of uncertainty, confusion and loss. As I read Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories by Annabel Beerel, I was drawn to some of these types of journeys that our leaders face and a significant one that I faced as a leader. Some churches must make existential decisions, all for different reasons. A moral failing of a leader has placed a church in a very challenging position. A group from a church have decided to start a new church across town with a leader who has left poorly.
From my personal experience, the church I was pastoring experienced a fire that destroyed our main building. The church had been in this location for 76 years. We would have to start behaving like a church plant with 500 people, setting up our Sunday services every week. During the following years, we had to try to heal the wounds of the act of arson, battle with our insurance company, decide where to rebuild, clarify the church’s vision, and raise capital to build. Then, with the completion of a new building in sight, COVID hit, and like the rest of the world, we had to come to terms with another unwanted journey. Even though I had led as a pastor in a lead role for 25 years, I knew that I would have to transform rapidly as a leader if I were to lead effectively.
Rethinking Leadership was written in 2020 during the pandemic. As a result of the pandemic, every leader and organization has had to embark on an unwanted journey. Beerel writes, “While many will try to return to the old ways. The past is gone. A new world is emerging that requires a whole other level of consciousness. In short, new leaders are needed.”[1] Beerel goes on to describe these new kinds of leaders. She states, “Effective leadership is the ability to respond in an adaptive manner to emergent , dynamic and complex situations. This ability depends on the capacities and readiness to acquire new skills and strategies for coping with complexity and change.”[2] At the heart of this book is a recognition that the world is a highly complex and volatile environment. Leadership theories, developed at another time, are helpful but inadequate to address our context. Therefore, leaders must not only be willing to lead their organizations toward change, but they must also change through continual learning and adaptation. To be an agent of change in an organization, the leader must fully embody change. Again, Beerel writes, “Leaders need to be learners. True learning results in transformation. Consciously transforming themselves is the hallmark of effective leadership.”[3]
While leaders must be learners and transform themselves, this is one of the most challenging things to do amidst a crisis. So, what could a leader do to template themselves for a crisis? Templating is a simulation process that is designed to develop a kind of leadership ‘muscle memory’ that kicks in when faced with a situation in real life, as described by Eve Poole in Leadersmithing.[4] For the remainder of this blog, I’d like to explore two skills addressed in Chapter 7, Leadership in Times of Crisis, that might be helpful for leaders to template before facing a crisis. Both skills involve the psychological challenges faced in a crisis.
The first factor of effective leadership in times of crisis is learning to become a non-anxious presence. Bereel notes, “When a crisis occurs, the first leadership tasks include creating an atmosphere of reassuring calm, providing psychological containment, and adopting pragmatic strategies to create as much safety as possible.”[5] As I consider the experiences that I have faced and now help others navigate, I affirm that this would be the most significant first step in a crisis. She addresses the psychology of leadership in Chapter 5 and references the self-differentiated leader described in A Failure of Nerve by Friedman. The self-differentiated leader, he writes, “can be separate while remaining connected, and therefore can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity in response to the automatic reactivity of others and, therefore, be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing.”[6]
Based on my own experience, I have found that self-care that includes daily solitude, sabbath, exercise, healthy nutrition and sleep can help church leaders deal with their inner anxiety. It seems that when things are most chaotic externally, we need to create an extra measure of healthy discipline to deal with our anxiety and maintain inner calm. Bereel notes that leaders will need “psychological stamina” to manage a crisis effectively.[7] It would be good to template this aspect of leadership before a crisis so that when a crisis does occur the leader has already learned to establish the kinds of habits that help them become a non-anxious presence.
A second leadership skill needed during a crises is the ability to discern between adaptive and technical change. This distinction is pivotal for leaders aiming to navigate complex situations successfully. In Chapter 7, the author references the seminal work of Ronald Heifetz, particularly his insights from Leadership on the Line, co-authored with Marty Linsky. Heifetz and Linsky’s framework provides a robust foundation for understanding how leaders can differentiate between adaptive challenges, which require changes in people’s values, beliefs, roles, relationships, and approaches, and technical challenges, which can be resolved through existing knowledge and procedures. This differentiation is essential for leaders to implement appropriate strategies and foster resilience within their organizations during times of crisis.[8] She also covers this material in greater depth in Chapter 10.
While both technical and adaptive work are important, it is often the adaptive work that gets neglected by leaders. Bereel writes, “Technical work is easier to identify than adaptive work, and most people are more comfortable with resorting to technical work, forgetting that the psychological and emotional work must get done if the technical work is to be successful.”[9] Adaptive leadership requires a leader to address the value tensions that might arise between various group members as they face change.
Leaders can begin to identify current “value tensions” and address these conflicts using adaptive leadership principles before a crisis arises. Rather than avoiding value tensions by smoothing over the waters, a leader might want to mine for these conflicts and address them during calmer times to develop the skills needed when a crisis occurs.
If I had more time, I would want to dive deeper into Chapter 17: Gender, Diversity, and Leadership as well as Chapter 18: Leading a Mutigenerational Workforce. Both of these issues are important for the long-term flourishing of the church
[1] Annabel, Beerel. Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Leadership Theories (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 2.
[2] Beerel, 6.
[3] Beerel, 107.
[4] Eve Poole, Leadersmithing: An Apprenticeship Approach to Making Great Leaders (London ; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Business, 2017),
[5] Annabel Beerel, Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories,165.
[6] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, ed. Margaret M. Treadwell and Edward W. Beal, 10th anniversary revised edition (New York: Church Publishing, 2017), 15.
[7] Annabel Beerel, Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories, 178.
[8] Ronald Heifetx and Marty Linsky. Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press: 2017).
[9] Annabel Beerel, Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories, 174.
About the Author
Graham English
I was born in Cape Town, South Africa 30 minutes from Table Mountain, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. My family immigrated to Vancouver, Canada where I spent my teen years, met Wendy, and got married. We now live on the Canadian prairies in northern Alberta. I think God has a sense of humour. I'm a follower of Jesus, work in leadership and church development, love my family and walk a lot.12 responses to “Leadership and the Unwanted Journey”
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Thanks for this fantastic post Graham. I resonate with the tendency to do technical work over true adaptive work. How would a leader help a community do adaptive work without trying to become the ‘hero’ leading the change?
Ryan, I think of a couple of things…
1. A leader models change by being willing to change through learning and being receptive to the ideas of others.
2. Through Curiosity – rather than having answers a leader can ask questions
3. By inviting others into solving problems and creating vision. When people are given the ability to cocreate they are more likely to own the way forward.
4. By experimenting and being willing to fail.
Hi Graham, Reading of your experience leading through fire, literally, was profound on many levels. It reminded me how little we know about others until someone is willing to share. Thank you for that. Yet, how you segwayed that into the reading for this week was clear, concise and impactful. I particularly appreciated your nod to Leadersmithing as it reminded me to continue to use Eve Poole as a resource. However, something that has me curious is if you have tried mining for value tensions and if so were the results edifying for the group?
Thanks, Diane. It was the most challenging time of leadership, yet God used it profoundly.
I have mined for value tensions by using Appreciative Inquiry which is a positive approach to change management. In an AI process values emerge in the discovery stage of AI. In this stage we discover what people value most but it’s done in a positive way. As a facilitator I will then get the group to vote on that which is most valued. Sometimes values emerge that must be held in tension. When that happens the group realizes that these are not competing values but rather complementary values that can work synergistically if held in tension.
Thank you, Graham, for your post. It is insightful and I have learn a lot from it. You shared about ‘leadership in crises and what is important for a leader. When you said, “A second leadership skill needed during a crises is the ability to discern between adaptive and technical change,” what do you mean by ‘technical change?’
Thank you,
Technical change is the kind of change that requires a simple solution. For example, the furnace at the church needs repairing. It’s a simple solution, get someone in to repair or replace it.
This is a very thorough post Graham, thank you. You mention ‘templating’ leadership skills through simulation to build ‘muscle memory.’ Could you share specific exercises or scenarios church leaders could practice to rehearse crisis response, particularly for balancing adaptive work (e.g., value tensions) with urgent technical demands like post-disaster rebuilding?
Debbie, I use a tool called Appreciate Inquiry. AI is a strengths based change management process that involves the whole system. Through AI an affirmative topic is identified EG. Building a high engagement team.
Then the group walks through a 4 stage process:
Discovery – discover the best of what it (what exists in our past or present that we value)
Dream – What are we longing for as we dream about our future?
Design – what opportunities do we have to become what we are longing for?
Deliver – create an action plan and co-deliver on it.
In my post fire experience, rebuilding was not a technical change. The technical change was resettling into a temporary space. After that, it was not clear and simple. Some wanted to move back to our location that we had been on for 70+ years, others wanted to rebuild in a new location, others thought we should rent for a while. Once our technical changes occurred and the dust settled I was able to lead our church through an AI process over a six month period to decide on our 3 biggest priorities. This process led us toward a new location and a greater outward focus while building on the strengths that were already present in our church.
Hi Graham, if you could go back to pastoring in 2020 through the onset of the pandemic, what would you do differently? How does this align or differ with what you’ve been learning this week?
Less stress. We tried too hard to replicate Sunday mornings online. I would practice adaptive leadership…experiment more and seek more feedback from our congregation.
Hi Graham, I appreciated how you referenced the “unwanted journey(s)” of leadership. Since starting this doctoral program, I have tried to maintain a mindset of discovery, even in unwanted journeys, but it’s not always easy. As you have continued to grow as an adaptive leader, have you had any recent experiences where you thought, “I would not have responded that way five years ago?” Thanks for a great post.
Thanks, Elysse. It happens all the time. How I lead a team is very different now. In general, I have less stress about the outcomes and more focused on the inputs and the process of leadership. The outcomes take care of themselves when the team is healthy and effective.