Figuring in Eights

  Leadership is quite a ride. Over the years, I have heard various people describe it in various ways. Some have imaged it as a rollercoaster because leadership has its ups and downs. Others, because of slips and falls, have imaged leadership as a rugged, mountainous climb to various levels of success. Still others have experienced leadership as a sort of black hole of need – vacuous and never ending. 

Leadership is quite a ride. I’ve experienced it best and most intensely as the flow through a figure eight landscape. The upper loop is a sort of high place in which theological, psychological and sociological concepts inform the vision for ministry. I’ve ridden this upper loop with so many wonderful people. The lower loop is a specific and pragmatic place of real challenges and logistical or adaptive responses. There have been wonderful people to ride this loop with as well. 

  Leadership is quite a ride. The most important place for me within the ride is at a threshold that tempts me to cycle in one loop or the other. It can be challenging to come out of the lower loop and find constructive time for concept and vision. Equally, it can be challenging to emerge from concept and vision to take a hold a pragmatic concern. The ability to flow around one loop and make my way through the threshold to the other has been a marker of leadership for me. 

Leadership is quite a ride. The leader needs an intrapersonal discipline that both provides momentum and exercises one toward strength. Conceptual and visionary work has never failed to provide momentum. I so enjoy the teamwork in that loop. But in as much as I experience momentum with concepts savored and vision honed, I find myself tempted at the threshold back down to the lower loop. Perhaps someone else can do the pragmatics or logistics. Perhaps someone else can work out the problems that emerge. 

Leadership is quite a ride until it isn’t. There comes a time in every leader’s life when they are going to be tempted to relegate themselves to an upper or lower loop because some how they seem to “belong” in one or the other. This temptation thwarts flow and the waters of ministry begin to stagnate. Burnout and cynicism are examples of stagnation’s symptoms.

The lower loop of pragmatic challenge never fails to impart the chemical gifts of serotonin, dopamine or endorphins. The exercise of rising up from the front lines of ministry feeds back into the loop of vision, but just before rising through the threshold, there is a temptation to be held to the tasks and the details.  “I can’t do the thinking work right now. There are too many things to do.”

Ministry on Monday and each day of the week is about the spiritual discipline of getting through the threshold of temptation that I belong in one loop or the other. It’s a spiritual discipline to give myself to the ride.