If you’re a coach who works with businesses and organizations, you need to check out Coachbook: A Guide to Organizational Coaching Strategies and Practices. The book is a bit reference-like in some ways (that’s a positive and a not-so-positive), and it also has some really good content and frameworks for those of us who coach high-level leaders.
First of all, what do I mean by “high-level leaders?” The leadership tide of the last few decades has pushed the notion that everybody is a leader in some ways. I guess that’s true since everybody exercises influence in multiple ways and we all stand to be more intentional about increasing our positive influence. But don’t be mistaken: leaders who occupy positions of great responsibility face different issues than does the leader of a small work team, the leader of the Sunday morning ushers, or the leader of a Boy Scout troop. I sometimes call these “enterprise leaders” because they exercise leadership that affects an entire organization. It’s not that a leader has to be the CEO or CFO or C-whatever-O, the leader could be in a strategic role that matters across the organization.
In the church, pastors of churches with multiple staff, multiple locations, or significant complexity and size are in this boat. Likewise, some denominational leaders and higher education leaders such function as high-level leaders. At issue with high-level leaders is that they face unique challenges related to change and complexity. Often these challenges stem from the scope and size of the organization, the number of direct reports (especially the number of cascading direct reports).
For example, a pastor I’ve coached for several years has only 3 direct reports. But each of his direct reports has 3 to 5 team members reporting directly to him. And each of those team members is responsible for a team of staff (usually a handful of fulltime and part time employees) and/or a team of volunteers (anywhere between six and twenty-plus). Do the math and you’ll see that this pastor is responsible not just for a congregation of 1,500 worshippers, but a workforce of 150 people. All of those people represent a long list of issues and responsibilities that span practically every subject taught in a college: finance, human development, arts, capital management, real estate, psychology, communication, politics, local government, etc.
I’m tired just writing that paragraph! But hopefully the paragraph helps you see that a pastor of even a moderately-sized church must deal with an amazing array of issues. The challenges are on par with the complexity and rate of change faced by top-level leaders of national and multi-national companies. And that’s what I mean by “high-level leadership.” Now, back to Coachbook. One of the things in Coachbook that I found very helpful when coaching high-level leaders is a four-fold framework of the issues faced by leaders. Here are the four types of issues, listed in order of increasing complexity: puzzles, problems, dilemmas, and mysteries. According to the authors, as a leader’s responsibility increases, he or she will gradually face more high-complexity issues and fewer low-complexity ones.
If you coach leaders (or are a leader), you might find these distinctions helpful. Puzzles have answers. “Puzzles are the everyday issues that anyone working in an organization must face. They are uni-dimensional, in that they can be clearly defined and can readily be quantified or at least measured.”(14) In a congregation, leaders face all sorts of puzzles: the heating unit breaks down, the parking scheme needs to be reconfigured, a volunteer policy needs to be implemented, etc. Problems need solutions. “Problems can be differentiated from puzzles because there are multiple perspectives that can be applied when analyzing a problem, several possible solutions associated with any one problem and multiple criteria that can be applied to the evaluation of the potential effectiveness of any one solution. There are many more cognitive demands being placed on us when we confront problems than when we confront puzzles—given that problems do not have simple or single solutions.”(15) For pastors, problems come in many forms: What worship style is appropriate? How should limited budget resources beapplied to staffing?
Dilemmas are complicated and complex. “When certain issues that managers face appear impervious to a definitive solution, it becomes useful to classify them as dilemmas. While dilemmas like problems are complicated, they are also complex, in that each of the many elements embedded in the dilemmas is connected to each (or most) of the other elements. We may view the problem from one perspective and take action to alleviate one part of the problem, and we immediately confront another part of the problem, often represented by an opposing stakeholder group…” (16)
Worse still, leaders sometimes face nested dilemmas. Church leaders face dilemmas such as how to attract people to the church while striving to resist consumerism. Mysteries are the issues we must take to God. “Mysteries operate at a different level than puzzles, problems and dilemmas. Mysteries are too complex to understand and are ultimately unknowable.”(19) Mysteries have no outcome, no way forward and must be lived with. Mysteries involve not only our organization and those within the organization’s scope and influence, but elements beyond us. For example: How is it that I have my particular set of talents and gifts? Why did a tornado hit our church and not the one a block away? What made the difference in how my children turned out so different from one another?
In my next post, I want to explore this a bit further and connect this framework to one of the biggest challenges I see church leaders face.
What about you? What kinds of issues do you face? What examples do you have for each type of issue?
