Once upon a time, long ago, in a faraway land, I worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. I was privileged to be able to climb through the ranks of the department during my 38-year career.

The Sheriff’s Department’s command and executive staff had many opportunities to receive training from world-class leadership authors, professors, consultants, and organizations. One such presenter, David Rabiner¹, provided a two-day workshops on leadership. There was something he repeated several times that has stuck with me for many years and is the subject of this month’s article. I roughly quote it here.

Every leader wants people to follow their leadership. But oftentimes, people don’t. People don’t follow our leadership because they don’t want to. There are lots of reasons why someone would not want to follow an organizational leader. But most leaders I talk with, don’t list among those potential reasons that their own leadership behaviors might be contributing to causing people to not want to follow them. And that’s something to talk about.

It will be helpful to split our conversation into two components – behaviors that tend to cause people to want to follow our leadership and things that tend to cause people to not want to follow our leadership. Here are some ideas for your conversations on these topics.

CREATING “WANT TO” FOLLOWERS

Authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner of the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, in their book “The Leadership Challenge” (2002 – Third Edition)² have written and contributed much to this discussion. In that book, after extensive research, they found four characteristics that people look for and admire in their leaders. The over 75,000 interview participants were asked to identify seven characteristics from a list of twenty characteristics that they “most look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction they would willingly follow” (italics mine, but emphasis theirs). Consistently over time and across continents, only four of the characteristics have continuously received over 50 percent of the votes.

Here are those four characteristics and some things you may wish to talk about.

Honest.

This top voter getter appeared in well over 80% of the responses. People want to follow leaders that can be trusted. It behooves church leaders to speak the truth (and to do it in love). Yet I often learn of church leaders who carefully parse words in order to give their desired “spin” to whatever they are uncomfortable saying in order to save face or avoid opposition. For example, sometimes church leaders will describe a new program or initiative in superlative words, speaking of the clear leading of God to engage in it – but results are subpar and cause people to wonder why God would want their church to start a program only for it to fail. Wouldn’t it have been better to communicate that we were going to try something new to see whether it would work? Leaders sometimes say that the church is “experiencing a budgetary shortfall” when they are actually in dire financial straits that threaten the church’s short- or mid-term viability.

What price do we leaders pay when we trade away our honesty and trustworthiness in order to persuade others to follow us?

Honesty eschews cheating, leaving out pertinent information, being “less than truthful” and not being true to our word and commitments.

Have a discussion with your leadership team about how you communicate with the church – are we focused upon being truth tellers or are we becoming marketeers?

Forward-Looking.

This characteristic appeared in well over 70% of the responses. People expect their leaders to be taking them somewhere – moving in some discernable direction. A church with a fuzzy mission is not forward-looking. Leaders who cannot communicate clearly where they are going are not forward-looking. Leaders who are not intentionally going someplace are not leading – they are wandering about or just taking a stroll. Sadly, I have had way too many contacts with established churches and established pastors that are not headed in any discernible direction. They are in church survival mode.

Have a discussion with your team about the intentionality and clarity of the church’s mission, core values, and key strategies. Do we all know what they are? Are we actively pursuing them? How would those who follow us know them?

Competent.

This characteristic appeared in well over 60% of the responses. “Leadership competence refers to the leader’s track record and ability get things done.”³ Are we getting things done? More specifically, are we getting done the things we are trying to get done and that our congregation is expecting us to get done?

Have a discussion with your team about what we are trying to get done in our church. How clear are our direction and our goals? Are we focused upon the goals we have set, or do we tend to drift into whatever challenge or idea comes our way? How do we share our progress – or lack of progress – to our church? Are we honest?

Inspiring.

This characteristic also appeared in well over 60% of the responses. No one will excitedly follow a boring leader. If the leaders are not inspired, the church will not be inspired. And an uninspired church is a lethargic church and quite likely, a dying church.

One of my favorite leadership quotes is attributed to Napoleon – “The leader’s role is to define reality and offer hope.” Honesty is the “define reality” part of Napoleon's saying. Inspiration is the “hope” part. Hope is encouraging, uplifting, even exciting and occasionally adventurous and a bit dangerous. Inspiration can be experienced through the words we use, the emotion in our voice, our posture and gestures as we communicate, and in the twinkle and/or fire in our eyes. There is excitement in our mannerisms when we lead people, yet inspiration does not ignore the challenges that may lie ahead. Our confidence is in God, not ourselves, and our God and His work should be exciting to us.

Have a discussion with your team about how we might become more inspirational to those we seek to lead. What about our mission and key strategies is exciting? Have we been communicating with honest, forward-looking, competent inspiration? What might we do better?

If you are wondering, the fifth-place characteristic appeared on the lists of only about 43% of the respondents – a 20-percentage point difference. These four characteristics are huge.

CREATING “HAVE TO” FOLLOWERS

I don’t want us to focus upon the negatives instead of the positives, but here are some ineffective leadership behaviors I have seen that create, at best, “have to” followers if not dissention or splits in churches. I trust readers will recognize sarcasm when they read it.

• Yelling at or dressing down people during Sunday worship. Nothing motivates people to follow Christ more effectively than being yelled at.
• Isolated or inaccessible leaders. People having questions or concerns will probably think everything is great when leaders ignore them or they cannot get their questions answered.
• Proof texting and responses by theses. Nothing like a 10-page manifesto, larded with tons of Bible verse references to calm the jitters of skittish sheep that have concerns about something in the church. The calm or reading the manifesto and all those verses has a calming effect on troubled sheep.
• Unclear directions. In the age of GPS and hand-held devices, nothing gives a congregant more confidence in their leaders than to have fuzzy directions to a fuzzy destination. It keeps us on our toes and fosters spontaneity. 
• “Because I’m the pastor – or elder – that’s why!” We all hated this as children when our parents laid the “because I’m the parent” conversation stopper on us, but as adults we appreciate it when our pastor or other church leaders do it because we recognize there most certainly must be a solid reason that only they would understand so we are not worthy to hear it. Appeals to our authority are guaranteed to produce “have to” followers – or rebellion – or fewer people at our church. Over-crowding solved.

Church leaders should occasionally pause and ask, “Am I effective in my leadership role and responsibilities?” I suggest you are if you are creating “want to” followers. We need to create “want to” followers in our churches who become “want to” followers of Christ. Leaders who are honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring have a leg up on leaders not having those traits.

Are we creating “want to” followers? That’s something to talk about.

Let us know if we can help and how your conversation goes. Contact Bob Osborne by e-mail at bob.osborne@efca.org. 

This is one of a series of articles intended to facilitate and guide church leaders’ conversations about significant issues that often are not talked about among pastors, boards, and church leadership teams. Visit the EFCA West website to see prior Something to Talk About articles.