It was a Wednesday night. I preached at our young adults’ service at church. I felt encouraged by the response, but I was tired and eager to get home. I was feeling under the weather. But I wanted to push through and deliver the sermon I had worked hard on. Driving home at 9:15 PM I wondered to myself, \u201cShould I take a sick day tomorrow? It would be great to stay home.\u201d Laura and I bought our townhome a few weeks prior. I wouldn\u2019t mind an extra day or two at home with Laura and our dog. I crawled into bed. Before falling asleep, we received a notification: Stay home. It was March 11, 2020.<\/p>\n
It was like I woke up the next day to a new world. Ministry would need to look different for the foreseeable future. The name of the game was \u201cPivot,\u201d \u201cAdapt,\u201d \u201cInnovate.\u201d As the days became weeks, the name of the game regressed to \u201cZoom,\u201d \u201cHello Fresh,\u201d \u201cNetflix.\u201d Though these months of 2020 were stretching, the lessons gleaned are invaluable and applicable for leading in our world today. For that, I am grateful.<\/p>\n
It was during this time that Annabel Beerel, an author and leadership consultant, put together her book Rethinking Leadership<\/em>.[1]<\/a> Forged in the crucible of 2020 with an interdisciplinary approach to leadership, Beerel\u2019s book is a critical tool for leaders engaged in a VUCA world.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n My approach to this post is unique to how I normally write. I will write more narratively and connect the lessons I extracted with Beerel\u2019s work. There are three leadership perspectives in particular I am learning in practice that Beerel writes about. They are Leadership and Management, Systems Leadership, and Adaptive Leadership. I will write about all three with Adaptive Leadership receiving the most attention.<\/p>\n Leadership and Management<\/strong><\/p>\n Personally, the most obvious and practical chapter Beerel writes is on leadership and management \u2013 what each one means and requires. A couple of years ago, my leadership at the church I serve at was limited to volunteers of the junior high ministry. I loved serving with these volunteers. Many of us were together through the turbulent year of 2020. This changed, and my leadership had to adapt when due to a promotion I began managing five staff members in addition to volunteers. This changed again six months when we merged two departments together with myself overseeing the new team. This resulted in a \u201csink or swim\u201d reality of management. I had to learn, and learn quickly. I often lament \u201cI am not a good manager.\u201d But being management comes with the territory of leadership in my role. Management and leadership, though different, overlap. And both are critical to doing my job well. What is required of me is managing the tension of what my teams need. Do they need more management from me, or leadership? Do they need accountability to short-term goals and a mitigation of risk (management)? Or do they need change, clarity of vision, and encouragement toward a particular direction (leadership)? There may be roles in the future in which I emphasize more of one than the other.<\/p>\n Systemic Leadership<\/strong><\/p>\n Management is one thing. But what happens when the burden of leadership is on you, but one is not leading staff or volunteers but peers? Recently, I stepped into a volunteer role of bringing together young adult pastors in the Greater Portland area for the purpose of unity, encouragement, and collaboration in ministry. Beerel\u2019s chapter on Systems Leadership provided me perspective on what I do in this role. According to Beerel, \u201cA system is a regularly interacting and interdependent group of parts, items, or people that form a unified whole with the purpose of establishing a goal.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a> This network of ministry relationships is, in essence, a system. It is complex, ambiguous, and slow-moving. It requires me, as the volunteer group leader, to be \u201ccollaborative, take a stakeholder perspective, and encourage distributed leadership.\u201d[4]<\/a> These are lessons I am putting into practice right now.<\/p>\n Adaptive Leadership<\/strong><\/p>\n It is unsurprising that the great leadership lesson learned at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was Adaptive Leadership. Developing the capacity to adapt in the team and\/or organization is the key task of the leader. But this begins with the leader. The leader must be willing to step out of the \u201cimaginative gridlock\u201d to use Dr. Edwin Friedman\u2019s language.[5]<\/a> But as the leader leads by example, a posture of learning amongst the team is imparted. In our rapidly changing, VUCA world this is a skill leaders ought not overlook. Dr. Tod Bolsinger writes extensively about this in his book for pastors leading in the new world of post-Christendom, Canoeing the Mountains<\/em>.[6]<\/a> He writes, \u201cLeadership in the past meant coming up with solutions.<\/p>\n Today it is learning how to ask new questions that we have been too scared, too busy or too proud to ask.\u201d[7]<\/a> This requires leading the people one is entrusted with through a learning process.[8]<\/a> But people do not like change. Therefore, they may \u201cgo after the leader rather than do the work.\u201d[9]<\/a> This harsh reality of sabotage is what Friedman warns is \u201cpart and parcel of the leadership process.\u201d[10]<\/a> With that being said, an essential part of adaptive leadership is self-care.[11]<\/a><\/p>\n Awaiting the Next Change<\/strong><\/p>\n That morning I woke up to the new reality the COVID-19 pandemic will not be the last time I realize my work and leadership requires re-imagining and re-tooling. Therefore, I ought to get used to change, but remain curious and calm, heeding Bolsinger\u2019s exhortation that \u201cleadership requires a calm, confident presence in the middle of a highly anxious, instinctively reactive situation that threatens to burn everyone, because calm, like anxiety, is contagious.\u201d[12]<\/a><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Annabel C. Beerel, Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories<\/em>, 1 Edition (New York: Routledge, 2021).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Jacobus Kok, Leading in a VUCA World Integrating Leadership, Discernment and Spirituality<\/em>, 1st ed. 2019., Contributions to Management Science (Cham: Springer Nature, 2019), https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-319-98884-9, 5.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Ibid., 195.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Ibid., 215.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (10th Anniversary, Revised Edition)<\/em> (Church Publishing, Inc., 2017), 33-57.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory<\/em> (InterVarsity Press, 2018).<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ibid., 113.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Ibid., 111.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Beerel, Rethinking Leadership<\/em>, 227.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Friedman, A Failure of Nerve<\/em>, 262.<\/p>\n