COMMENTARY: Weak Leadership All Around Us

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Consider this small incident as a lens for looking at leadership: We are driving to Easter worship. The car chugs and dies. I pull off the road. My wife and I assess the situation. Could be fuel supply. We agree that I will walk home to get another car […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Consider this small incident as a lens for looking at leadership:

We are driving to Easter worship. The car chugs and dies. I pull off the road. My wife and I assess the situation. Could be fuel supply. We agree that I will walk home to get another car and some gasoline.


Others might decide differently. The point isn’t achieving a perfect plan, but how we go about it.

Three key elements: First, once the immediate crisis is handled, we assess the situation before acting. Second, we work together and openly. Third, our concern is for the good of the whole.

I get it wrong about as often as I get it right. But I have learned, partly through my own mistakes, that healthy leadership will generally contain these three elements: thoughtful assessment, shared and transparent process, and seeking the good of the whole. Not only will better decisions be made, but the led will follow with confidence and trust.

As I look around, I am dismayed by the current state of leadership. Not bad decisions, necessarily, but weak leaders and self-serving process.

In my city’s dysfunctional school board, for example, a board member quietly crafts a plan and then is amazed that those shut out of her problem-solving process don’t accept her solution. Meanwhile, some board members grandstand for political advantage, forgetting whose interests they serve.

Once the immediacy of Sept. 11 gave way to action-planning, politicians sought to exploit the situation. Rather than assess strategic vulnerabilities, leaders deployed long-simmering ideas about suspending habeas corpus, spying on citizens and going to war to enhance worldwide stature.

Or so it appeared. Because plans were drafted secretly and then rushed into practice, many citizens instinctively distrusted the plans. Calculation of advantage isn’t the same as thoughtful assessment. A closed and overly hyped process feeds distrust. Hiding outcomes from public scrutiny feeds distrust. That distrust will do more damage to the commonweal than poor decisions or heated debate.

Weak leadership has dogged the final days of Terri Schiavo. Sensing advantage in the cultural wars, politicians and religious leaders climbed on board the family’s divisions, ratcheting up the stakes and pitting citizens against each other. Instead of thoughtful assessment, we see stampeded congressmen, crowd-pleasing executives and an increasingly strident chorus of ideologues shouting “Murderer!” Meanwhile, the good of the whole is lost, not to mention a woman’s right to die with dignity.


Weak leadership typically spawns doubts about motive. “What are they up to?” “What will they do to us next?”

Weak leadership encourages blaming, scapegoating and grandiose assertions. Those behaviors, in turn, kill debate, undermine community and, in the end, produce followers who are fickle and vengeful.

Organized religion is plagued by weak leadership. I don’t mean holding different opinions from mine, or operating within different ecclesiastical systems. I mean weak. I see too much secrecy, conflict avoidance and manipulation. I see too much name-calling. I see partisans lobbing grenades, rather than thoughtfully considering the whole. I see decisions made but not explained, actions taken but not evaluated, outcomes hidden or denied. I see more zeal for control than for consensus, more fear of losing than curiosity about options, more eagerness to exploit discord than to heal wounds.

As a result, our congregations and judicatories are seething with distrust and discontent. Whose motives can be trusted? Whose data is honest? The outcomes are mediocrity, withdrawal, lethargy.

My fear is that weak leadership at the political level will turn ugly and destructive, resulting in significant losses of freedom, and our faith communities will be too weak to recognize danger, too fragmented to imagine the good of the whole, and too self-serving to stand against actual forces of darkness, as opposed to doctrinal foes.

MO/PH RNS END

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His forthcoming book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” will be published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)


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