Now I’m no John C. Maxwell, or any other author that would show up on a google search of authors in leadership. But, I sat in class yesterday and listened to Craig Miller pastor of Grace Baptist Church here in Cedarville discuss how to lead a group of people when they can leave whenever they want. It is easy to lead a group of people when you have a paycheck that you can hold over their heads to get them to do whatever you want, but not so easy when at any time, for any reason, without serious consequences your constituents can just up and leave with no ramifications felt.
So how do you lead them? There are several key components to lead people in this group, these concepts can be applied to the local Kiwanis group, or Rotary Club, or Knights of Columbus, and even, better yet, the local community of believers.
The first is to give your constituents a sense of ownership. Note that I did not say patronize your constituents with menial tasks that a trained chimpanzee could accomplish. However, give your constituents a role that makes them feel like the organization will benefit from their service to it. Whether that includes keeping attendance records, and calling people ahead of time to remind them of meetings, or whether that means asking them to be apart of a childcare group, give them some role that lets them claim partial ownership for the success of the organization.
Another thing is communicating clearly and concisely. Yes, in organizational communication there is the need for strategic ambiguity, which uses ambiguous and broad terms to get different parts of the organization to agree with the ambiguous statement, instead of bickering over the different terms and semantics of the words. However, strategic ambiguity is shallow leadership, its the first level, any leader can use strategic ambiguity, anybody can say something like our organization is committed to quality, thats strategic ambiguity, sounds good… but what does quality mean, and how committed is the organization. This is where clear and consice communication comes in.
A Leader must be able to articulate the mission of the oranization, or the direction the organization is going. First the leader must determine what the course of action is, and then figure out a way to clearly and concisely communicate the direction/mission to their constituents in a way that gives the constituents a sense of ownership of the mission, and a sense of accomplishment for the success of the organization thus far.
Ultimately people want to feel like they belong to the organization, and that they are influential in the success of the organization; if this were not the case, chances are they wouldn’t have gotten involved in said organization if the didn’t feel like taking ownership of part of it. People also want to know where they are going. When I was in middle school, I was forced to attend the youth group at Lake Carroll Baptist Church and I’ll be honest, it was terrible. It was terrible for many reasons, namely the duo of people that led the youth group: Steve Channels and Tom Brooks. Now, don’t get me wrong they are great people, and good golfing buddies; but they were not good leaders. They did not have a vision for where the youth group was going, a vision for how to teach youth the Bible, or even a working understanding of the Bible, a prime example of someone managing to rise to the level of incompetence. Now, we would take these mystery trips, that were designed to be fun, we’d show up at the youth room on a friday night, with 20 bucks, and not have a clue where we were going, and the thrill of the night was the suprise destination. While that made for a fun friday evening once every other month or so, but made for a terrible youth group experience because there was no vision, and no articulation of that vision.
Where there is no vision, the people shall perish Prov. 29:18
Practical steps
1. Define a mission
2. Determine tasks that will provide a sense of ownership to your constituents
3. Communicate the vision you have defined for your organization
4.Follow through and build into the lives of your organizations members
