I’m often surprised at the disconnect that we clergy have from our congregation in several areas. One I see especially seems counterintuitive. We go to conferences to feed our own growth about spirituality and faith, and then fail to share those very things with our congregations. It seems that we somehow assume that the faith of our congregants, and the ways it needs to be nurtured, is somehow different from ours. Similarly, we get coaching to help us gain perspective, learn, and function better, and then we don’t see the connection that we should do likewise with our congregational leaders.
During a recent consultation with a pastor I recommended that he function as a coach to the elders in the church, who were the most mature and non-reactive persons in the system in the midst of a crisis. He said that he’d never thought about functioning in that capacity for his congregational leaders, even though he himself has for years sought out coaching to help him function better.
This can make a good experiment for learning to function differently and to follow those basic systems principles for the leader as coach:
- The leader is the regulator for health in the system. Therefore, he or she invests in the most mature persons in the system—those capable of learning, growing, and changing their ways of functioning
- The leader solicits health and maturity through challenge. When you issue a challenge, those who can be assets to the system will step up (and those who are either benign or liabilities are quickly identified)
- Work with, and invest in, the most motivated. Trying to get people to change can tip us into a willful posture. Willfulness is what does the harm in any system and is the quickest route to getting stuck.
- The leader as coach shares information and educates. This helps provide perspective, foster imagination, and facilitates shifts in patterns of thinking.
Sometimes leaders need to do two things at the same time: containing the pathogens while cultivating the strengths and resources for health of the system. Edwin Friedman has some good material on the leader as coach in Generation to Generation. I address that concept in the book The Hidden Lives of Congregations in chapters 8 to 10. And on page 196 there is a section titled “Focus on Coaching and Consulting†that describes this aspect of pastoral leadership.
