Empowering Leadership

If your stated aim is to build an apostolic church that transforms the world around it (see previous article on the Apostolic Reformation) then what would the leadership culture of such a church look like? And more to the point, what would it not look like?

Reading Kris Vallotan's book Heavy Rain recently a particular paragraph stood out to me and struck home. Its like when someone puts their finger on something that you had been experiencing but had never quite realised before, and you suddenly go "oh yeah! That's it".

He was talking about building a leadership culture in churches that helps people to become great. In other words, he encourages leaders to not just aim to make people "good" but great. By great he means fulfilling their potential for greatness that people have in God. Each of us are called to significance, to be great, to achieve something awesome with our lives in Him, and that brings Him glory. David had a hero culture - his mighty men, whose exploits were recorded.

So if your aim is to create a culture where people become great and do amazing things, then you would need a culture that releases this in people, that empowers people, and doesn't dis-empower them.

This is what he said:

"Empowering leaders make decisions with people, not just for people. When we withhold information from our people or tell them just what they need to know to get their job done, we produce slave camps in which one person does all the thinking. This is religion on steroids."

"If we are going to become a house of heros, we need fresh ideas, untried solutions, innovation and bold, courageous thoughts delivered by risk takers, not zoo keepers"

The aim of parenthood is to bring our kids to the point of being able to make good decisions for themselves and manage themselves without ongoing direction and control from you. If after 20 years your offspring still need you to run their lives for them then you have completely failed as a parent.

No child can grow up without being allowed some degree of autonomy, taking some risks and making their own mistakes, learning the hard way. Indeed child development psychologist Erickson tells us that at certain stages of a child's life, it is essential for healthy psychological development that children experience some degree of autonomy. If they are not allowed to do this then they will never come to maturity under your tutelage. Sometimes I think that's why God lets us make so many mistakes!

Last week I was in a meeting with a social worker and one of my team carrying out an exercise in consultation about a new Quality Assurance regime we were trying to bring into the Council where I work. I asked them to start by identifying the outcomes that they wanted to achieve in their work with children and the social worker said something that completely surprised me.

He said that he wanted social workers to have"autonomy".

My first reaction was that of hearing alarm bells ring. The thought of letting social workers loose with autonomy frankly scared me. I don't have enough confidence in the majority of our social workers to let them have "autonomy" in a publicly run service working with vulnerable children at significant risk, at times to the point of life or death. There is a legitimate need for management to control the work that is taking place.

On further discussion with him, where we got to was to re-frame what he meant. Whilst he used the word autonomy what he was saying was that as an intelligent, thoughtful, reflective professional what he wanted was his own professional judgement to be respected and listened to in supervision. He wanted to be given more responsibility and control over his case loads in the context of careful supervision.

To put it another way - he wanted managers to stop treating him and his colleagues like children who had to be directed and controlled all the time. And there he had a point. A very good point as well.

The last government in the UK had in its wisdom invented and imposed a tight strait jacket of rules, regulations, procedures and timescales to micro manage social workers. They have set timescales for their visits, a set IT template to complete that was invented by someone who has never had to do a social worker's job before, and is measured by performance indicators that skew the work towards fulfilling bureaucratic processes instead of concentrating on the outcomes for the children they are working for. It has been a recipe for disaster.

Social workers feel demoralised, disempowered and demotivated by this approach. They feel part of a machine more interested in meeting government targets than making a difference to children. And they know that meeting the demands of the bureaucracy is getting in the way of meeting the needs of the children.

These aren't just my impressions - they are also the findings of a government funded report into children's social care by Eileen Munro, published in May 2011.

So whats my point?

Well, its very simple - we can't build an empowering culture by operating a top down, directive, and controlling style of leadership. If we want to release the potential in people to achieve great things we have to empower them. We have to give them responsibility, to take some risks, and stop trying to do all the thinking for them.

I think that starts by taking decisions with people and not making decisions for people. Now, there is a thought.