Leading in Times of Crisis

Leading in Times of Crisis

While wandering the landscape of leadership, you will be sure to encounter crisis...and this Covid-19 pandemic is providing leaders a laboratory of experience & opportunity
 

In the initial days of any crisis, all eyes are on the crisis itself. Concern runs deep. Focus is on the people who are most affected. But then "someone" has to mobilize and deploy the resources needed to address the situation. Here is where leadership has to take the reins and the responsibility. In these kinds of situations, the decisions over how to help in a crisis are often themselves made in a context of crisis. Not all the information is at hand. Resources are not always fully in place. Yet action is needed. There is no perfect process, but the leader has to step up to the plate.

And here is where it gets interesting. Every time we watch the international response to massive disruptions like this pandemic, it only takes a few days for criticism to pour in over the leadership of the effort to deploy countermeasures. It's either not fast enough, or it's too slow, or not the right kind of help at the right time.

Funny how we all can lead so effectively from the chair in front of the TV.

Leading in a crisis is fraught with the competing expectations of multiple stakeholders in the process. What can you in that situation, do to provide strong leadership?  I offer 3 thoughts:

Slow down

Panic generates speed. The human fight or flight response is a naturally occurring defense mechanism and becomes our default response when we are faced with danger.   There is a certain 'mob mentality' that can take over when crisis hits.  Look at the world reaction to the financial crisis of Sept 2008 and what is happening now  (we will forever think of 2020 in humorous hindsight as the great toilet paper shortage). 

Left unchecked by good leadership actions, panic will naturally overwhelm the system.  Good leaders calm their own panic by deliberately slowing down their thinking, resisting the panic-reaction. Your brain is a stage and if there are too many actors on it, internal chaos ensues. Remove some of the actors. Clear your mental space of the clutter that comes with crisis so that you can order your thoughts when others' thoughts are in disarray.

Friends of mine in another business recently shared with me that leaders have been conditioned for forward motion and for advance; to always keep the wind in our sails. The idea of slowing down and coasting is perceived as sure defeat in a competitive, forward motion world. Yet there is a time when 'coasting' is actually a good thing. In fact, all of life is based on a principle of 'oscillation' - periods of growth combined with rest. Take a walk, get away with your team, physically move away from your current environment so you can center your thoughts.

Gain clarity

Gain clarity on 2 fronts:

1. The Facts. This is not just a matter of getting the facts, but then of accepting them. It does you and your employees/followers no good to deny what is going on. The people you lead are not naive. They can see the same landscape as you. You may know more of the details, you may be able to see farther, but you are not the only one 'in the know'.

2. The Future. This may be one of the best times for you to gain clarity on your personal and corporate purpose. Why?

◦ Purpose is both an anchor and a beacon. It holds us down in a storm and it directs us to the future. So, a crisis is a gut-check time. Is your personal purpose and your corporate purpose in sufficient alignment for you to lead with integrity? Are you anchored so as not to panic yet able to see the future with hope and confidence? You will lead with more confidence and competence when this alignment is in place.

◦ Retaining the energy, focus and effort of employees/followers in uncertain times depends more than you think on their connection with the long term vision and purpose of the organization. People decide on how much of themselves they will give to their work depending on the level to which they feel they are connected to something they believe in. A Harris Interactive poll quoted by Steven Covey in his book "The 8th Habit" indicated only 37% of workers have a clear understanding of the purpose of their organization. What do you think that does to productivity and effectiveness? A disconnect like this when crisis hits only further diminishes the very energy you need from your people to make it through a tough time! They are more likely to stay with you if they know you have both an anchor and a beacon. In uncertain times clarity on purpose creates certainty, (which translates to loyalty) and hope (which leads to forward energy).

Communicate

“Communicate deeply but quickly. In times of crisis people's fears matter to an organization even more than they should during “normal” times. If everybody in an organization believes they are on a sinking boat, they will disengage - thus increasing the vulnerability and accelerating the downward spiral of the organization.”(Holger Nauheimer, 2008, The Change Management Newsletter)

Nauheimer also declares that truly transformational leaders will walk the talk in front of their people, demonstrating what it means to wrestle with reality, make tough decisions and communicate them wisely. Your actions will inspire them to make wise decisions too. Have regular, short meetings with different groups within your organization. Tell them what you are doing to address issues. Get feedback on how your actions to address uncertainty are working. Encourage honesty and transparency so that you can hear their opinions and ideas. This process though 'labour-intensive', will increase confidence and loyalty within your teams. You might want to consider using an external facilitator to help with communications. During times of crises or uncertainty, people tend be guided by their assumptions. It is difficult internally to challenge those perspectives. An external, strictly impartial facilitator can help to map out different assumptions and guide teams to productive outcomes.

Conclusion:

Concerning the advance of human discovery throughout history, Daniel Boorstin in his book The Discoverers concluded that “the greatest barrier to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge”. A leader's current ignorance of the strategies needed to navigate uncertainty or crisis is not the final factor determining success or failure. Believing you already know what there is to know is the greatest danger because it blocks you from the learning needed to create new solutions for new conditions.
 

Leading though a crisis will stir up the pot of competing expectations. People will always criticize your decisions. Lead anyway. 

The people IN THE CRISIS matter more than the people "calling the play from the couch".

Leadership Power and Insecurity

Its incredible what power does to a leaders' ability and readiness to see the future.  You'd think that 'seeing forward' and leading others there is the hallmark of leadership.  Not always.

The Bible has a story (many actually) that demonstrates this.  In the face of an obvious miracle that demonstrated the power of a new movement at hand, Jewish leadership called in the upstarts to warn them to suppress things.  What was going on was getting disruptive to the system they lead (managed).  Read the story in the book of Acts, chapter 4.  They were only concerned about self-protection and thwarting any new thing that might change the game and negatively impact the security of their system and the positions they played in it.

The tendency to protect what is, continues to show up in leaders today.  Need I point out the too-numerous contemporary examples from politics to religion?

Ironic - it's the leaders who are often the last ones on board, because they are the first ones to think about how change will affect the security of their power and status.

If you are a leader - are you actually leading?

Changing How the World Works

I am growing weary of mission rhetoric. My thinking on what defines and comprises “mission” is definitely morphing. I grew up in an evangelical environment that was very much about ‘telling’ the story to the ‘regions beyond’. Perhaps like many of you. It wasn't world-changing.  Mostly about changing eternal addresses.

Along the lifetime of my ministry I have encountered my own and the broader church’s narrowness of engagement with broader culture, defined largely by those encounters that would lead to conversions or church attendance. Church mission-rhetoric may be to “love the world as Jesus loves”, or to be "focused on the lost”, but when push comes to shove, the metrics behind whether to keep a program or engagement going is what ultimately reveals the narrow definition of your ‘mission’.

I am a lowly voice among many writers and thinkers who are trying to yell at the church and show a “new, but not new” understanding of the Missio Dei, which embraces all things in this world as the arena for the restorative force of Gods’ Kingdom. After all, it is ‘all things’ that Christ intends to reconcile to Himself (Colossians 1:20).

How engaged are we with ‘all things’ as defining the mission of God?

The power of God to restore the world is in the loving acts of engagement with the world as it is, in order to see it become what He intends for it. We have a grand and just cause that moves far beyond ‘crossing the line’ to Jesus’ side and enjoying spiritual renewal, to a lifestyle that lives out the ways of the Kingdom of God in front of our society. It’s in that living that the power of the Gospel is experienced by the world. That power is not located exclusively through inner renewal or spiritual insight (which much of the church’s energy is dedicated to provide), but it is in the encounter between the Christ in us and the people and systems of this world.

This is how the early church transformed the world. It was not through evangelistic forays into people groups, but via societal engagements that clearly showed and offered a way of being that stood in an appealing contrast to the surrounding society [1]. Christians lived then, as we do now, within an understanding they were part of a new society, an alternate Kingdom. We live by the rules and ways of that Kingdom, which when expressed in word and deed, cannot help but interact with social, economic and political systems. (How can you read your Gospels and not see this embedded in the words and ways of Jesus?). We are to be part of a social revolution that is the direct (and inevitable) result of a Kingdom way of being. The eventual institutionalization of the early movement of the emerging church (the fate of all movements if they don’t die off completely), has had the effect of walling off this new societal revolution and instead has created some doors for entry, but which now require certain types of keys to gain entry.

We, the community of Christ on this earth will always be in tension over the radical movement outward into the world and the urge to consolidate our efforts into the institutional structures and thinking of the church. Believe me, after all I have said when I say this: May the tension never leave us. It’s the intention of the gift-mix Jesus gave to the leadership functions of the church. The apostles, prophets and evangelists are given to call us out of our consolidating tendencies so that we remain focused on living out this new society called the Kingdom in front of (and sometimes as an affront to) the world. Life calls to life. The shepherds and teachers ground us and keep reminding us that Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. But rue the days, as we are in now, when we as the Christ-community settle and merely ‘send off’ the apostles, prophets and evangelists to do their work elsewhere (e.g. to “missions”, or para-church organizations, or local social agencies, or to ‘be a light’ in their jobs), while shepherds and teachers keep the non-profit wheels running and people in the pews to pay for the programs & staff that justifies our corporate existence.

This dichotomy, left unchallenged when all 5 gifts are not informing mission, reinforces to the watching world that the gathered church is NOT a new society living according to new ways of being, but has taken its place alongside other religions of choice, establishing organizational structures for maintaining loyalty and meaning for insiders.

The world is transformed by those who show up.










 Harv Matchullis


[1] For an historical look at the sociological reasons for the church’s significant advance to become 50% of the known world by AD 300, read Rodney Starks’ “The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries”

The Passage

We all enter this passage. Until then, we peer at it, contemplate it, fear it.

Every one of us will observe people walking this way before we ever step foot on that path.  But when we do, it's a final walk.

I watched my father on this passage 44 years ago.  A painful walk.  Now I watch my mother.  Her journey is soon to end.

Death is so common. You would think that such a common experience among humanity would historically have elicited something different than grief. Since we ALL go through it and have done so during our entire history, would it not be more natural and sensible and evolutionary, to be more matter-of-fact about it? We are born, we live, we die. Repeat for every human. As far as losing someone, hey, there are plenty of human companions to take the place of one who walked that final passage.

Why is it then that we feel this gaping hole in our chest when we lose someone we love?  I can remember thinking for decades after my dads' death that perhaps he was just 'lost' and would walk through the door any moment.  What a bizarre hope.  Really I don't care what someone thinks. I am 60 and still miss him.  Now, it's my mother.  While my head understands the reality of death and in her case, the progression of cancer, my heart is being ripped open.

The reason death is ALWAYS so hard is because it was never designed into us.  I believe in a Divine Creator who made us for eternal life.  We were not made for death - and that is why death is so 'unnatural' to us. We grieve not just because of the loss of presence, we grieve because deep in our visceral soul, we face the most unnatural event of the human experience - its end.

You and I will walk this passage as my mother walks it now. It ends in death. No one escapes. But I say to you that there is another passage you can access on this side of life that will usher you back to the original plan of God.  The still living and very real Jesus Christ offers us a way of living that returns us to the original plan of God.

Talk to me if you want to know more.

For now, I'm helping my mom on the final part of her passage here.  And when she is done, she has a new passage to walk.  But it still hurts like hell.

Mysterious Faith Meets Real World

Have you read Sapiens by historian Yuval Harari? He subtitled his book: “A Brief History of Humankind”. How humble.  His is a pure humanist POV that views anything not originating from a biological imperative as a myth or an imagined reality, created to help keep some sense of order in a society.  My faith included.  Jesus & Christianity is merely a myth.

His arguments got me wondering about my faith.  As I pondered his theories of culture and religion, and then my reasons for following the Way of Jesus, I concluded that if I looked at all the religious & faith options available to me in the world,  I am actually not sure I would pick Christianity! How would I know which one was true?  Better to live by my own rules.

Yet I cannot escape faith and belief.  I have tried. 

Faith calls to me even in my doubt and when life makes no sense whatsoever.   My most profound encounter with this was when I lead an international church in Phnom Penh Cambodia in the 1990’s.  It was barely post-Khmer Rouge. The church was comprised mostly of relief and development workers. Every day they worked with a traumatized people.  Their MAIN issue week in and week out was:  “How could God have endured and allowed the pain and horror that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on these people?  Where was God?”. Christian platitudes from a pastor were not helpful in those moments.  I had to wrestle down the ‘why’ of my faith to its purest essence.

It’s such a messed up world isn’t it?  A hard one in which to maintain faith & hope in anything.  Evil threatens to break the dike built by human good and decency. The dike has so many holes in it there’s not enough of us to plug them.  So, why should I believe in a God who lets this world get so messed up? Why would I choose to plug the holes in the dike? Why not just pull away from it all and let it be?

So I ask myself, and you, “What or who, keeps you in the game of following Jesus”?

The only answer I have is that faith as a gift.  If it came down to being dependent on creating and sustaining personal reasons to remain engaged as a Christian, I would have given up long ago.  I have endured too much personal pain and have seen too much evil in my lifetime for that formula to keep me in the game.

The gift of faith does not and cannot come from within.  Someone gives it.  

If you and I have faith in Jesus it is because that is God’s gift.  It is a deep, often unexplainable confidence that keeps my eyes focused on God in the face of so much that rails against even the existence of a God. The Bible says that without faith, we can’t please God.  It’s also made clear we can’t work our way to God, therefore He gives us the faith we need to come close to Him.  And sometimes, like the manna the Israelites had to collect each morning, we too have to pick up our faith, enough for each day.

This is both a humbling and an astounding mystery, so counter-intuitive to the quid-pro-quo economy of the human mind. We have what we have been given.  No effort.  No status produced this.  Why some get the gift and others don’t is also a mystery, and will remain so because since it’s a gift, it’s up to the Giver.

If this gift of faith is an undeserved grace, is there any reason then to bother engaging this faith with the world?  Any reason for 'evangelism'?  Any purpose in passing on the faith? 

YES

Faith being a gift of God releases us from trying to convince others to take the gift.  It’s not ours to give.  We are released from placing heavy  ‘save the world’  burdens on ourselves and are freed instead to live according to our faith in a way that “will make the teaching of God our Saviour attractive” (Titus 2:10).  Hebrews 11:6 says that without faith we can’t possibly connect to God - and that to even receive faith you need to believe that He exists and that He cares enough to respond to those who are open to seek after Him.

So the BIG question is whether there is anything to convince others of a reason to believe that God even exists.  What would make the teaching of God our Saviour attractive?

That’s where love enters.  God is love.  If so, then where’s the love?

·       You can create the most articulate argument for God and belief, but if LOVE, the very essence of God is not evident, how will anyone even believe there is a gift-giving God?  However if a person sees and feels love, belief in a God is perhaps possible.  If the thought of a God who loves is possible, then seeking after that God is possible, and then the gift of faith is possible.

Faith is not in your control.  It’s a gift of God.

Love however, is in your control.  It’s a gift you can give.

Mourning Your Transitions

Have you mourned the things you left behind, left undone, or that left you?

Whether your transition is job loss, loss of a dream, inability to complete an important assignment, leaving something (someone) behind to obtain work or a dream or any other form of loss - have you mourned it?

I write this on my last day of "unemployment" after ending a ministry last January. Tomorrow, May 31st I fly to Toronto for 2 weeks to begin my new role as Director of Candidate Recruitment & Development for the C&MA in Canada. I will be based in Calgary but will be travelling a fair bit with this role. My responsibility is to oversee the processes that recruit and prepare the people who serve in international/cross cultural contexts.

It was not until a few days ago, in the midst of a final formal review to assess the leadership and organizational lessons learned during my time as leader of the ministry I left behind, that I finally grieved the loss.

I lamented
I mourned

I felt sorrow
And now I finally feel free to move on.

Up until this moment my processing has been a mix of 'suck it up and end well', of rationalization, disappointment & acceptance. Lot's of 'head stuff'. Only recently did my heart mourn the loss of what was. I discovered something in my 'lament' - that until you mourn, you cannot move on. The Lord truly met me in the 'mourning' and today I finally feel released to close the door on what was and open the new one as of tomorrow. I actually feel physically and emotionally lighter. I am now unchained from what I carried sub-consciously. Closing a door does not mean forgetting relationships, lessons or even pain, but it does release your spirit to move freely into what is next.

Whatever you are leaving behind in your transition, know this - while your heart mourns and you release the sorrow deep within, God will strengthen you to hold onto the good things done, experienced and learned. Then let the freedom gained via mourning reign, so you can move into what is next.

I leave you with this thought that has encouraged me as I think about what was and what could have been:

God carries on what I cannot. Rest in that and open the next door.

Harv

Landing the Career Plane

June 1 2019.  That's the day I start a new career.

I did not choose to make a career shift at age 60, but there I was.  I am generally quite positive and hopeful; a dreamer by nature, but quite frankly I found the prospect of finding a job at my age intimidating.  Ageism is out there and I had no idea if I would encounter it as I searched for employment.  Something else I encountered out there (or should I say 'in there'), are the limiting beliefs about age that you allow to rent space in your head.

Let me start off by stating that my age and experience were actually to my advantage in the role I just acquired. They honoured that and in fact it was part of their search parameters.  I am a fortunate man. 

During this process I discovered some things about myself and making a career decision at this age. 

First, I had to deal with the competing internal narratives of what I knew I could bring to the table because of accumulated life experience and knowledge VS. insecurities about my age.  This competing discourse was loudest when I sought roles outside my career field but within the scope of my experience.  At times I felt less confident than a new graduate (at least they have naivete on their side!).  In the end the answer was inside of me.  I had to put on my big boy pants and get out there. 

Secondly, this thing about finding 'passion' and excitement in your career, while it rang true in my earlier career shifts, wasn't factoring prominently in this decision making process.  People I involved in the process would sometimes ask me: "Harv - are you excited about this potential role"?  My honest response was: "I'm not sure yet".  This lack of excitement actually had me worried that perhaps this wasn't the job for me after all.  Yet everything I knew & learned about the role and its' possibilities made it an excellent fit.  My mentors and advisors strongly affirmed me.  My mind was 100% there.  So, where was my heart? Where was this 'passion' thing?

I liken the experience of career decision making at this age vs. earlier decades as the difference between an aircraft take-off and landing.  In your earlier years, you are the pilot of your own career.  When you take off (numerous times for most of us) you have a wide open sky in front of you.  The possibilities, while not endless are exciting. Yes, you have a flight plan, but as conditions change you can shift.  There is time in your life and space in your career trajectory for course corrections.  However, now at age 60 I was thinking more like this:

"I'm about to land this plane. There's one runway.  Is this the runway where I want to land my life experience?"

The reality of your 'career age' changes the way you make decisions.  Sure, passion is a part of it, but now you are more contemplative, reflective and wise precisely because of your age.  Decisions are less about self-fulfillment and more about legacy, succession and finding a place where you can build into the best system or foundation for whomever comes next behind you.

A final word on this thing about 'passion' & finding self-fulfillment in our careers.  That is a luxury the majority of this world cannot afford.  For most, work is a function of survival, not fulfillment.  That I have work at all is a blessing.  That I get to do something I love and that will contribute is a profound privilege.