Ask Alban: Managing Millennials

Q. Our congregation recently called an energetic and talented young clergy leader. The congregation loves and respects her leadership.  However, there are some problems brewing around work style.  She continually disregards her scheduled office hours and doesn’t respond to telephone or email messages in a timely manner. I am head of staff.  Is this something that I should crack down on as a supervisor, or is it a generational difference that I should try to understand and honor?  How can I help her better manage her relationship with others on the team who are increasingly frustrated by this behavior?

A. The short answer to your question is that the tensions you are experiencing are likely related to generational differences. Your role as a supervisor is to help members of your team appreciate, acknowledge and arbitrate their differences related to behavioral preferences, and then to set reasonable boundaries that allow the full team to function effectively together.

Tamara Erickson is a widely respected author and speaker on managing different generations in the workplace.  She explains that generational characteristics are shaped by members’ shared experiences during their pre-and early teen years. Millennials were born between 1980 and 2000.  Members of this generation shared two important experiences in their formative years: terrorism and technology[i].

Early exposure to terrorism has taught this generation that the world can be unsafe; it is random and unpredictable. The logical response to this exposure is to make the most of today and to live every day to the fullest.  A sense of immediacy is one of this generation’s more observable characteristics. They live in the here and now. Their most pressing questions are whether the activities they are doing right now are challenging, meaningful and enjoyable.

Unlike the generations before them, Millennials are not institutionally driven and don’t particularly value participation in institutional life. Staff team practices like “assigned office hours” make no reasonable sense to them. Millennial pastors tend to approach their work in highly relational ways. They find meaning in work that is engaged outside of the church building, in environments that meet people where they live, work and play. They feel stifled by forced time in an office setting.

Millennials also came of age in a world that was wired with technology.  The have intuitively absorbed things that the rest of us had to learn intellectually. Living with technology has taught Millennials that not every communication needs to be dealt with, and different forms of communication carry different response expectations.  Millennials focus on managing technology and communication in ways that are helpful and productive to them, not intrusive or anxiety-producing. Many in this generation operate with clear and simple rules about how to manage communication with technology. E-mail only if you must send a document, and don’t expect a response.  Send a text message to coordinate or address an immediate need. Share general information, updates and photos on Facebook. Never leave a phone message, unless it is for someone “older”. In short, Millennials show a preference for semi-synchronous writing, instead of synchronous voice[ii].

None of these preferences in communication are problematic when Millennials are dealing with members of their own generation.  However, most of our congregations are populated with staff and members that function with different expectations and behavioral patterns, formed by their own generational preferences.  When someone observes behaviors that are inconsistent with expected norms, they tend to attribute rudeness and disrespect to the one demonstrating those behaviors.

So, what is your role as head of staff in resolving these differences and setting boundaries around behavior? Erickson recommends a four-fold response[iii].

Appreciate: Withhold your own judgment for a period of time. Watch her behavior and see if you can glean the benefits that go along with the choices that she makes.  Millennials are innately innovative, they value and appreciate diversity, they are masterful coordinators and gifted at building networks. In what ways do the behaviors that irritate you allow these other characteristics to flourish?

Acknowledge:  Share some articles or insights about generational differences in the workplace with your team. Help the team realize that one behavioral pattern isn’t inherently better than another, just different. Ask each team member to articulate some of their own preferences, and to explain how those preferences help them engage effectively in ministry.

Arbitrate: Help team members articulate the difference between their needs and their wants.  Needs stem from legitimate and essential duties and obligations. For example, a staff member has a legitimate need to know where the clergy leader is when trying to contact her, in order to deal with a pastoral care crisis.  Wants stem from preferences and conveniences. A staff member may want the clergy leader to keep regular office hours, because the staff member finds it unfair that clergy staff don’t have to account for their whereabouts.  Define acceptable behavior patterns for the collective team on the basis of legitimate need.

Adapt: Continue to help the team appreciate their differences and check in with one another as they live into a new, mutually built set of expectations.

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[i] Tamara J Erickson, “The Millennials” at www.thersa.org/fellowship/journal/archive/summer-2012

[ii] Tamara Erickson, Plugged in: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work, (Boston:Harvard Business Press, 2008).

[iii] Tamara J Erickson, “The Four A’s”, Diversity Executive, May/June 2012.

Ask Alban: Thinking About Board Size

Q. Everyone knows that our governing board is too large for effective decision making, and yet every time we talk about reducing the size of our board people grow anxious. The conversation gets stuck when leaders assert that we must have a large board to insure good representation.  How can we engage a productive conversation about board size that explores new ground and doesn’t provoke anxiety?

A. A good place to begin the dialogue is by asking board members, “What is the fundamental work of the board?” You may want to begin with the assertion that the primary work of the board is governance, and then go on to ask board members how they understand that term.

Once board members build a shared definition of their work, you can introduce the next important question, “Why is having a large board important to you?” A first round response is likely to include vague assertions about the importance of representation and good democratic process. If you stick with this question long enough (by repeatedly asking, “And why is that important?”) you will eventually surface the heart of resistance. Congregations with large boards are often protecting or promoting some core value that is widely shared but not fully articulated. Let me offer a few examples from my consulting practice.

The board of a Baptist church recently spoke to me about their belief in soul liberty and soul freedom, and the need to protect individual voice from the unchecked authority of a pastor. In their thinking, a large board is the best way to insure the individual right of self-expression.

The board of a Unitarian Universalist congregation spoke to me about the importance of hearing the underrepresented, or the voice on the margins. For this particular group, a large board is important to insure that a mainstream voice doesn’t silence the margin.

A group of Mennonite pastors recently spoke to me of their congregations’ deeply held values of humility and being a “plain people”. A large board signifies that no individual voice is more important than another.

A Jewish rabbi explained that for a people who have suffered near extinction, the notion that every person matters finds its way into board life, where the presence of many voices around the table is an end unto itself.

If we listen carefully to these examples we see that “representation” is the expressed principle, but the underlying values that drive people to pursue representation are subtly unique. If you want to advance the dialogue around reducing board size, you need to articulate the underlying values that support representation. Then you are ready for the next question.

“Are we really promoting or protecting what is most important to us by operating with a large board?” In the above examples board members recognized that what they cared most deeply about was not actually preserved or promoted by a large body. A large board often results in a few active board members engaging in dialogue and decision making, while the rest of the board looks on, or rubberstamps decisions made outside of the room. Sub-groups within the board often form, creating marginalized clusters whose voices are never fully heard or honored. Board members don’t experience their presence as critical and find it easy to skip meetings or to ignore their responsibilities. The most assertive and frequently heard voices on the board are often not the healthiest leadership voices. In short, large boards don’t actually promote good representation, they often undermine it.

Once the board has identified the fundamental nature of their work, and they have recognized that being large doesn’t necessarily promote effective representation, you are ready to move the dialogue forward. “Where does our understanding of “right” board size come from?”  Somewhere in the history of the congregation a group of leaders decided that this structure was the right structure. Why was that decision made? Was it a good decision for that time? Are the conditions which informed that decision still relevant today? Does denominational polity really require the specific practices that we have adopted?

Finally you are ready to pose the ultimate question, “What is the right board size for who we are and what we seek to accomplish?”

Boards that engage in this type of dialogue rarely come to a decision about reduced board size in a single conversation. It takes a long time to unfreeze the long held assumptions that members cling to, even when they can no longer defend the logic behind their position. Lots of patience and good humor is required. And once the board has changed their thinking, well then there is the rest of the congregation.

Adaptive Challenges

Last month, I was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at the United Methodist Quadrennial Training in Nashville. The topic was adaptive leadership. It was invigorating to hear the dialogue among United Methodist leaders about the adaptive challenges they face, and the barriers that stand in their way of addressing those challenges.

Here is a link to an article about the event in the United Methodist Reporter:

Denomination urged to trust, share leadership

 

Spiritual Work in Pastoral Transition

 Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Frank Ostaseski speak about Being a Compassionate Companion while accompanying the dying. Frank is a leader/teacher in the Zen Hospice Project. As I listened to Frank speak, I was struck by how well his five precepts for walking with the dying apply to congregational life, when a congregation is in the midst of a significant ending.

Pastoral transition is a death, of sorts, in the lifecycle of a congregation. It involves taking stock, defining the boundaries of our own existence, celebrating our success, grieving our losses, and reflecting on what it means to construct a well- lived life as a congregation. In this sense pastoral transition calls forth the same kind of spiritual work that is involved in a good death experience.

Let’s consider Ostaseski’s five precepts for companioning death, and apply them (with some liberties) to leadership in a season of pastoral transition.

1. Welcome Everything: Push Away Nothing: Over years of doing ministry under a singular head of staff, congregations get caught in habitual responses to ministry and the environment. In a season of pastoral transition it behooves leaders to adopt an attitude of “fearless receptivity”; openness to considering that “what comes to us is for us”, to embrace and to learn from everything. All things have the potential to teach us, especially conflict, failed experiences and risk taking.

Of course, this doesn’t suggest that leaders embrace every new request or new idea that presents itself during an interim time period. It does suggest that leaders maintain a spirit of wonderment about what emerges and a willingness to embrace the anxieties that arise in saying goodbye.

2. Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience: I have noticed that congregations approaching a pastoral transition often hunker down and prepare themselves to power through the events of the transition period. They act as if hard work and singularity of focus will help minimize congregational anxieties and conflicts. Leaders put on their super-hero armor and their masks of competency in front of the congregation. They deny whatever level of grief, confusion or anxiety that they may be experiencing for fear of contagion.

If we want our congregations to practice adaptive leadership in a season of pastoral transition, then we need to cultivate openness, receptivity and wonder. We can’t cultivate those attributes in a congregation without revealing our own discomfort and sense of dis-orientation. This is not about revealing our ignorance. It is about demonstrating our authenticity.

3. Don’t Wait: So often, congregations in the midst of pastoral transition put any and all new initiatives on hold, for fear of binding the hands of the new leader. All planning and evaluation efforts are met with a resounding, “We had better not initiate that until after the new pastor arrives.” The congregation moves into maintenance mode and this is deadly, particularly for the large congregation. Once a congregation has programmed itself to function in maintenance mode it is extraordinarily difficult to re-ignite new energies.

Implementation of changes in the strategic direction of the congregation should be postponed until the arrival of new leadership. However, dreaming about those directions and making ongoing course changes in anticipation of those changes, these are necessary for vitality and growth.

4. Find a Place of Rest in the Midst of Things: Pastoral transitions can move at a snail’s pace. It can take months/years to articulate the needs of the congregation, prepare an attractive church profile, search for the ideal candidate and call that candidate. Leaders must take care not to burn out while ensconced in the difficult work of adaptive learning.

The basic human response is to try and find rest by managing the conditions that surround us. We tell ourselves that we will rest once the budget is balanced, the staff team is fully configured, the new board is up and functioning and a search committee is underway. In a season of pastoral transition, conditions will almost never be right for rest, if rest requires everything to be in order.

We need to allow ourselves to take a rest from the hard work of adaptive leadership by bringing our attention fully to the presence of the moment we are in; by resting in the sufficiency of God’s grace and abundance in the now.

5. Cultivate a Don’t Know Mindset: It is not ignorance to admit that you don’t know what to do next, you don’t know how a problem will resolve itself, or if a problem will resolve itself. When we don’t know what to do next, we have to rely on others to pick up their share of the adaptive challenge and to do their part in the hard work of transition. Giving the work back to the people is a hallmark of good adaptive leadership. When we admit that we don’t know, we open ourselves to new learning and create an atmosphere where others can do the same.

 

Bound by Shame

Recently, author Karen McClintock wrote The Challenge to Change  in which she made this claim, “I believe congregations are in decline because they have become shame-bound.”

I haven’t been able to get this provocative statement out of my mind.  It certainly proves true in my consulting practice, particularly in any situation that involves imaging a new future.  To imagine a new future we must always begin with understanding our past, so that the future is rooted in something real.  I often invite leaders to describe the glory days of the congregation, that period of time when the congregation was functioning as its best version of itself.  They  have no problem reaching consensus on what the glory era was, and they can quickly describe what made it a high point in the history of the congregation (usually, that attendance was at an all-time high). The shame enters in when they begin to describe the loss of those by-gone days, the descent into something other than their best selves.  They lower their eyes as they speak; they grow silent, they mumble their explanations, and often protest the invitation to dwell on the past.  It pains leaders to acknowledge that the decline has happened on their watch. Even though they can point to cultural shifts and the overall decline of the Church, they wonder what they might have done sooner or better to thwart the decline of their congregation.

I can feel the shame when I ask congregations to tell me about both their proudest and sorriest moments in ministry.  Leaders quickly chime in to tell me about their best ministry moments, but they fumble when describing that which they are sorriest about.  They want to gloss over those shame-filled memories and often haven’t developed a shared story-line to frame their understanding of those times.  It’s too hard to talk about the failed pastorate, the memory of a decision that in retrospect was steeped in racism, the sexual scandal that was covered up for fear of disgrace and inevitable membership loss.

The presence of shame is not alarming to me. What is alarming is the visible way in which I see shame binding the adaptive learning process that is needed to move into a new future.  A congregation needs to access its best adaptive capacities, whether the congregation is creating a new strategic plan, preparing for a new pastorate, or trying to introduce some overdue cultural change.

In my experience, shame thwarts the adaptive learning process in the following predictable ways:

• Adaptive learning requires that we distinguish between our positive core, (that which represents our authentic, best selves and must be protected at all costs) and our institutionalized dry-rot, (that which needs to be scraped away and replaced with new and fresh practices).  When shame-bound we often cling to our false selves to keep the truth at bay. We blame the pastor that embarrassed us without accepting any shared responsibility; we explain away our racism as something that every other congregation fell into as well. Without authentic voice we can’t fully claim our positive core, or distinguish it from the dry rot.

• Shame-bound congregations try to minimize their loss and failure by re-creating the glory days, rather than risking a move into an undefined future. If we can just get back to where we were before the loss set in, we can eradicate the shame. When asked to dream about the future, shame-bound leaders often focus on re-creating programs, structures and processes that are familiar.  Because they have not appropriately excavated their losses or created a shared leadership narrative about the loss, they seem unable to take the necessary risks involved in creating something truly adaptive.

• Shame-bound leaders have difficulty distinguishing symptoms, causes and solutions. Shame thrives on secrecy and an unexplored truth.  When we haven’t fully explored the pain of our past we tend to blur the distinctions between that which caused our decline, the symptoms that indicated a problem existed, and the possible solutions.  Consider this example, a congregation that is ashamed of having very few active members between the ages of 20-35 will often claim a new strategic initiative aimed at attracting young adults. They almost always propose to launch a new young adult ministry program to address the identified problem, without stopping to consider that the loss of young adults is perhaps symptomatic of an underlying root cause, such as the absence of a vibrant discipleship process.  A shame-bound mind doesn’t think expansively and analytically about the source of its problems. It only seeks to eradicate the symptom that it finds most painful.

So, how do we begin to unbind ourselves from shame, for the sake of becoming unencumbered adaptive leaders?  Brene Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, suggests that overcoming shame begins with vulnerability, and vulnerability is born of trust.  We need to create safe spaces in our congregation for shared story-telling about both our prouds and our sorries.  We need to create shared leadership narratives that make meaning out of our “not so stellar” moments so that we can learn from them and move forward, not backward.

Does your congregation suffer from an unexamined source of shame that prevents it from adaptive learning?

Persuasion and Influence

For many of us in ministry the use of persuasion and influence, outside of the pulpit, makes us uncomfortable. We don’t want to be seen as manipulative or unethical. So, when we need to convince someone to do something that they wouldn’t do of their own volition, we frame our invitation as a legitimate request (establishing our right as a leader to make the request), or we rely on rational persuasion (presenting logical arguments and factual evidence that a proposal or request is the best way to proceed).

Imagine for a moment that you need to persuade members of your congregation to experiment with greater musical diversity in worship. Framing the invitation as a “legitimate request” would involve some reference to an important article you recently read, or a workshop you attended with a recognized national expert who said that thriving churches offer diverse musical choices. Or, using “rational persuasion” you might argue that the last time the congregation experienced numerical growth in worship attendance was when alternative musical styles were introduced.

These two forms of influence work well when two conditions exist: when you are regarded as one having appropriate expertise in the area that you are trying to influence; and/or when the values of those that you are seeking to influence align with your own values.

Adaptive change in our congregations calls for more sophisticated forms of influence. We are asking people to adopt new behavioral norms and to step boldly outside of their comfort zones. We are increasingly inviting people to live in disequilibrium with us, and they may no longer believe that we all operate with the same values base. They may not trust our expertise in areas that they have not yet experienced. This requires skills in influence that move well beyond rational persuasion and legitimate request. We need to deepen our reservoir of influence tactics.

When Jesus was preparing to send the twelve out into neighboring communities to spread the Gospel he said, “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16). We need to become a little savvier in our influence capabilities. We need to understand more about the science and power of persuasion.

Check out the following animated video, describing the Universal Principles of Persuasion based on the research of  Dr. Robert Cialdini, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University.

Does this level of influence strike you as appropriate or inappropriate for our work in congregations; worldly or wise?

Alban Institute’s Top Articles of 2012

Which Alban Weekly articles were the most read during 2012? The combination of a good title, compelling content, and, frequently, sharing on social media helped make these 10 articles the most popular among our readers. Thanks to all who shared these and other articles on their Facebook pages, wrote about them in their blogs, or forwarded them to their friends. This week, we offer links to these articles for those who missed them the first time or want to read them again, and some discounts on some of the books they were adapted from for those who want to go deeper.   

What’s the Problem? by Susan Beaumont was featured as the #2 article for 2012 through the Alban Institute.  Check it out HERE.