An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

Leadership is a frustrating subject...

By Sally Morgenthaler

Morgenthaler has challenged and shaped the course of Christian worship for two decades. Now she is helping Christian leaders shift to the kind of leadership practices that are indispensable in a globalized culture. She has also founded a life-coaching ministry for women, focusing on leadership, career, and personal goals.

Leadership is a frustrating subject, for no other reason than our definition of it in the western world is so constricted.  Ask any group of people in the U.S. to list adjectives that describe good leaders and, with few permutations, the list is the same.  In our country (and it doesn’t matter what the venue--business, government, ministry), a leader is good if he is assertive, authoritative, decisive, tough, and independent.  He is a lone ranger, a sole visionary with take-charge, no-nonsense attitude.  And most importantly, he is always in control.

But, wait a minute. Why use the pronoun "he"? Aren't there women who are good leaders? No doubt. But for most of the last two centuries, "good leadership" has been equivalant to what it has mean to be a "good man." The consequences of this parallel labeling have been huge.  Scores of men who don’t fit the quintessential American male portrait have had to adopt a false self in order to lead, or have shied away from leadership altogether.  Women who have wanted to be seen as true leaders have had to reject their sexuality and become stereotypically “male” if they wanted to be taken seriously.  Ironically, as many women leaders did just that in the past few decades--became stereotypically “male”--they have often been tagged with less-than-positive labels.

Is there a better way to define and practice leadership?  Are there ways to take the act of leading to a new, more humane, and more collaborative level?  Are there ways to look at male and female-ness more holistically, and to lead out of a place of completeness?

Musings on a Tuesday in Colorado, between blizzards…

Sample Chapter (Sally Morgenthaler)

15: Leadership in a Flattened World

Grassroots Culture and the Demise of the CEO Model;

Sally Morgenthaler

What is leadership in an age of unprecedented connectedness? When information is as accessible as the Blackberry in your back pocket? When the world no longer needs data brokers, when the word authority inspires only suspicion and revolt, and when business, political, and religious icons are deconstructed at the click of a mouse button? What does it really mean to be in charge of anything?

Nothing. Because, in the new and increasingly flattened world, being in charge is an illusion. Being in charge worked (and marginally so) only in a world of slow change, in a predictable universe where information (and thus, power) is ensconced in the hands of a few. But that world is gone. With the rise of the individual (the power of one) and the rise of the tribe (the power of one connected), all bets are off. From Al-Qaeda to the post-Katrina revolt to fragmenting retail markets to the small-enterprise explosion in India and China, we see the old world of “big and powerful” unraveling.

Still, we hang on to our illusions. We retreat into the old story: leadership as domination and control. Margaret Wheatley describes our desperate attempts to hang on to what is gone:

Ever since uncertainty became our insistent twenty-first-century companion, leadership strategies have taken a great leap backward to the familiar territory of command and control. . . . How is it that we failed to learn that whenever we try to impose control on people and situations, we only serve to make them more uncontrollable? All of life resists control. All of life reacts to any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself. When we deny life’s need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organizations. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us.¹

Perhaps what Wheatley describes has always been a reality: human beings are simply wired to push back. Maybe the real shift is that now we have an unprecedented ability to do so. Now eighty-year-old Uncle Harold can post his very own book review on Amazon.com. Aunt Sarah can finally sell her Hummel collection, not at the neighborhood garage sale but on eBay. Now we have Google in our hip pockets, and our cell phones double as personal computers, televisions, cameras, video recorders, and stereo systems. Do we really get the significance of those sideways, post-terrorist clips from the bowels of a London subway system? Suddenly it actually matters that we exist, that we live in a certain place and time. No matter what our income or educational level, we can join the posse of several thousand bloggers and send CBS’s Dan Rather a group message. A big and terrifyingly audible message: “Dan, we smell a rat. We know too much. Get the story right or get out.”