Pastors on purpose
Leadership on the Line:
Staying Alive Through
the Dangers of Leading.
By Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty
Linsky. Harvard Business School,
252 pp., $27.50.
Recently i went through the experience of interviewing for a pastoral position. In my round of encounters with search committees, I was questioned about my vision of leadership and how I would implement that vision in the life of a congregation. Behind this line of questioning was the desire for someone who would provide direction, ensure stability, administrate efficiently and instigate transformation in a way that would make all things new with a minimum of disturbance to the status quo. In none of those conversations did the members of a committee say that they were looking for someone who would make them face issues and realities that they did not want to face. None declared, implicitly or explicitly, that they were seeking a leader who would "challenge people's habits, beliefs and values" and "create risk, conflict and instability."
According to the theory of leadership developed by Ronald Heifetz in his earlier book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, these congregations were looking for management to solve technical problems rather than for leadership that would engage them in adaptive work. Adaptive work is demanding and threatening, but it is the defining mark of leadership. People's instinctive resistance to this kind of challenge makes leadership both difficult and dangerous.
At the end of that book Heifetz briefly identifies several strategies intended to help leaders to survive and thrive amidst the dangers of leading: getting on the balcony, distinguishing self from role, externalizing the conflict, identifying partners, listening, finding a sanctuary and preserving a sense of purpose. I suspect that many of my fellow pastors who read this first volume finished it with a hunger to hear more. Leadership on the Line (coauthored with Marty Linsky, Heifetz's principal colleague at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) is Heifetz's answer to that yearning.
