On Leadership
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island.
Sunday October 6, 2002
READING: 1st Corinthians 12: 14-26
***
I've been thinking a little bit this past week about whether or not I want to coach basketball again this year over at the Boys and Girls Club. I mean, I enjoyed doing it last year, and I think that the kids had a good time too, I know their parents appreciated it; but it was awfully time-consuming, and I could probably find better things to do with my time (not that I would necessarily do them), plus I’m a little wary of the tendency, that once you have done something successfully one time, it becomes a tradition on into perpetuity.
Then I started thinking about the motivational speech I would want to give my players on the first day of practice, something along the lines of Saint Paul -- that a basketball team is like a body, with one heart and one purpose; that the guards are like the hands, who are responsible for passing and dribbling the ball; the forwards are like the legs, they run the floor and jump up and rebound; and the center is the backbone around which the rest of the team moves. And, of course, the head of the body is the coach, with eyes to see what is going on, and an experienced brain to figure out what to do, and a mouth to explain to the players how to do it.
And then I started thinking about how my thirteen-year-old players would probably respond to this little pep talk, maybe asking me things like “What part of the body sits on the bench and makes rude noises while the rest of us play basketball?”...and I realized that even if I do decide to coach again this winter, my pep talk is probably going to require a little more work if I hope to get my point across.
Two weeks ago I spoke from this pulpit about the importance of volunteers and the “voluntary church” as the lifeblood of a free church, and of a free society. Last week I spoke about the mission of the church as a “missionary” organization, both to the larger world and in particular to our own children. And this week I want to conclude this somewhat informal series by talking about the notion of Leadership, which is sometimes simply defined as “The art of getting people to work together toward a common goal.” Yet the Art of Leadership itself is anything but simple. Leaders come in all shapes and sizes, they each have their own distinctive skills and styles; while different situations sometimes call for different skills and styles of leadership. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” Leader, yet there are certain principles and characteristics which effective leaders often seem to have in common, regardless of the situation or their personal style.
Effective leaders are generally people of high personal Integrity. They understand that leadership is about a reciprocal relationship between a leader and their followers, that loyalty and accountability are a two-way street, and that people tend to follow a leader they trust, and whom they believe has their best interests at heart.
Effective leaders are often quite Flexible: they are not afraid to surround themselves with strong, capable, and intelligent subordinates, or to listen to and incorporate the opinions of others when appropriate; and they seem to know almost intuitively when it is best to focus on the goal, the task at hand, and when it is more important to focus on relationships and the morale of the group.
Finally, effective leaders often exhibit a certain kind of Creativity; they have a vision of how things might be different than they now are, are capable of thinking strategically about how to get from here to there, and are able to communicate that vision effectively to others. Yet in addition to this ability to think abstractly, effective leaders also tend to be pragmatic, possess good common sense, and have a bias for results. They are capable both of taking the initiative, and of “thinking outside the box;” of being attentive to detail without losing sight of the “big picture.”
There have been literally thousands of books written on the subject of leadership, and when you pause to consider even just the few qualities I’ve just described, it is easy to see why. Leadership is a subtle and elusive art; its principal characteristic often seems to be an ability to hold two contradictory practices together in tension at the same time. Do I talk or do I listen? Analyze or act? Is it better to lead from the front, by inspiration and example; or from the rear, through encouragement and consensus building, making certain that everyone is included and no one left behind? Push or Pull? Get in their face, or get out of the way? We want our leaders to be at once both strong and empathetic; decisive but not reckless; wiser than we are, yet considerate of our wishes and opinions. A leader should both lead the people where we want to go, yet challenge us to go beyond where we have gone before, to become better and more effective than we now are.
But rather than endlessly examining various theories of leadership, sometimes it is more beneficial to look at specific examples. In Nat Philbrick’s history of the whaleship Essex, there is an excellent example of what can happen when otherwise effective leaders make the mistake of allowing their own habitual style of leadership to undermine both their own better judgment and the best interests of the group.
When I first read that portion of *In the Heart of the Sea* my first thought was that George Pollard failed as a leader because he allowed his own desire to achieve consensus among his crew to overcome his superior knowledge and experience; he should have acted in a more authoritarian way because was the authority -- he knew, or should have known, that the correct decision was to sail with the wind and the current rather than against them, and he had a responsibility to either convince his crew of the wisdom of that course of action, or to simply insist upon it because of his position as the captain. But instead he allowed his assertive mate to assume authority that did not really belong to him, and to impose his will on the entire crew by force of personality alone.
Owen Chase also failed as leader because he didn’t truly accept or understand his responsibilities as a follower; rather than following the lead of his captain, he in effect turned the most important decision of the voyage into a contest of wills between himself and his commander, who presumably held that position of formal authority by virtue of his superior knowledge, experience, and judgment. As the captain, Pollard knew that he was ultimately responsible for the lives of his men, so it is understandable that he would want to solicit their opinions about a decision so inseparably linked to their ultimate fate. But the leadership skills which had served Pollard so successfully as a mate now failed him as a master, while Chase was all too willing to assume authority that did not properly belong to him simply because it was in his personality to do so.
Chase sounded like a leader, even though he did not truly possess the knowledge or experience to make the right decision; while Pollard, who possessed the very skills that Chase lacked, allowed his desire for consensus to eclipse his more fundamental responsibility to take command in a crisis. And the crew of the Essex, acting out of their fear of imaginary cannibals, chose to follow the wishes of a strong but misguided leader rather than an apparently weak and indecisive one, and thus in turn those who survived became themselves the very thing they feared most.
Authoritarian leaders often appear to be strong leaders, precisely because they are so decisive, but that quality in and of itself says little about the quality or correctness of their decisions. So-called “social” leaders, on the other hand, are much more likely to arrive at good decisions, since they tend to draw upon the wisdom of the group, but the question remains whether they will be able to reach those decisions in a timely fashion, and also whether they have the ability to lead people beyond their own preconceived notions of what is possible or desirable to a higher sense of vision and purpose. Truly effective leaders are able to combine elements of both leadership styles, and a third quality as well: the insight that the lives and safety of other individuals often depend upon the wisdom of their decisions, and that, in many ways, the leader is actually the servant of the group, whose health and well-being must always come ahead of the leader’s own.
Perhaps the best known authoritarian leader in maritime history is the infamous William Bligh. Bligh was by all accounts an excellent seaman and navigator, as his successful thirty six hundred mile voyage in an open boat to the island of Timor following the Mutiny on the HMS Bounty readily attests. But his name is now synonymous with cruel and arbitrary authoritarian leadership, despite the suggestion, by a few historians at least, that it was actually lax discipline aboard the Bounty that was the true cause of the mutiny. But a better case can be made for blaming the mutiny on Bligh’s personality...which was not unusually cruel (at least by the standards of the time), but rather overbearing and egotistical, combining supreme self-confidence with an equally unshakable self-righteousness, as well as a surprising sense of insecurity, which tended to express itself through Bligh’s frequent need to put others down in order to bolster his own self-esteem.
Bligh also manifested an extraordinary lack of empathy for someone who began his career as an ordinary sailor (as had his mentor, James Cook), and tended to treat his crew as if they were children whose problems and concerns were trivial and unimportant. Finally (as if all this weren’t enough), Bligh also apparently had a quick and violent temper, and often flew into a rage without warning, only to have his anger dissipate a short time later. So despite his superb experience and knowledge of the sea, Bligh’s effectiveness as a leader was ultimately scuttled by his numerous personal shortcomings. His problems even followed him on to land; in 1808, while serving as the governor of New South Wales, Bligh managed to drive an entire colony into rebellion through his relentless attempts to crack down on the lucrative rum trade and put an end to irregular land speculation. A court martial eventually exonerated him of any wrong-doing, as it had in the case of the Bounty, and Bligh ended his career with the rank of Admiral and a comfortable pension. But his reputation as an inhumane tyrant has proved the more enduring legacy, a cautionary tale for any who would believe that it is enough to be decisive, firm, competent and resolute in order to become a strong leader.
An interesting counterpoint to the case of William Bligh is the career of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton certainly had ample credentials and experience, but his real gifts as a leader were his ability to surround himself with competent people, and to earn their loyalty through his concern for their safety and his understanding of their psychological needs. On January 18th, 1915 Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became icebound in the Weddell Sea (a body of water which, by way of a footnote, was discovered by and named for my soon-to-be-former-wife’s great-great-grandfather, James Michael Weddell, a man who was by all accounts both a drunk and a scoundrel, but nevertheless much beloved by his men and revered by his descendants). For twenty months, Shackleton’s Expedition endured the rigors of being trapped in the Antarctic.
Shackleton (who was typically referred to by the other members of the expedition simply as “the Boss”) kept his men both occupied and entertained, freely delegated authority to his subordinates when appropriate, made the tough decisions when necessary (often first soliciting advice from others), dealt effectively with at least one brief incident of rebellion, and successfully inspired and encouraged his men by both his expertise and his personal example. The full story of Shackleton’s adventure is far more detailed than I could possibly hope to tell today, but the long and the short of it is that after the trapped Endurance was crushed by the ice and sank on November 21st, Shackleton led his men across the ice pack and eventually over open water to a place called Elephant Island, where he left the bulk of the expedition under the care of his second-in-command Frank Wild, and on April 24th, 1916 set out with a hand-picked crew of five men in a twenty-foot boat on a treacherous 800 mile voyage to the Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia Island, where he arrived on May 20th.
Almost immediately Shackleton organized an expedition to rescue the men left behind on Elephant Island, but it was not until August 30th, on his fourth attempt, that he was able to break through the winter ice and reach the men he had left behind nearly four months earlier. But the thing that makes the story of Shackleton’s failed expedition truly remarkable is the fact that not a single member of the expedition lost his life: sailors and officers, scientists, the photographer, even the stowaway... they all survived to tell the tale of their ordeal, in no small part thanks to Shackleton’s incredible “social” leadership.
I suppose it is only natural that, as religious liberals, Unitarians tend to be suspicious of “authoritarian” leaders, and prefer to embrace the more democratically based principles of “social” leadership. But the truly important thing to remember is no single style of leadership is appropriate to every situation, and yet we remain one body, with “many members” -- a head, a heart, arms and legs and shoulders and a backbone...and only when all the parts of the body are working effectively together do we attain our full potential as a community of faith. And this is precisely the true art of leadership -- an art which all of us may be called upon to perform from time to time -- as much a relationship as it is a skill, a relationship of mutual trust and accountability, of reciprocal loyalties and obligations, of shared vision and common goals, and the uncommon commitment to transform our dreams into reality....
***
2nd READING: from The Prophet by Kahil Gibran
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island.
Sunday October 6, 2002
READING: 1st Corinthians 12: 14-26
***
I've been thinking a little bit this past week about whether or not I want to coach basketball again this year over at the Boys and Girls Club. I mean, I enjoyed doing it last year, and I think that the kids had a good time too, I know their parents appreciated it; but it was awfully time-consuming, and I could probably find better things to do with my time (not that I would necessarily do them), plus I’m a little wary of the tendency, that once you have done something successfully one time, it becomes a tradition on into perpetuity.
Then I started thinking about the motivational speech I would want to give my players on the first day of practice, something along the lines of Saint Paul -- that a basketball team is like a body, with one heart and one purpose; that the guards are like the hands, who are responsible for passing and dribbling the ball; the forwards are like the legs, they run the floor and jump up and rebound; and the center is the backbone around which the rest of the team moves. And, of course, the head of the body is the coach, with eyes to see what is going on, and an experienced brain to figure out what to do, and a mouth to explain to the players how to do it.
And then I started thinking about how my thirteen-year-old players would probably respond to this little pep talk, maybe asking me things like “What part of the body sits on the bench and makes rude noises while the rest of us play basketball?”...and I realized that even if I do decide to coach again this winter, my pep talk is probably going to require a little more work if I hope to get my point across.
Two weeks ago I spoke from this pulpit about the importance of volunteers and the “voluntary church” as the lifeblood of a free church, and of a free society. Last week I spoke about the mission of the church as a “missionary” organization, both to the larger world and in particular to our own children. And this week I want to conclude this somewhat informal series by talking about the notion of Leadership, which is sometimes simply defined as “The art of getting people to work together toward a common goal.” Yet the Art of Leadership itself is anything but simple. Leaders come in all shapes and sizes, they each have their own distinctive skills and styles; while different situations sometimes call for different skills and styles of leadership. There’s no such thing as a “perfect” Leader, yet there are certain principles and characteristics which effective leaders often seem to have in common, regardless of the situation or their personal style.
Effective leaders are generally people of high personal Integrity. They understand that leadership is about a reciprocal relationship between a leader and their followers, that loyalty and accountability are a two-way street, and that people tend to follow a leader they trust, and whom they believe has their best interests at heart.
Effective leaders are often quite Flexible: they are not afraid to surround themselves with strong, capable, and intelligent subordinates, or to listen to and incorporate the opinions of others when appropriate; and they seem to know almost intuitively when it is best to focus on the goal, the task at hand, and when it is more important to focus on relationships and the morale of the group.
Finally, effective leaders often exhibit a certain kind of Creativity; they have a vision of how things might be different than they now are, are capable of thinking strategically about how to get from here to there, and are able to communicate that vision effectively to others. Yet in addition to this ability to think abstractly, effective leaders also tend to be pragmatic, possess good common sense, and have a bias for results. They are capable both of taking the initiative, and of “thinking outside the box;” of being attentive to detail without losing sight of the “big picture.”
There have been literally thousands of books written on the subject of leadership, and when you pause to consider even just the few qualities I’ve just described, it is easy to see why. Leadership is a subtle and elusive art; its principal characteristic often seems to be an ability to hold two contradictory practices together in tension at the same time. Do I talk or do I listen? Analyze or act? Is it better to lead from the front, by inspiration and example; or from the rear, through encouragement and consensus building, making certain that everyone is included and no one left behind? Push or Pull? Get in their face, or get out of the way? We want our leaders to be at once both strong and empathetic; decisive but not reckless; wiser than we are, yet considerate of our wishes and opinions. A leader should both lead the people where we want to go, yet challenge us to go beyond where we have gone before, to become better and more effective than we now are.
But rather than endlessly examining various theories of leadership, sometimes it is more beneficial to look at specific examples. In Nat Philbrick’s history of the whaleship Essex, there is an excellent example of what can happen when otherwise effective leaders make the mistake of allowing their own habitual style of leadership to undermine both their own better judgment and the best interests of the group.
When I first read that portion of *In the Heart of the Sea* my first thought was that George Pollard failed as a leader because he allowed his own desire to achieve consensus among his crew to overcome his superior knowledge and experience; he should have acted in a more authoritarian way because was the authority -- he knew, or should have known, that the correct decision was to sail with the wind and the current rather than against them, and he had a responsibility to either convince his crew of the wisdom of that course of action, or to simply insist upon it because of his position as the captain. But instead he allowed his assertive mate to assume authority that did not really belong to him, and to impose his will on the entire crew by force of personality alone.
Owen Chase also failed as leader because he didn’t truly accept or understand his responsibilities as a follower; rather than following the lead of his captain, he in effect turned the most important decision of the voyage into a contest of wills between himself and his commander, who presumably held that position of formal authority by virtue of his superior knowledge, experience, and judgment. As the captain, Pollard knew that he was ultimately responsible for the lives of his men, so it is understandable that he would want to solicit their opinions about a decision so inseparably linked to their ultimate fate. But the leadership skills which had served Pollard so successfully as a mate now failed him as a master, while Chase was all too willing to assume authority that did not properly belong to him simply because it was in his personality to do so.
Chase sounded like a leader, even though he did not truly possess the knowledge or experience to make the right decision; while Pollard, who possessed the very skills that Chase lacked, allowed his desire for consensus to eclipse his more fundamental responsibility to take command in a crisis. And the crew of the Essex, acting out of their fear of imaginary cannibals, chose to follow the wishes of a strong but misguided leader rather than an apparently weak and indecisive one, and thus in turn those who survived became themselves the very thing they feared most.
Authoritarian leaders often appear to be strong leaders, precisely because they are so decisive, but that quality in and of itself says little about the quality or correctness of their decisions. So-called “social” leaders, on the other hand, are much more likely to arrive at good decisions, since they tend to draw upon the wisdom of the group, but the question remains whether they will be able to reach those decisions in a timely fashion, and also whether they have the ability to lead people beyond their own preconceived notions of what is possible or desirable to a higher sense of vision and purpose. Truly effective leaders are able to combine elements of both leadership styles, and a third quality as well: the insight that the lives and safety of other individuals often depend upon the wisdom of their decisions, and that, in many ways, the leader is actually the servant of the group, whose health and well-being must always come ahead of the leader’s own.
Perhaps the best known authoritarian leader in maritime history is the infamous William Bligh. Bligh was by all accounts an excellent seaman and navigator, as his successful thirty six hundred mile voyage in an open boat to the island of Timor following the Mutiny on the HMS Bounty readily attests. But his name is now synonymous with cruel and arbitrary authoritarian leadership, despite the suggestion, by a few historians at least, that it was actually lax discipline aboard the Bounty that was the true cause of the mutiny. But a better case can be made for blaming the mutiny on Bligh’s personality...which was not unusually cruel (at least by the standards of the time), but rather overbearing and egotistical, combining supreme self-confidence with an equally unshakable self-righteousness, as well as a surprising sense of insecurity, which tended to express itself through Bligh’s frequent need to put others down in order to bolster his own self-esteem.
Bligh also manifested an extraordinary lack of empathy for someone who began his career as an ordinary sailor (as had his mentor, James Cook), and tended to treat his crew as if they were children whose problems and concerns were trivial and unimportant. Finally (as if all this weren’t enough), Bligh also apparently had a quick and violent temper, and often flew into a rage without warning, only to have his anger dissipate a short time later. So despite his superb experience and knowledge of the sea, Bligh’s effectiveness as a leader was ultimately scuttled by his numerous personal shortcomings. His problems even followed him on to land; in 1808, while serving as the governor of New South Wales, Bligh managed to drive an entire colony into rebellion through his relentless attempts to crack down on the lucrative rum trade and put an end to irregular land speculation. A court martial eventually exonerated him of any wrong-doing, as it had in the case of the Bounty, and Bligh ended his career with the rank of Admiral and a comfortable pension. But his reputation as an inhumane tyrant has proved the more enduring legacy, a cautionary tale for any who would believe that it is enough to be decisive, firm, competent and resolute in order to become a strong leader.
An interesting counterpoint to the case of William Bligh is the career of the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton certainly had ample credentials and experience, but his real gifts as a leader were his ability to surround himself with competent people, and to earn their loyalty through his concern for their safety and his understanding of their psychological needs. On January 18th, 1915 Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became icebound in the Weddell Sea (a body of water which, by way of a footnote, was discovered by and named for my soon-to-be-former-wife’s great-great-grandfather, James Michael Weddell, a man who was by all accounts both a drunk and a scoundrel, but nevertheless much beloved by his men and revered by his descendants). For twenty months, Shackleton’s Expedition endured the rigors of being trapped in the Antarctic.
Shackleton (who was typically referred to by the other members of the expedition simply as “the Boss”) kept his men both occupied and entertained, freely delegated authority to his subordinates when appropriate, made the tough decisions when necessary (often first soliciting advice from others), dealt effectively with at least one brief incident of rebellion, and successfully inspired and encouraged his men by both his expertise and his personal example. The full story of Shackleton’s adventure is far more detailed than I could possibly hope to tell today, but the long and the short of it is that after the trapped Endurance was crushed by the ice and sank on November 21st, Shackleton led his men across the ice pack and eventually over open water to a place called Elephant Island, where he left the bulk of the expedition under the care of his second-in-command Frank Wild, and on April 24th, 1916 set out with a hand-picked crew of five men in a twenty-foot boat on a treacherous 800 mile voyage to the Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia Island, where he arrived on May 20th.
Almost immediately Shackleton organized an expedition to rescue the men left behind on Elephant Island, but it was not until August 30th, on his fourth attempt, that he was able to break through the winter ice and reach the men he had left behind nearly four months earlier. But the thing that makes the story of Shackleton’s failed expedition truly remarkable is the fact that not a single member of the expedition lost his life: sailors and officers, scientists, the photographer, even the stowaway... they all survived to tell the tale of their ordeal, in no small part thanks to Shackleton’s incredible “social” leadership.
I suppose it is only natural that, as religious liberals, Unitarians tend to be suspicious of “authoritarian” leaders, and prefer to embrace the more democratically based principles of “social” leadership. But the truly important thing to remember is no single style of leadership is appropriate to every situation, and yet we remain one body, with “many members” -- a head, a heart, arms and legs and shoulders and a backbone...and only when all the parts of the body are working effectively together do we attain our full potential as a community of faith. And this is precisely the true art of leadership -- an art which all of us may be called upon to perform from time to time -- as much a relationship as it is a skill, a relationship of mutual trust and accountability, of reciprocal loyalties and obligations, of shared vision and common goals, and the uncommon commitment to transform our dreams into reality....
***
2nd READING: from The Prophet by Kahil Gibran
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 12:14 PM
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