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Posts from the ‘Leadership’ Category

Dec 21

Accountability and Responsibility

In one of my last posts I wrote about the need to let go of an insistence upon having to enforce ”accountability and responsibility” in religious expression.  This seems a constant theme of mine these days, but it cannot let me go.

For me this derives from a hyper-awareness of the abuses of spiritual language of the recent past.  Ministers convinced that they were responsible to no one but themselves taking sexual advantage of vulnerable, hurting parishioners come to mind.  People who want to take advantage of the church to pursue their own spiritual quest but who don’t want to give anything in return is another constant theme.  Those who do not wish to be in community because they don’t wish to have anything about them challenged is another category. Read more

Dec 12

4 Comments

“Moving from Polity to Purpose”

I had the privilege of witnessing a profound conversation with my colleagues in the Pacific Western Region.  They were talking about what it would take to really shift our culture away from holding on to “this is mine” to “we are called to serve a larger vision.”  They named it powerfully as “moving from polity to purpose.”

What excites me most about our move toward regionalization is not so much that we can create new and interesting structures, but that this transition helps us uncover a deeper charge of culture change that asks us to claim a larger purpose of serving the larger world, not just “ourselves.” Read more

Oct 10

What Good is Expertise?

In one of my recent posts I talked about how offering expertise may not be the most helpful strategy of leadership.  So what use is expertise at all then, many of you asked me (with not a little frustration!)  It’s a good question, and I’ve been stewing on it for weeks.

The recent reflections about the life of Steve Jobs have given me some perspective. Jobs certainly never eschewed expertise.  He didn’t wait for people to tell him what they were looking for to make their lives easier.  As many have said, he decided what would be helpful and then marketed it to convince people how much they needed it.  But, and this is a big but, he used his expertise to create something new that people could then participate in co-creating.  The whole concept of open-sourcing apps has engaged people in a common enterprise that is not pre-determined.  Apple didn’t tell people the kinds of apps they could develop – they created a platform on which infinite ideas could be explored. Read more

Sep 8

9 Comments

The Pendulum is Swinging

I have recently become aware of a cultural pendulum swinging in Unitarian Universalist culture.

Ministers like me who have been around at least twenty years were strongly schooled in the notion that we needed to bring order out of chaos.  Our highly egalitarian and inclusive cultures growing out of the “anything goes” culture of the 60’s and 70’s had created a situation in which it often felt like we were just chasing our tails and not able to make progress (or even decisions!)  Remember all the jokes about herding cats?  What was needed, we believed, was an ability to structure our work with appropriate authority and definitiveness. Read more

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