How Not to Waste a Crisis

For many leaders, especially the kinds of leaders who are asked to take on challenging companies, organizations, or congregations that are in the middle of change or weathering a crisis, it can be daunting to realize that the very same experience that makes people trust you at the helm may have reinforced some habits that will keep you from being able to take on the challenges of the moment.

This is what many of us in church leadership have been learning for the past twenty years as the culture around us has changed and as one crisis after another has tested the mettle of our leadership skills.

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, I heard a whisper for the first time. It was from a pastor who was deeply discouraged and trying to make sense of why so much effort and faithfulness seemed to bear such little fruit. Over the years I would hear it over and over again: “Seminary didn’t train me for this, Tod.”

In 2015 I published Canoeing the Mountains, a book that uses the metaphor of Lewis and Clark’s expedition as a way of describing the kind of adaptive leadership that is needed when you go “off the map” and face challenges for which you have no expertise. Adaptive leadership teaches us to build trust through forming relational “holding environments,” to expect to experience loss when we let go of deeply held behaviors and expectations, and to become people who can learn as we go. It teaches us that we have to learn to manage competing values and to deal with sabotage and resistance—by the very people we are called to lead.

Many leaders have begun to question their assumptions about leadership being defined by position, platforms, popularity, and personality. We have grown skeptical of leaders who seem more focused on their own control or charisma, their own “brands” and ideas, than on actually serving people, but we are unsure how the values and teachings of faith translate into vibrant, enduring communities and institutions.

Our old leadership practices are no longer working, and we don’t know what to do.

As it turns out, we are in good company.

In the biblical story, Jehoshaphat the ancient king of Judah gets word that an immense army made up of three enemy foes is massing against him. He gathers the families of Judah together in assembly and they cry out to God for help. The story of God’s miraculous display of power in giving Judah victory is often and rightly told to assure the faithful that the biggest battles of life are “not yours but God’s.” But what is most instructive for us is what Jehoshaphat did before the battle, when the news was so frightening and the future so daunting. What Jehoshaphat does at that moment is breathtaking for its bold vulnerability.

He stands before his people and admits that he doesn’t know what to do.

And this is a significant shift for both leaders and their people alike. So, the new mindset for leading through a world of “permanent crisis” is not how to bring your expertise, education, and mastery to bear on the challenges before you, but training differently in how to learn to lead all over again—in real time—in the midst of the crisis.

Whether you are facing a worldwide crisis or just the next challenge to come across your desk, re-learning to lead—in the middle of that moment when your old ways don’t work—is the only way forward.

And it is hard and humbling.