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5 Leadership mistakes
After the shortest tenure as British Prime Minister, Liz Truss has finally stepped down (or, more precisely, forced into resigning) following one of the worst market crashes in modern memory and a backbenchers' revolt. It all happened so swiftly that it felt like a bad dream - only to be reminded it was all too real by stellar inflation and rising costs. Unsurprisingly, Liz Truss will be known in history not as the third female British PM but as the worst one.
However, it should be pointed out that Liz's failure wasn't necessarily down to bad intentions, nor her focus on growth. Her vision for a prosperous, high-wage, low-tax Britain was most likely the reason why Conservative members favoured her over Rishi Sunak and his more cautious and restrained plan. Her failure was ultimately a leadership failure, one that carried all the trends of other leadership failures that I've had the displeasure of observing over the years.
Now that the dust has settled over her disastrous premiership (although we are still left to pay the bill!) it's worth taking a moment to reflect on Liz's leadership mistakes with a view not to repeat the same mistakes!
1. Take your time
As I often teach my students, what ultimately sank the Titanic wasn't an iceberg nor an engineering flaw but a combination of size and speed. The iceberg was spotted and the ship's wheel turned all the way, but the collision occurred nonetheless because the ship was too large (and therefore heavy) and travelling too fast. Similarly, by her own admission, Liz did too much and too fast with an economy that was too large and established. To be fair, Liz only had two years to turn things around, but her miscalculation cannot be overstated. In her chancellor's words (yeah, the guy she fired) - "Slow down or you will only have 2 months." Those words turned out to be prophetic!
Unfortunately, I have seen Churches split and collapse not because of a flawed vision or an unrealistic plan (let's face it, most churches nowadays need a big fat makeover) but because of a leadership that attempted too much too soon - in a context that, let's face it, is often very large, very old and very resistant to change!
The truth is that the larger and more established the organisation is, the longer the leader must take to implement change. Failure to do so would not only undermine the organisation's present, but undo its past as well. This is why I am not very keen on short-term or fixed-term leadership and the systems built around it, as they do not provide the leader with sufficient time to establish and implement vision successfully.
2. Read the room
Speaking of time, whereas change is sometimes desperately needed, it is important to take into account the "season" people and systems find themselves in. Just as in nature there are seasons designed to labour or stay put, to plant or uproot, the same applies to organisations (including Churches!) Liz Truss took the reins of Britain at a time when the nation just wanted a little respite. After all, we had Brexit, the Pandemic and the war in Ukraine (with the following energy crisis) one after another. The vast majority of the population needed time to rebuild, not to change - to grow, not to gamble. We just wanted some stability to find our feet again. Quoting Jonathan Kirchner, an executive coach, business psychologist and founder and CEO of AIIR Consulting, "You must balance the need for change with the need for stability."
In a similar way, change has to find the right season for it to grow in a healthy way. Change doesn't happen in a vacuum but in and through people at different stages in their lives - something that incidentally applies to organisations as well. One of the first tasks of a good leader is to identify the season their people and organisation are in. Are they grieving the previous leadership? Are they shell-shocked by a series of hurtful events? Are they tired of being "experimented on" by previous leaders? Are they overworked? For if people are not thirsty for change, they will not drink!
3. Build a diverse team
Another mistake of Liz's premiership is the fact that she built a very homogenous team. Many skills and talents may have been represented, but they were all from the same political camp within the Conservative party - Boris-loving, right-leaning brexiteers. In other words, people that not only believed in Liz's vision but in the means to achieve it. Whereas this type of team made things very easy for Liz internally, as it would not naturally challenge her decisions, it also created an echo chamber that encouraged a false perception of political, economic and national moods.
Unfortunately, I have seen similar dynamics in other Churches' leadership teams. Whereas it is crucial to build a team around one vision, it mustn't bear the senior leader's image but rather the broader image of the Church. Not only do teams require diversity of skills and talents, but also a variety of perspectives and walks of life - providing a broader picture to the team, synergising one another's strengths and minimising one another's weaknesses and blindspots. This should be particularly true in the Church, a body of different members and different gifts. Ephesian's five-fold ministry structure also comes to mind, where apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers work together for the building up of the Church. From experience, they are radically different from one another (both in the way they think and the way they operate) but once working together they create that speed, direction and balance necessary for growth.
So, don't build a team around your friends and family, nor those who will say Yes just to have a seat at the table. Intentionally appoint people of skills, integrity and vision, but that are very different from you. People that can support you but that don't shy away from confrontation and open disagreement. It may make things challenging from time to time, but also save your butt!
4. Trust is everything
Let me put it bluntly - if you call yourself a leader but hardly anybody follows you, you are not a leader. At best, you are taking a walk. The ultimate test of leadership isn't an exciting vision or a detailed plan, but whether or not you'll gain people's trust.
When Liz won the Conservative leadership race, few newspapers declared her victory with the head "In Liz we Truss." A clever word-play if not somewhat blasphemous - but certainly not true. Her victory only pointed to the fact that a weak majority of Conservatives (57.4%) decided to take a gamble on her risky policy. The trust of 80.000 people in a nation of 67 million is not a lot of trust to build on.
Trust is not only fundamental to leadership generally, but especially for those leadership decisions that are radical, establishment-breaking and carrying a strong element of risk. The greater the proposed disruption, the greater the trust required from those we serve to pull it off. However, trust is not easily built up! It requires years of servitude and wins. Speaking from experience, the main reason why I have managed to successfully transition our Church in such a deep and radical way (alongside God's grace!) is the fact that I had earned the people's trust over 7 years of blood, sweat and tears. After months of vision-casting, creative communication and negotiations, the final vote was cast - 80+% in favour. After about 20% of the people who voted against disappeared (most of them overnight), I then discovered that of those who voted in favour, only about 20% had fully understood the vision and supported the plan. The remaining 60% chose to follow simply because they trusted me.
Unfortunately, Liz didn't have the nation's trust - nor the trust of MPs and Market big-wigs! Neither did she have the time to build up her trust meter with a long series of small but meaningful wins. When she asked them to simply trust her gamble on nothing but her word, the whole house came down on her.
5. Communicate with power brokers
Once Liz won the Conservative race and built her politically homogenous team, her boldness and willingness to be unpopular seemed to suggest she felt like she possessed the necessary "power" to implement her radical economic vision ("Trussonomics"). However, as it turns out, she forgot to take into consideration power brokers, namely individuals and institutions with the power to either support or suppress her quest. Chief among them were the Markets - which immediately vetoed her plan by sinking the pound and spiking the cost of borrowing.
Whether we like it or not, power brokers are in every organisation - including the Church! Large (and often problematic!) families that make up a significant proportion of the congregation, unelected members with hands in all sorts of proverbial pies, people that served in a specific capacity for years, big donors, long-standing members etc. Anyone who carries significant influence and "weight."
Now, I am not suggesting that vision and planning should invariably surrender to the will (and whims) of power brokers - in fact, in my experience, sometimes these power brokers need their power broken! However, wisdom demands we informally consult with them more closely, keeping them in the loop of our thoughts, making them part of our decision-making processes with a willingness to compromise wherever possible. Failure to do so will remind us just how little power we thought we had.
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