PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Bigstock/Natasa Adzic
LEADERS CAN OFFER A DISTINCTIVE GIFT TO THOSE WHO FOLLOW
To cultivate trust, leaders must contribute to a sense of safety, commit themselves to listening, empower others to act, learn from their mistakes, and promise only what they can deliver, writes the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
One of the pleasant surprises about being a church consultant in the late 20th century was that, for many churches, the low trust among congregants exhibited before hiring the consultant transformed into remarkably high trust in the consultant as they shared stories of pain and loss. All the participants, on every side, assumed that the consultant would see the situation their way. This perspective made getting people to talk very easy.Once people had a chance to tell their stories to a stranger, they began to discover what was really important to them. The consultant’s work, then, was figuring out how to get people to listen to each other, across the sides into which they were divided. Congregants could remember a time when they felt listened to; the consultant’s work was to recover that kind of relationship.
Today, many people in the United States don’t remember a time when they were heard. Some feel that the American economy and society have left them far behind. Others have been silenced for generations, their stories missing from history books and media coverage. As a result, many increasingly believe that they can be understood only by people like themselves. People not like themselves are dangerous. For protection, some people hide, while others lash out.
In this moment, engendering trust -- in one’s leadership and within one’s community -- is among the leader’s most important and difficult acts. Recently, a college dean told me that academic leadership is now all about trust. She was a tenured professor at a prestigious university before being recruited to lead 500 faculty members in the elite undergraduate school of a rival institution. In her brief tenure, she has realized that her standing as a scholar and the prestige of the school have contributed little to her being effective.
Trust is built on a foundation of credibility and transparency. But trust also requires a sense of safety. Today’s leaders can contribute to colleagues’ feeling safe, but factors outside their influence can create a feeling of danger. The impact of systemic oppression that has kept people at the margins of organizations, communities and society is now being named more clearly for those in power. Marginalized people have always known they are not safe; more privileged people now feel unsafe as well.
For the last 25 years, I have been a department director in two different large organizations. In each case, the department was an island within a larger organization, with its own particular mission, specific audience and dedicated funding. I have seen part of my job as protecting my colleagues from the “politics” of the larger organization and the funders. I have treated the organization and funders like sponsors. We have fulfilled their requirements while focusing our creative energy on understanding and responding to our specific audience’s needs.
It is no longer possible for a single leader to provide such protection. Each person must have the opportunity to name his or her vulnerabilities in multiple places. All employees or participants must contribute to the sense of safety over time.
My first experience with this sort of responsibility came as a freshly minted consultant. After a long meeting, a lay leader pulled me aside and said, “If you were assisting my company, I would fire you. We trust you more than we trust ourselves. Don’t promise what you cannot deliver. We need you to be dependable.”
The lay leader had hired many consultants over the years. He could see that I was focused on designing a good process to help the congregation after being betrayed by its pastor. But he wanted me to see that while process might be important to me, the church community needed to place their confidence in me and experience my confidence in them. They did not trust themselves to have difficult conversations alone and needed me to bridge this gap of trust.
Every leader faces a similar situation today. Any action is subject to scrutiny. Any situation can become one primarily about trust. We must pay attention to both the presenting challenge and its emotional consequences.
How can leaders do this?
- Put safety-building first. Analyze every situation through the lens of how its resolution could increase or decrease safety.
- Listen, listen, listen. What are colleagues and constituents saying? What feelings are underneath the words? What is the history behind the concern? Listen for systemic injustice that often underlies a concern.
- Empower action. Given the multiple and deep causes of the challenges people are facing, the leader is not the only person who can or should act. Consider how you might empower others to address the situation.
- Name mistakes and lessons learned. Learn from others about the impact of the mistake. Apologize.
- Don’t promise what you cannot deliver. Name your intentions and the limits. Keep pushing on the limits.
Read more from David Odom »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Episode 3: Albert Reyes on how working for Sprint prepared him for ministry
CAN THESE BONES PODCAST: ALBERT REYES
In this episode of “Can These Bones,” co-host Bill Lamar talks with Albert Reyes, the president and CEO of Buckner International, about what Christian leaders should learn about management.
Albert Reyes worked in a Sprint call center, then moved up the ladder at the telecommunications company. Since then, as president of Baptist University of the Américas and now at Buckner International, he's applied what he learned. Leadership, management, budgeting -- none of these were taught in seminary, but all have come in handy in ministry, he tells co-host Bill Lamar. He talks about following the mission of Buckner's founder, learning to lead, and why he doesn't have a leadership style of his own. He also reflects on his own spiritual practices -- even for those weeks when he's not in church.
This episode is part of a series. Learn more about Can These Bones or learn how to subscribe to a podcast.
Listen and subscribe
More from Albert Reyes
Buckner International
“The Jesus Agenda: Becoming an Agent of Redemption”
Faith & Leadership: “Living into a new vision,” by Lynn Gosnell, on Baptist University of the Américas and Reyes’ role in its transformation
Recommended management books:
“The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter,” by Michael Watkins
“Summoned to Lead,” by Leonard Sweet
“The Way of the Shepherd: Seven Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People,” by Kevin Leman and William Pentak
“The Advantage,” by Patrick Lencioni
“Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called ‘Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A,’” by Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge
“Leading Cross-Culturally: Covenant Relationships for Effective Christian Leadership,” by Sherwood G. Lingenfelter
“The Jesus Agenda: Becoming an Agent of Redemption”
Faith & Leadership: “Living into a new vision,” by Lynn Gosnell, on Baptist University of the Américas and Reyes’ role in its transformation
Recommended management books:
“The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter,” by Michael Watkins
“Summoned to Lead,” by Leonard Sweet
“The Way of the Shepherd: Seven Ancient Secrets to Managing Productive People,” by Kevin Leman and William Pentak
“The Advantage,” by Patrick Lencioni
“Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called ‘Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A,’” by Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge
“Leading Cross-Culturally: Covenant Relationships for Effective Christian Leadership,” by Sherwood G. Lingenfelter
Transcript
Bill Lamar: From Faith & Leadership, this is “Can These Bones,” a podcast that asks a fresh set of questions about leadership and the future of the church. I’m Bill Lamar.
Laura Everett: And I’m Laura Everett. This is episode 3 of a series of conversations with leaders from the church and other fields. Through this podcast, we want to share our hope in the resurrection and perhaps breathe life into leaders struggling in the “valley of dry bones.”
Bill, our guest today is Albert Reyes, president and CEO of Buckner International, a global Christian ministry serving children and senior adults. He came to this position through a circuitous route. You spoke with him -- talk a little about Albert’s background.
Bill Lamar: Albert Reyes was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. He said he felt a call to ministry while he was very young -- in high school. His parents had not gone to college, so his first thought was that he would be able to go to seminary straight out of high school. When his pastor told him that he would need a college degree first, he decided not to study ministry but to study business.
That led to a career at Sprint, where he led call centers. And later he ascended to the presidency of the Baptist University of the Américas in San Antonio, where he led a turnaround of that school. And now, of course, Albert Reyes is the CEO of Buckner International in Dallas, Texas.
Laura Everett: Let’s hear more of his story and Albert Reyes’ work at Buckner.
Bill Lamar: You’re listening to “Can These Bones.” This is Bill Lamar, and joining me is Dr. Albert Reyes, who leads Buckner, an amazing ministry that does great work in the world, and we’ll say more about it. Dr. Reyes, welcome to “Can These Bones.”
Albert Reyes: Thank you.
Bill Lamar: Buckner is known, Dr. Reyes, as a powerhouse of global ministry. Can you share with us what it is you share with others when you are seeking to acquaint them very specifically with the work of Buckner?
Albert Reyes: Well, you know, it’s a very complex organization, but to kind of break it down, it really is born out of a scripture that our founder, Robert Cooke Buckner, focused on right after the Civil War.
It’s James 1:27 -- that pure religion that the Father accepts is to serve orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself undefiled from the world. In that verse are the two objects of our mission: orphans and seniors, or widows. And so we talk in terms of vulnerable children and their families, as well as senior adults.
We have a senior adult division that’s primarily --actually, only -- in Texas, five different cities, and then the children-and-families part of our work is throughout Texas, but also in six countries outside the U.S., primarily in the Western Hemisphere, south of the border. So we would talk about Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Mexico and then across the ocean in Kenya.
There are 150 million orphans around the world. And we just -- the need is so great to respond to children that don’t have a family that we do the best we can in the places where we serve through donor support to provide services for children and families that really, really struggle to survive, actually.
Bill Lamar: Tell me what you learned working at a call center for Sprint. What did you learn there that you carry with you into the space of president and CEO of Buckner?
Albert Reyes: Well, that was such a fun experience. We were -- I learned so many things. First, I’m sitting in college thinking, “When am I ever going to use this, Lord?” And just trusting that someday, somehow I would take what I was learning and be able to apply it to ministry.
And so I began with Sprint. And back then, we were just getting off the ground. It was a privately held company, but over the duration of my time there, we became a publicly traded company with an initial stock offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
So just getting a business education in management, at Angelo State, I couldn’t foresee that it would prepare me to be in a startup company that is publically traded.
I started off in sales, and that was OK. I realized -- I learned that that’s not really what I’m good at doing. I know other people that are just fantastic, and they love it, you know; I was really more in the problem-solving side of things. So I migrated over to customer service. And one thing I learned is a lot of curse words that I didn’t know existed.
[Laughter]
Bill Lamar: Would you care to share any of those with us?
Albert Reyes: I’ve tried to forget most of them! But people wouldn’t call customer service and say, “I just want you to know today, everything’s working fine,” you know? They only call when there’s a problem. So call after call after call. And it was really a great service, but we had our days where things weren’t working right and customers had a reason to be upset.
But we are the company that did, at Sprint, the coast-to-coast fiber-optic call, the first in the nation. We picked up a telephone receiver in New York and one in LA and dropped a pin, a straight pin, on a desk, and you actually could hear the pin drop, the quality was so good. So I was proud to be a part of that.
And working through customer service, and converting the customers from the rotary dial and all the codes that you used to dial to fully digital fiber-optic network calls was just a really exciting place to be and to grow with the company, and to get involved.
One of the things that we did, if I were to point to something I learned, is -- we called it MBA. Our leaders called it “management by alignment.”
And we would, once a year, get all the midlevel managers all the way up through the senior executives and create a vision and a strategy and the way we were going to take on Ma Bell and knock MCI out of the pack, you know, and just be the winners, you know? And we would have engineering and sales and marketing and customer service and all the major divisions together to agree what each department was going to do or not do in order for our success.
And I really learned a lot from just watching how senior leaders worked and how they would disagree and resolve conflict for the shareholder and for the profit that we would bring forward. And so a lot of things that I learned in my college education I was able to apply immediately.
And actually, the truth is that many of those skills I learned helped me to survive as a pastor. Because in seminary, you know, we studied a lot of disciplines and a lot of important things that helped me to be equipped, but there weren’t courses on management and administration and planning and strategic initiatives, and all the things that I learned in practice after my college education.
I realized that a church is a 501(c)(3); it’s a nonprofit organization, and it has budgets and processes and people and resources and goals, and everything that a business has, except that it’s ministry. And I found that to be a tremendous strength for me, because, you know, you deal with a church council and deacons and conflict.
I know that, at least in Texas, pastors get terminated every week, and the reason -- the top three reasons that I’ve learned are that a pastor doesn’t know how to manage or the pastor doesn’t know how to lead or the pastor does not know how to get along with other people.
And those things you have to do in a business. You have to manage things and lead it somewhere, and you’ve got to get along with people; otherwise, you won’t be there very long.
[Sprint] was not a religious or spiritual or Christian environment, so I got to see the real world as it is, and I thought that was very helpful for me. I’ve been in business before, so it wasn’t really anything new, but it helped me get in touch with what people in the pew go through every week.
I know other peers that -- they went to college and studied Bible, then they went to seminary and studied theology, and then they became a pastor, but they never really got their fingers dirty or got into the nitty-gritty of life and faced having to terminate someone or be terminated or to solve a problem that meant a difference with a company surviving.
So that helped me get in touch with, hey, these are the people that are -- they could stay in bed Sunday, but they’re getting up and they’re coming up here, and this better be good for them. Because they need to be encouraged and learn how to live out their faith in the workplace, and there might be problems at work, at home.
So it was a very good baptism into the pastorate.
Bill Lamar: You mentioned something that I think would be helpful for us. You talked about a number of persons in ministry who are not acquainted with tools of management, dealing with human resources, budgets, finances. For persons who sense that to be a growing edge in their work in ministry, what would you recommend to them that they might gain proficiency?
Albert Reyes: Buckner is a social service missions agency, and for the majority of our time, we’ve been basically social service. So naturally, the people who are experts that come to Buckner to work with senior adults or with children and families are trained in the skill and theories of social work.
The issue that becomes kind of problematic, which I think would relate to pastors and people in vocational ministry, is that once they do a really good job, then we would like for them to be promoted to then supervise people who deliver frontline services where those skills are important.
If they do a good job supervising, then we want them to manage or become a director over people who manage people who deliver services.
And you know, two or three promotions into it -- and of course everybody would like to have upward mobility and grow in their position -- I often point out that, “Hey, you used to deliver frontline services, but now you’re managing people who manage people who manage services to clients.”
And so I tell our staff that once you get into the management ranks, you’re going to have to eat up every book in management that you can find, and here’s a list I’d recommend.
If you can, then I would consider maybe taking some management courses, either not accredited or accredited, you know, continuing education or maybe an MBA degree. Because once you get into -- for example, with Buckner, we have a $115 million budget, you know, we’re in six countries, and 1,400 staff, and whether we’re serving seniors or whether we’re serving children, everything we’re managing requires a skill, a skill set.
You’re managing through people, our greatest resource.
So unfortunately, the social work curriculums that I’ve seen -- and the theological curriculums I’ve actually taken -- do not focus on management and leadership. I think some of the seminaries are starting to offer a course in leadership, but that really hadn’t been the case in the past.
I have 90 hours in an M.Div. degree, with not a single course in leadership or management. There was one in administration. And I’m grateful for my seminary education at Southwestern Seminary; it’s fantastic, and if you want to talk about Greek and Hebrew and preaching and theology and hermeneutics, it’s all good, but management wasn’t part of that.
Then when I took the doctor of ministry, I requested from the faculty to study leadership, and the answer was, “We don’t teach that here.” And I said, “I know; that’s why I’m asking you. Because I think I’m going to need to know more about leadership in a ministry context.”
They did allow me to do an independent study, and I studied leadership styles of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels and tried to do a comparative analysis to study leadership in that context.
So I would say to people, you know, once you start becoming responsible for a business unit or a management group or an area of responsibility, you really need to do some continuing education and maybe even take a degree or learn on the job or somehow be efficient with the assignment that you have and that you’re accountable to the Lord for.
Bill Lamar: Can you say something about transformation? You have participated in the transformation of organizations. What are your thoughts on transformation as you consider that having been a pastor, a university president, and now the leader of a substantial nonprofit? What does transformation mean?
Albert Reyes: I think that as I began to work in organizations, even church planting, and then existing churches that needed to transition to survive and even possibly thrive in the place where God had put them, I learned that I didn’t know much about the complexity of working with an organization to help it transform itself.
I find that if organizations or ministries, churches, institutions don’t rebirth themselves, then the natural life cycle of an organization is to be born, to grow, to hit an apex and then to decline and then to die. And so if a rebirth is not going to happen, then a funeral, for sure, is in the works. And that happens across the board. Regardless of how great the organization was in its heyday, it has to be reborn, like we have to be reborn.
And so I decided that I needed more of that, and that was when I was at BUA, Baptist University of the Américas, and took a Ph.D. degree in leadership at Andrews University, a wonderful program. My specialty was organizational development, organizational transformation. And what I did was I learned, of course, the theory and the different models that are out there.
And I think that Michael Watkins in his book “The First 90 Days” [subtitled, in the first edition, “Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels], Harvard Business Press, has an interesting model at the very beginning of the book. The book’s focused on how leaders in any new assignment can secure their success by doing certain things. So he’s got a whole formula that you should apply. And I did that at Buckner.
But what’s interesting is at the beginning he says that there are typically five business scenarios in any organization. So there’s a startup, there’s a divestiture, there is a turnaround, there’s sustaining success, and then there’s realignment. Regardless of the organization, you’re going to be in one of those five situations.
So in some cases, “winning” is going to be to shut the ministry down, or the organization down. That’s a win if that’s what needs to happen. Or in some cases, you have to start one up or you have to put the brakes on before you go over the cliff, and turn around before you crash and die.
And so what I learned is that people talk about leadership style and whatever and say, “Well, this is my style” or, “That’s my style.” Well, the truth is it doesn’t matter what your style is; the demand is that you apply the right style given the situation that you’re in.
So I did a turnaround experience at BUA, but when I came to Buckner, I couldn’t do turnaround behavior, because it wasn’t a turnaround situation. It was actually more like sustaining success and maybe realignment.
So you have to sort of diagnose the context that you’re in and then apply the right leadership skills to what the organization needs. That’s accentuated by a book that I came across that Leonard Sweet wrote called “Summoned to Lead.”
He argues in the book, you know, “Are leaders born, or are they made?” So he argues both sides and then concludes by saying, “I don’t think leaders are necessarily born or made; I think they’re summoned.” It’s like God summons you to a situation -- and he gives some examples -- and then you have to lead out of that situation.
And so when I came to Buckner and when I went to BUA, I didn’t select the context or the dynamics or the situations; I was called to it, and God summoned me there. And so then you have to ask yourself, “Which way is the way forward?” And you guide and lead according to what you see there, and apply the skills that are appropriate for that situation.
I think leaders make the mistake of just saying, “I’m kind of a one-type leader; this is the way I lead.” That’s really not the right approach. The approach is, “What kind of leader does the organization need right now?” And then you diagnose and then lead according to that.
Bill Lamar: Thank you. What about restoration? Is there a difference, or how do you characterize a difference between transformation and restoration?
Albert Reyes: Well, I think that restoration’s important when we think about uncovering and rediscovering the core mission of an organization. I think that’s critical. When leaders are called to organizations, unless they’re starting one, you’re not really called to make it all up and kind of start over; you’re called to recover or uncover and perhaps restore the original mission and the intent of the organization as it was founded.
And so I think a key strategy in developing your plan for leading an organization is to go discover the enabling documents and go read what the founders intended. Get acquainted with the mission itself, and then ask yourself, “How can I be a steward, a good steward, of what God has entrusted in me in this assignment? How can I then manage and steward the mission of this organization and be faithful to what was intended in the very beginning?”
And so I really tried to get to the very bottom of what did R.C. Buckner really intend, and what was he like, and how did he do ministry. And then I’ve tried to align what we do according to that.
Bill Lamar: I was able to read a little bit about your book “The Jesus Agenda,” and it has a lot to do with Luke 4, one of my favorite passages. Can you share with us about “The Jesus Agenda”?
Albert Reyes: Well, yes. “The Jesus Agenda” -- the subtitle is “Becoming an Agent of Redemption.” And as I was digging in the history of our ministry and looking at our mission and our founder, I just felt like there was a theme that was emerging as I studied and began to read -- that really our founder was about being an instrument of redemption for the lives of the children that he encountered after the Civil War, as well as the wives who became widows. Some of them, many of them, struggled, and some did not survive.
I looked at Jesus’ sermon in Luke chapter 4. And as I read his sermon, I thought, you know, that’s his inaugural sermon; it’s the first time he preaches in public. And in that sermon, he outlined what he was going to do.
And I started thinking, prior to the presidential election of 2016, previous years, in previous presidential elections, there’s always an inaugural speech after the president’s elected. And in the speech, they generally outline what they plan to do in the first 90 days and over the course of the tenure as president.
And I thought, “Well, that’s what Jesus is doing.” He’s saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me; the Spirit has anointed me.” And then he says “to preach good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, and to give liberty to the oppressed and to proclaim the year of our Lord’s favor.” So he outlined what he was going to do.
And then later, whenever the disciples of John went to check and ask, you know, “Are you the one that we’ve been waiting for?” Jesus says back in Matthew, he says to them, “Go tell John” -- you know, “Tell him what you’ve seen. The people who are blind have been given their sight. The people have been healed.” And he kind of goes through what he said he would do at the beginning. And so that’s the mission that he gives us.
And when we’re serving according to those objects and goals, then we become agents of the redemptive work that he wants to do. So when you put a pair of shoes on a child, you’re an agent of redemption. Whenever you open your home and make room at the table for a child who doesn’t have a family, you are now an agent in the redemptive activity of God in that child’s life.
And so that’s what I’ve tried to communicate with our supporters and donors: that with the resources that they give us or the time that they give as volunteers, or the churches that engage with us, we have an opportunity, and with all of redemptive history, to have a key part in what God wants to do in the life of another person.
Bill Lamar: What are the habits and practices that give you the spiritual and physical strength to do the work that you’ve been called to do?
Albert Reyes: Well, I don’t think that you can really be sustained in a ministry unless you’re connected to the Master, to Jesus himself. And so I would probably not be the poster child for daily devotion and writing my thoughts in a journal, journaling.
I have read the book Bill Hybels wrote, “Too Busy Not to Pray.” And so I am too busy that I can’t afford not to pray, you know. I must. I must. But again, I’m not the model or example.
Nevertheless, a day does not go by that I don’t read a verse or two. Nowadays, you’ve got an iPhone; if you have a phone, you can get the Bible app, and it’ll give you a verse for the day. So even before you look at Facebook or Twitter or whatever is happening, you can look at your Bible app for three or four minutes and pray. So sometimes it gets down to that.
And there happen to be 31 [chapters in] Proverbs, and most months there are 31 days, so the reading plan is to say, “Well, what’s today’s date? Today’s the 14th, so I’m going to read the 14th chapter of Proverbs.”
And when you do it consistently, and not in a legalistic fashion where you punish yourself because you missed a day, but you just get in that routine of saying, “Now, what’s today’s date?” and go to that [chapter], you’ll find that over a year’s time, you’ve read through the Proverbs several times.
Proverbs offers wisdom to people. And the opposite of wisdom is foolishness; the opposite of a wise person is to be a fool. And so what I say is, “A proverb a day keeps stupidity away.”
I think spiritual formation is one of the things that I took from seminary that really helped to teach me how to study the Scripture and how to feed myself, right?
And I’ll just be honest. I mean, now that you’ve got -- and I’m not a very good church member. I wish I was there every Sunday teaching Sunday school, but because I travel, it’s just hard to be consistent. But because of electronics, I can access a lot of Bible preachers and teachers with podcasts, like this one, or sermons.
So I’m constantly -- I’m not going to go without a meal, you know? A spiritual one, too, you know? I get hungry spiritually, so I know how to open the Scripture up and just cook up something that nourishes my soul. But I also know how to access a good Bible teacher that I like or, of course, be a part of a group that studies the Scripture. So I think you have to feed yourself spiritually.
And then realize that one of the things that my seminary professor taught me -- you know, I forgot a whole lot of what I learned, but there are a few things I learned. And one is that our professor, and I forget which one now, said, “Just remember …” -- it was a room full of aspiring ministry leaders -- “there’s only one Messiah, and you’re not it.”
And so he said you just can’t solve -- you’re not going to be able to save people and solve everybody’s problems, and if you try to, you may just finish yourself. And so I’ve learned my limitations, and I can say now, “I know the Messiah. I know where you can find him. In fact, I can lead you to him, and I think if you get connected with him he can really help you, but I’m not him,” you know?
And I think sometimes, especially ministers, pastors, just don’t get that lesson, and they burn themselves out. They ruin their families, end up in divorce, and just don’t have the self-care and family care and marriage care that they need, because they don’t sometimes see their limitations.
Bill Lamar: You’ve been very generous with your time, Dr. Reyes. One last question. The title of the podcast, the name of the podcast, is “Can These Bones.” And I know that you are well acquainted with that Ezekiel passage. Where do you see life in the midst of death? Where do you see hope in the midst of despair?
Albert Reyes: Well, you know, I see a lot of churches that are just struggling to be alive and even survive one Sunday to the next. Many churches, probably the majority in the U.S., are declining -- plateaued or declining. Very few are growing. Certain pockets are exploding or growing, but I believe that the church is the cutting edge of God’s redemptive work in history, that he placed his hope and his dream in the church, the local church.
So I think the kingdom of God -- you can see a vestige of the kingdom in the church, wherever it may be found, and I have great hope in the church, if the church, wherever she is, will rediscover her mission, will ask herself, “What time is it, and where are we?” Because it’s not 1950, and we’re not there anymore.
People are struggling for hope, and people need answers and solutions, and they need stability and a point of reference. And I still think that the answer’s in Jesus and his church. And those bones can become alive if revival happens, and commitment, and the church gets to the mission that Jesus intended for her, and that’s found in the Jesus agenda.
Bill Lamar: Well, thank you, Dr. Reyes for your time, your good work.
Albert Reyes: Thank you very much. You’re welcome.
Bill Lamar: Thank you.
Laura Everett: That was my co-host Bill Lamar’s conversation with Albert Reyes, the president and CEO of Buckner International. Bill, it’s so clear that his experience working at Sprint was a huge part of his formation as a leader. What did you notice about what he learned by working at Sprint?
Bill Lamar: Well, I’ll tell you, I would imagine, Laura, that working at a call center is very, very good preparation for ministry.
When I moved to Metropolitan AME in Washington, D.C., Laura, I faced a huge shift in scale and scope. Not only was I the pastor of a local congregation, but was a pastor of a place that has hosted throughout the years persons who are on the front lines of struggling for justice and freedom and equality, those who are asking big theological questions, those who are doing significant artistic work.
And so I had to pastor the congregation, host amazing people doing work that really transforms a community, and also serve as a host for our denominational efforts whenever those efforts would bring our denomination to Washington, D.C. -- which is often.
And so I, in order to be successful, had to seek out the help of many persons who had shifted scale and scope in ministry time and time again.
Listening to Albert Reyes reminded me of what persons whose ministry has shifted in scale and scope taught me. I mean, he has gone from local church settings to the presidency of a university to the CEO of a very, very large international ministry.
And it seems that he was able to do it successfully because along the way he mastered and learned what he needed to learn in the local church, he learned what he needed to learn in an educational institution, he learned what he needed to learn in corporate America at Sprint, managing difficulty and customer issues.
And it just seems to me that though his trajectory may indeed have been circuitous, all of his preparation has led him to being able to lead this multinational organization with a huge footprint that does good work in the world.
So it helps me to not lose heart, that though the trajectory and the path may not be a straight line, if we learn what we need to learn where we are, we may indeed be surprised about where we end up.
Laura Everett: Bill, I so resonated with that, both with your experience and with Albert Reyes’ path in ministry.
You know, I feel like one of the most formative experiences for me in learning how to be a good pastor was by waitressing. I just learned again and again how to notice what people needed, sometimes to anticipate, to respond, to sometimes limit expectations of what was possible.
But that nonlinear path to ministry I’m hearing from more and more local pastors who I talk to -- about how they are following a path that is not maybe what the generation before us did, where first you leave seminary and then you become an associate pastor and then maybe you become a solo pastor and then you become a senior pastor and then you become a senior pastor of an even bigger church. That is just not happening in the same sort of way.
And for me, as someone who leads an institution, a Christian institution, the formation that I got in local congregations has stayed with me. I feel like some of what I learned in hospital chaplaincy has been so important in leading a Christian institution. That every interaction, every phone call, every email, every meeting I am in -- and my God, I am in a lot of meetings -- can be used as an opportunity for care, for edification, for uplift in the Spirit. That I don’t stop doing pastoral care because I am leading a Christian institution, but the way I do pastoral care changes.
I’m so grateful for the ways that Albert Reyes’ story of following God’s call took him to so many different places. I’m reminded of what a colleague said to me recently, that “nothing is wasted in the service of God.” Nothing is wasted in the service of God, and my God, Albert Reyes’ formation in those Sprint call centers comes through loud and clear as he attends to a global institution.
Bill Lamar: You know, Laura, many of our colleagues become frustrated because the path, the vocational path, that they’re on is anything but a straight line. But realizing that we can maximize our opportunity to serve in the future by maximizing every present vocational reality is very, very, very helpful.
And I think that -- I can remember working at a homeless shelter when I was in college, and that was formational for me, because I learned that I had to build relationships, not only with the people that ran the shelter, but with our clients. I learned that there is no job too lowly for any leader, that whatever needs to be done, if you want a team that is motivated to do the work, the leader must be willing to do whatever work needs to get done.
And so I saw that, I modeled that, and I have tried, to the best of my ability, to continue to be that kind of leader.
You know, Laura, one of the things that Albert talked about was restoration: uncovering or rediscovering the original mission of institutions. Like a lot of Christian leaders, he’s in charge of something that has a long history and tradition. Buckner has been in existence for 138 years, but he still goes back to the founder; he still goes back to the founding documents and the work they did helping widows and orphans after the Civil War.
Do you ever revisit the founding documents of the Massachusetts Council?
Laura Everett: Bill, I have. I’ve gone back and looked at some of those foundational documents, and even the predecessor bodies that became a part of the [Massachusetts] Council of Churches.
So my institution, the Massachusetts Council of Churches, was formed 115 years ago. And the way I heard this story was that in 1903, 10 Protestant gentlemen walked into Park Street Church and declared “interdenominational comity.” That’s interdenominational comity, c-o-m-i-t-y.
But they declared this at a time where there were new immigrants arriving in Boston, new immigrants who were primarily Catholic, who were primarily Italian and Irish. And so that story that we tell ourselves about the goodwill and the Christian unity in that founding is also put in the wider context of anxiety about new immigrants.
And when you tell this story and you say that it’s 10 Protestant gentlemen, you notice who’s missing: women were missing, people of color were missing, Roman Catholics were missing, Orthodox Christians were missing. And so for me, to go back to the founding narrative is also to ask, “Who is missing from that foundational story, and how does our work across generations expand to include other people and other perspectives?”
Bill Lamar: You know, Laura, I often go back to the founding of what is known as the African Methodist Episcopal Church. We started in 1787 as the Free African Society. And Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others came together as free Africans in Philadelphia, which was of course the capital [around that time], and was really the seat of tremendous intellectual and political activity among free Africans trying to bring about abolition in the United States.
So the Free African Society were free Africans who would give their money to help the enslaved who were coming, searching for freedom in Pennsylvania. They helped to educate their children. They helped to bury the dead. They helped to build economic strength, because Africans were cut out of mainstream political participation and participation in the economic institutions of the early republic.
And so one of the things that I’m clear about is the founders knew that we needed to build institutions that would care for us, and we could not always depend on the broader institutional realities or the political reality to do what we needed to get done.
That inspires me, even in this age, to continue to build a strong, independent institution that will look after those whom our founders cared for up until the time that they died.
And as you mention, I called the names of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, but also I need to call the names of Flora Allen and Sarah Allen and so many women whose names were not a part of the record, but without their sacrifice there would not have been a Free African Society, nor an African Methodist Episcopal Church.
And paying attention to who is not a part of the document and paying attention to the broader historical reality will help us to tell the truth about our institutions and to strengthen them -- not based on myths that make us comfortable, but on the real challenges of history that can help us to move forward.
Laura Everett: I hear that coming through loud and clear in your conversation with Albert Reyes, Bill, this sense that the founding documents of Buckner International came from a very particular time and place, and yet they have expanded. They have expanded to other parts of the world; they’ve expanded who is to be cared for. But they’ve held constant this commitment to the most vulnerable, from a scriptural commitment, really, to the care of widows and children that they hear in the words of Jesus.
I’m really grateful for the grounding in history, but also that expansiveness of who are the most vulnerable now. Bill, one of the things I heard come through in the end of the interview you had with Albert Reyes is a conversation about spiritual practices.
What did you hear in how Albert grounds his leadership?
Bill Lamar: What I appreciated about Albert was his honesty around the fact that he’s got a lot of things claiming his attention. And that he tries his best to spend some moments in Scripture and prayer every day. Sometimes, he admitted, not so successfully. But he turns himself back to these words, back to these realities that reacquaint him with his past, with his vision of who God is theologically, and how that feeds him as an individual such that he might serve his family and he might serve Buckner.
I try my best to ground myself every day. One of the things that I’m well aware of is that if I do not have anything in me by way of spiritual sustenance, it becomes very difficult for me to provide that for anyone else.
And so I was thankful that Albert Reyes was honest enough to admit that he struggles with this reality but he also knows that he cannot do the work he’s called to do without spending some time in devotion, some time buttressing his spiritual life so that he can lead such a complex institution.
And I think no matter the scale and scope of the institutions that we serve or that we lead, we, like Albert Reyes, need time to center ourselves to be reacquainted with the God of our ancestors who calls us into the service of widows, orphans and the world around us.
Laura Everett: Listeners, we hope that listening to this podcast is part of what grounds you in the Christian tradition, in the transformative call that God has on your life and the work -- and the colleagues we need to do this work -- of transforming our institutions.
We hope that the conversation that you’ve heard with Albert Reyes and myself and Bill Lamar is part of a breath of life into some dry bones.
Bill Lamar: Thanks for listening to “Can These Bones.” I hope that you enjoyed our conversation as much as we did. There’s more about Albert Reyes, including some of his book recommendations, on our website, www.canthesebones.com.
Laura, who are we talking to next time?
Laura Everett: I had a great conversation with Gideon Tsang, a pastor of vision and teaching at Vox Veniae in Austin, Texas.
Bill Lamar: Laura, I’m looking forward to your conversation with Gideon.
Laura Everett: Me, too.
Bill Lamar: “Can These Bones” is brought to you by Faith & Leadership, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. It’s produced by Sally Hicks, Kelly Ryan Gilmer and Dave Odom. Our theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions. Funding is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.
We’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts about this podcast on social media. I’m on Twitter @WilliamHLamarIV, and you can reach Laura on Twitter @RevEverett. You can also find us through our website, www.canthesebones.com.
I’m Bill Lamar, and this is “Can These Bones.”
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Read or listen to this podcast »How do I listen to a podcast? »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke DivinityMaintaining trust in a relationship is like walking a tightrope
MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
Nathan Kirkpatrick: Maintaining trust in a relationship is like walking a tightrope
A high wire walker performs at the UniverSoul Circus April 30, 2005, in the Jamaica neighborhood of New York City.
Bigstock/Anthony Correia
Given the nature of human beings and institutions, at some point relationships become unsteady. And repairing trust can be a challenge for leaders, writes the managing director of Alban.
In your mind’s eye, picture the tightrope act at the circus.
The performer takes a slow, deliberate step out onto the wire to test its tension and strength. Once the wire has proved worthy, the performer takes an additional step. Then another.
Now both feet are on the wire. Every step away from the platform is a test to see whether the tightrope will hold and the precarious balance can be maintained.
Once the performer trusts the wire (and herself), artistry can begin. Steps forward, steps backward. Her pace increases. She leans in gravity-defying tilts away from the wire’s safety. Her arms are now outstretched with only one leg planted. Then a handstand. Maybe a cartwheel or a ride on a tricycle just to show off.
There, on that high wire, is an image of what happens in human interactions and in organizational life every day. It happens in every Christian institution, in every congregation.
The new employee, the new volunteer or the first-time visitor arrives, and tentatively, he or she tests the space: Can I be myself here? Is it worth my time? Do I have something to give? Are my gifts desired and received? Does anyone care about me? Does anyone even notice that I am here?
Assuming that those first steps prove steady, the new person continues to risk more steps, as each one proves steady. It continues like this, one step at a time. He takes on more responsibility; he speaks up in a meeting and offers an unpopular or differing opinion. He visits a church school class. He asks the pastor to coffee.
Each step tests the wire. Can it hold his weight, his needs, his hopes? Is the developing relationship worthy of trust?
Given the nature of human beings and human institutions, at some point he will experience an unsteady step. The wire will give, or he will lose his balance. It was a step too far. It was too much too soon. The trust, in himself or the institution, was greater than the wire could bear.
You know what this looks like.
In a professional setting, it happens when you offer opinions and are consistently summarily ignored. It happens when your boss intentionally or unintentionally undermines your work or your relationship with other colleagues. It happens when you entrust your professional future to someone who turns out to be self-interested and self-promoting. Likewise, it happens when you overstep your responsibility or overestimate your ability to deliver on promises made.
On a personal level, it happens every time you entrust part of your story to someone who then shares it inappropriately. Conversely, it happens when you share too much of your story and the other person backs away because he is overwhelmed. It happens when you need someone to support you and, for whatever reason, she can’t.
In each of these situations, and others like them, you find yourself seeking a new equilibrium -- perhaps closer to the platform, where there is less risk and more safety.
What does this look like? Now you’re quiet in meetings. You don’t raise your hand for new assignments. You don’t come to coffee hour. You skip church school and drop out of the choir. You use the side door of the sanctuary after church and don’t speak to the pastor.
This continues for a while, until there is enough trust accumulated to risk taking another meaningful step forward in the relationship.
The challenge in this moment for the leader is to ignore any instinct to chase; the pastoral instinct in this situation can be problematic, if not completely self-defeating. It is easy for clergy types to hound someone (frequent phone calls, repeated emails, impromptu check-ins, interrogating questions), even with the best of intentions.
What the literature suggests, though, is that this kind of persistence does not contribute to the repair of trust. It may actually lead to a further withdrawal from -- if not outright rupture of -- the relationship.
Instead, these steps can help restore trust:
While trust repair always requires patience, that can be especially difficult when dealing with an employee who has come to have low trust in the institution or a colleague, particularly if the supervisor believes that the low level of trust is unjustified or unfair. Even when it is justified, work and ministry must still continue, and the contribution of the person who has a low level of trust is no less important now than it was before the breach of trust.
Thus, it is crucial during times of trust repair to be mindful of honoring the professional relationship:
These are tedious questions with which to struggle, but trust repair -- like trust itself -- is a walk on a tightrope.
In your mind’s eye, picture the tightrope act at the circus.
The performer takes a slow, deliberate step out onto the wire to test its tension and strength. Once the wire has proved worthy, the performer takes an additional step. Then another.
Now both feet are on the wire. Every step away from the platform is a test to see whether the tightrope will hold and the precarious balance can be maintained.
Once the performer trusts the wire (and herself), artistry can begin. Steps forward, steps backward. Her pace increases. She leans in gravity-defying tilts away from the wire’s safety. Her arms are now outstretched with only one leg planted. Then a handstand. Maybe a cartwheel or a ride on a tricycle just to show off.
There, on that high wire, is an image of what happens in human interactions and in organizational life every day. It happens in every Christian institution, in every congregation.
The new employee, the new volunteer or the first-time visitor arrives, and tentatively, he or she tests the space: Can I be myself here? Is it worth my time? Do I have something to give? Are my gifts desired and received? Does anyone care about me? Does anyone even notice that I am here?
Assuming that those first steps prove steady, the new person continues to risk more steps, as each one proves steady. It continues like this, one step at a time. He takes on more responsibility; he speaks up in a meeting and offers an unpopular or differing opinion. He visits a church school class. He asks the pastor to coffee.
Each step tests the wire. Can it hold his weight, his needs, his hopes? Is the developing relationship worthy of trust?
Given the nature of human beings and human institutions, at some point he will experience an unsteady step. The wire will give, or he will lose his balance. It was a step too far. It was too much too soon. The trust, in himself or the institution, was greater than the wire could bear.
You know what this looks like.
In a professional setting, it happens when you offer opinions and are consistently summarily ignored. It happens when your boss intentionally or unintentionally undermines your work or your relationship with other colleagues. It happens when you entrust your professional future to someone who turns out to be self-interested and self-promoting. Likewise, it happens when you overstep your responsibility or overestimate your ability to deliver on promises made.
On a personal level, it happens every time you entrust part of your story to someone who then shares it inappropriately. Conversely, it happens when you share too much of your story and the other person backs away because he is overwhelmed. It happens when you need someone to support you and, for whatever reason, she can’t.
In each of these situations, and others like them, you find yourself seeking a new equilibrium -- perhaps closer to the platform, where there is less risk and more safety.
What does this look like? Now you’re quiet in meetings. You don’t raise your hand for new assignments. You don’t come to coffee hour. You skip church school and drop out of the choir. You use the side door of the sanctuary after church and don’t speak to the pastor.
This continues for a while, until there is enough trust accumulated to risk taking another meaningful step forward in the relationship.
The challenge in this moment for the leader is to ignore any instinct to chase; the pastoral instinct in this situation can be problematic, if not completely self-defeating. It is easy for clergy types to hound someone (frequent phone calls, repeated emails, impromptu check-ins, interrogating questions), even with the best of intentions.
What the literature suggests, though, is that this kind of persistence does not contribute to the repair of trust. It may actually lead to a further withdrawal from -- if not outright rupture of -- the relationship.
Instead, these steps can help restore trust:
- a meaningful demonstration of concern, including an apology (if warranted)
- a consistency and predictability of behavior
- transparency when possible and an explanation of why when not
While trust repair always requires patience, that can be especially difficult when dealing with an employee who has come to have low trust in the institution or a colleague, particularly if the supervisor believes that the low level of trust is unjustified or unfair. Even when it is justified, work and ministry must still continue, and the contribution of the person who has a low level of trust is no less important now than it was before the breach of trust.
Thus, it is crucial during times of trust repair to be mindful of honoring the professional relationship:
- assuming that the other person’s intentions are good
- asking questions rather than presuming answers
- talking to each other rather than about each other
These are tedious questions with which to struggle, but trust repair -- like trust itself -- is a walk on a tightrope.
Read more from Nathan Kirkpatrick »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Building and restoring trust
MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
Kurt T. Dirks: Building and restoring trust
By studying college basketball teams, a Washington University business researcher examines the importance of one aspect of leadership: trust.
Update: Kurt T. Dirks is the vice chancellor of international relations and Bank of America Professor of Leadership at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis.
Whether the setting is a basketball team, a business or a religious organization, trust is at the core of successful leadership, said Kurt T. Dirks. Dirks studies the relationship between trust, leader effectiveness and organizational success. His findings highlight the differences in accomplishments between teams with varying levels of trust in a leader’s competency, character and caring.
Dirks said his studies across a variety of types of teams and organizations indicate that it is critical that leaders acquire awareness of how they are viewed by their people, establish individualized ways of demonstrating trustworthy qualities and confront mistakes head-on. In the face of a transgression, Dirks said, silence is the worst strategy.
Dirks is the Bank of America Professor of Managerial Leadership at Washington University in St. Louis at the Olin Business School, where he also directs the Taylor Experimental Laboratory. His doctoral degree was earned at the University of Minnesota.
Dirks has been a presenter at the New Directions in Leadership Research Conference at The Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at Duke University. He spoke with Faith & Leadership about the results of his research. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: My first question is, Why and how do you study trust in leadership?
Leadership is getting other individuals to work toward a common goal. That’s very hard to do if people don’t trust their leader. Followers start diverting energy toward their personal goals, such as, “How can I protect myself in this situation?”
Trust is at the core of successful leadership.
Q: You studied college basketball coaches to examine the importance of trust in leadership. What did you find?
The study was designed to provide a rigorous test of the notion that being able to trust your leader would impact the performance of the team. The setting I chose was college basketball teams. The study included 30 NCAA men’s basketball teams in 12 conferences in Midwestern and Western states.
After the basketball preseason was over, I sent out surveys to teams’ coaches. The surveys used a standard measure of trust in a leader. And team members filled out the survey asking, Do you trust your leader? Do you trust your teammates? I wanted to see if that predicts how that team performs across the season, taking into account other factors.
Let’s see how the team does in the preseason, how long has the team been together, how long has the coach coached -- all the things that you could imagine throwing in there we tried to take into account. After taking all those factors into account, the bottom line was that trust accounted for about 7 percent of the variance in performance across the season; the only other factor that predicted as much of the variance in performance was talent of the team.
Q: So a higher level of trust was correlated to a higher number of wins?
That’s exactly right. You look across those teams and the team that had the highest trust in their leader ended up being the No. 1 team by the end of the season. The team with the lowest won about 10 percent of the games, and the coach ended up being fired at the end of the year.
Interestingly, the person who was the top coach happened to be your archrival, [then-University of Kansas coach] Roy Williams.
Q: Could the study also show causality?
I tried to take into account the factors that would account for that correlation. The hypothesis was partially that how the team did last year would predict whether those teams trusted their coach this year, which in turn would predict future performance. It can’t conclusively prove causation, but it comes as close as we can with social science while studying real teams.
Q: In general, what do people look for in deciding whether or not to trust their leaders?
The first thing people tend to look for is what we call competence. Does that leader have the skills and abilities to solve whatever we face as an organization?
The second factor that we look for is character: Does the leader have strong values? Do they do what they say they’re going to do; are they fully truthful when they’re talking to me? Those are attributes that person brings to the table.
The third factor that comes into play is caring. Does the leader care about me personally? Is this someone who takes my interests into account beyond what I can do for them? You have to take all three of those factors into account in building trust in a leader.
Q: Are there concrete ways a leader can build trust in these three factors?
A colleague and I looked across all the research that has been done on leadership over the last four decades and said, “What are the top five drivers of trust in leaders?” I’ll work backwards: No. 5 was an alignment between leaders’ goals and my goals. Are our goals aligned? Are we working in the same direction on the important parts?
The fourth thing was alignment of words and actions. When that leader says something, do their actions correspond to that?
One of the last three things is the allocation of the outcomes. Do I get what I deserve, whether that’s pay or recognition? Is what I’m putting in recognized appropriately?
No. 2 was whether I get to participate in the decision-making process.
The most powerful one of all was, When decisions are implemented, how am I treated? Am I treated with respect?
Q: Would the results of your study apply to various settings of leadership, for instance, in churches as well as businesses?
If I’m working for an individual as opposed to being a parishioner in a church, that may be a different type of relationship. But the alignment between words and actions matters across pretty much every type of organization. How people are treated when decisions are made matters a tremendous amount in almost any type of organization.
Q: Does the trust issue play differently in a setting of economic or organizational uncertainty, which many churches are experiencing?
In that situation, where people are particularly concerned about their own welfare, worried about how it’s going to affect them personally, trust becomes even more critical.
We go back to the basketball team study: one of the analyses I’ve done is to look at teams that were struggling versus those which seemed to be doing quite well. In those teams that were struggling, the relationship between trust and performance was stronger.
As one coach put it, when things are going well, no one is worried about how team members are getting along. It’s when the group or organization is doing poorly, the finger pointing starts and people question each other’s motives and worry about their own welfare. That’s when trust becomes particularly crucial.
Q: You conducted another study about the effects of apology versus denial in regaining trust, and suggest that that trust is easier to earn initially then to regain once it has been violated.
People have a difficult time forgetting about violations of trust. One of our graduate students and I looked at the question of, If a violation occurs, are people able to forget that violation?
We made an allegation that a violation occurred with a job candidate that we had made up. It was an experimental setting, so we were able to do this. Then we told people that it was actually false, this violation never occurred; then looked at some data on whether people were able to forget that information. The data suggested that people were not able to set that information aside; when they made decisions about that candidate, that information lingered in people’s minds.
Q: Is an apology or a denial more effective in situations where leaders have violated a trust?
In research and what we observed happening in real life, there was evidence that when a transgression would occur, some people would apologize and believe that was the best strategy. There are other cases where people said when transgression occurs you should try to deny it. We tried to sort out -- is there one that’s better than the other, and why?
If we go back to those three factors of what people look for in a leader, there’s an important difference between attributions related to competence versus attributions related to character.
People see positive displays of competence as much more diagnostic than negative displays. Having a stellar performance one day and a subpar performance another day, the stellar performance outweighs people’s judgments about competence more than the subpar days.
[It’s] exactly the opposite when it comes to character. When someone has a stellar day and another day they do something that appears to be the wrong thing, the immoral thing, it’s that negative display, that perception of immoral action, which outweighs anything they’ve done in the past.
We tested that in several experiments, both here and in Singapore, and found that when people are perceived to have committed a violation of competence, the apology worked very well because people tended to give that person the benefit of the doubt -- they’ll do better next time. Competence is something I can fix and address; therefore, I’m given that second chance.
When that person was believed to have committed an immoral act, the apology had a negative outcome. When people admitted that they had engaged in this immoral act and said, “I’m going to do better in the future,” people tended not to believe them. It was a notion that character is something that you have or you don’t; you can’t fix it.
Q: If you are a leader reading this who may be in that position, does telling the truth about whether you actually did the thing play any role in restoring trust?
Definitely. Certainly; for example, if a leader tried to cover it up and the people found out that they actually did the behavior and tried to deny it, they were penalized for that in our studies, but no more than they would’ve been penalized if they initially apologized.
Q: One might come to the depressing conclusion from your research that it pays to lie if you get caught doing something wrong. Would you recommend that?
Definitely not. We certainly would want people to do the right thing, which is to tell the truth, because there’s more to a situation than what’s going to rebuild that trust.
The thing to keep in mind is that some people will view many of these as competence violations that are unintentional, but a whole different set of people may conclude it’s an integrity violation.
An important thing [for the leader] is making clear that this was an unintentional act and providing the evidence framing it as an unintentional violation, assuming it was.
Q: That’s an unintended mistake versus a willful kind of moral transgression?
That’s exactly right. Making sure it’s framed very clearly and known to be the case that this was not a willful immoral action, because most situations are quite gray as to what it was, and it’s best to address that.
Q: Based on your research, how would you recommend that people in leadership positions address building and retaining trust?
First, know where you stand with your people. Self-awareness is critical and can be a very difficult thing to have.
Let me go back to the basketball study. I sent feedback to all the teams that participated: here’s where you stood as a team and your coach stood, and here’s where it is relative to every other team.
After I sent the feedback out, I got a very interesting call from a coach who was a successful coach throughout his entire career; the question he asked me was, “Why don’t they trust me completely?” Here’s a guy who is trying to do the right thing, wants to believe his team trusted him completely; that actually wasn’t the case.
Everyone wants to be trusted, but it’s rarely the case that leaders are where they would like to be.
Two, recognizing what’s the appropriate balance for you showing that character, that competence and that caring. How can you show that your own way? Everyone will do it differently, but it’s important that every leader find a way to establish those three attributes.
The final thing is recognizing that every leader is going to make mistakes; trust is going to ebb and flow. Recognizing in the long term that they need to take it on -- situations when they do something their people don’t like, unintentional mistakes or whatever -- to be able to take that head-on. Failing to take it head-on, our work would suggest, is the worst strategy. Of all the responses -- apologizing and denying or any of that -- silence is certainly the worst strategy.
Read more from Kurt T. Dirks »
Communication in the Church: A Handbook for Healthier Relationships by Thomas G. Kirkpatrick
Communication is integral to the mission of the church, but it can go awry in myriad ways, both obvious and subtle. Communication in the Church helps congregations create healthier ways for their members to relate to one another for greater personal and congregational success. The book offers practical guidelines to help readers become more effective in how they build relationships, lead meetings, experience trust, practice forgiveness, use power, and bridge cultures.
Communication in the Church distills the latest social science research for readers including clergy, lay leaders, continuing education planners, students, scholars, and others. Each chapter includes real-life scenarios, sensible guidelines, practical applications, and suggestions for further learning. This book aims to help readers communicate more effectively-from leading more engaging and productive meetings to preventing or addressing communication breakdowns.
Learn more and order the book »
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Building and restoring trust
MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
Kurt T. Dirks: Building and restoring trust
Update: Kurt T. Dirks is the vice chancellor of international relations and Bank of America Professor of Leadership at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis.
Whether the setting is a basketball team, a business or a religious organization, trust is at the core of successful leadership, said Kurt T. Dirks. Dirks studies the relationship between trust, leader effectiveness and organizational success. His findings highlight the differences in accomplishments between teams with varying levels of trust in a leader’s competency, character and caring.
Dirks said his studies across a variety of types of teams and organizations indicate that it is critical that leaders acquire awareness of how they are viewed by their people, establish individualized ways of demonstrating trustworthy qualities and confront mistakes head-on. In the face of a transgression, Dirks said, silence is the worst strategy.
Dirks is the Bank of America Professor of Managerial Leadership at Washington University in St. Louis at the Olin Business School, where he also directs the Taylor Experimental Laboratory. His doctoral degree was earned at the University of Minnesota.
Dirks has been a presenter at the New Directions in Leadership Research Conference at The Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at Duke University. He spoke with Faith & Leadership about the results of his research. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: My first question is, Why and how do you study trust in leadership?
Leadership is getting other individuals to work toward a common goal. That’s very hard to do if people don’t trust their leader. Followers start diverting energy toward their personal goals, such as, “How can I protect myself in this situation?”
Trust is at the core of successful leadership.
Q: You studied college basketball coaches to examine the importance of trust in leadership. What did you find?
The study was designed to provide a rigorous test of the notion that being able to trust your leader would impact the performance of the team. The setting I chose was college basketball teams. The study included 30 NCAA men’s basketball teams in 12 conferences in Midwestern and Western states.
After the basketball preseason was over, I sent out surveys to teams’ coaches. The surveys used a standard measure of trust in a leader. And team members filled out the survey asking, Do you trust your leader? Do you trust your teammates? I wanted to see if that predicts how that team performs across the season, taking into account other factors.
Let’s see how the team does in the preseason, how long has the team been together, how long has the coach coached -- all the things that you could imagine throwing in there we tried to take into account. After taking all those factors into account, the bottom line was that trust accounted for about 7 percent of the variance in performance across the season; the only other factor that predicted as much of the variance in performance was talent of the team.
Q: So a higher level of trust was correlated to a higher number of wins?
That’s exactly right. You look across those teams and the team that had the highest trust in their leader ended up being the No. 1 team by the end of the season. The team with the lowest won about 10 percent of the games, and the coach ended up being fired at the end of the year.
Interestingly, the person who was the top coach happened to be your archrival, [then-University of Kansas coach] Roy Williams.
Q: Could the study also show causality?
I tried to take into account the factors that would account for that correlation. The hypothesis was partially that how the team did last year would predict whether those teams trusted their coach this year, which in turn would predict future performance. It can’t conclusively prove causation, but it comes as close as we can with social science while studying real teams.
Q: In general, what do people look for in deciding whether or not to trust their leaders?
The first thing people tend to look for is what we call competence. Does that leader have the skills and abilities to solve whatever we face as an organization?
The second factor that we look for is character: Does the leader have strong values? Do they do what they say they’re going to do; are they fully truthful when they’re talking to me? Those are attributes that person brings to the table.
The third factor that comes into play is caring. Does the leader care about me personally? Is this someone who takes my interests into account beyond what I can do for them? You have to take all three of those factors into account in building trust in a leader.
Q: Are there concrete ways a leader can build trust in these three factors?
A colleague and I looked across all the research that has been done on leadership over the last four decades and said, “What are the top five drivers of trust in leaders?” I’ll work backwards: No. 5 was an alignment between leaders’ goals and my goals. Are our goals aligned? Are we working in the same direction on the important parts?
The fourth thing was alignment of words and actions. When that leader says something, do their actions correspond to that?
One of the last three things is the allocation of the outcomes. Do I get what I deserve, whether that’s pay or recognition? Is what I’m putting in recognized appropriately?
No. 2 was whether I get to participate in the decision-making process.
The most powerful one of all was, When decisions are implemented, how am I treated? Am I treated with respect?
Q: Would the results of your study apply to various settings of leadership, for instance, in churches as well as businesses?
If I’m working for an individual as opposed to being a parishioner in a church, that may be a different type of relationship. But the alignment between words and actions matters across pretty much every type of organization. How people are treated when decisions are made matters a tremendous amount in almost any type of organization.
Q: Does the trust issue play differently in a setting of economic or organizational uncertainty, which many churches are experiencing?
In that situation, where people are particularly concerned about their own welfare, worried about how it’s going to affect them personally, trust becomes even more critical.
We go back to the basketball team study: one of the analyses I’ve done is to look at teams that were struggling versus those which seemed to be doing quite well. In those teams that were struggling, the relationship between trust and performance was stronger.
As one coach put it, when things are going well, no one is worried about how team members are getting along. It’s when the group or organization is doing poorly, the finger pointing starts and people question each other’s motives and worry about their own welfare. That’s when trust becomes particularly crucial.
Q: You conducted another study about the effects of apology versus denial in regaining trust, and suggest that that trust is easier to earn initially then to regain once it has been violated.
People have a difficult time forgetting about violations of trust. One of our graduate students and I looked at the question of, If a violation occurs, are people able to forget that violation?
We made an allegation that a violation occurred with a job candidate that we had made up. It was an experimental setting, so we were able to do this. Then we told people that it was actually false, this violation never occurred; then looked at some data on whether people were able to forget that information. The data suggested that people were not able to set that information aside; when they made decisions about that candidate, that information lingered in people’s minds.
Q: Is an apology or a denial more effective in situations where leaders have violated a trust?
In research and what we observed happening in real life, there was evidence that when a transgression would occur, some people would apologize and believe that was the best strategy. There are other cases where people said when transgression occurs you should try to deny it. We tried to sort out -- is there one that’s better than the other, and why?
If we go back to those three factors of what people look for in a leader, there’s an important difference between attributions related to competence versus attributions related to character.
People see positive displays of competence as much more diagnostic than negative displays. Having a stellar performance one day and a subpar performance another day, the stellar performance outweighs people’s judgments about competence more than the subpar days.
[It’s] exactly the opposite when it comes to character. When someone has a stellar day and another day they do something that appears to be the wrong thing, the immoral thing, it’s that negative display, that perception of immoral action, which outweighs anything they’ve done in the past.
We tested that in several experiments, both here and in Singapore, and found that when people are perceived to have committed a violation of competence, the apology worked very well because people tended to give that person the benefit of the doubt -- they’ll do better next time. Competence is something I can fix and address; therefore, I’m given that second chance.
When that person was believed to have committed an immoral act, the apology had a negative outcome. When people admitted that they had engaged in this immoral act and said, “I’m going to do better in the future,” people tended not to believe them. It was a notion that character is something that you have or you don’t; you can’t fix it.
Q: If you are a leader reading this who may be in that position, does telling the truth about whether you actually did the thing play any role in restoring trust?
Definitely. Certainly; for example, if a leader tried to cover it up and the people found out that they actually did the behavior and tried to deny it, they were penalized for that in our studies, but no more than they would’ve been penalized if they initially apologized.
Q: One might come to the depressing conclusion from your research that it pays to lie if you get caught doing something wrong. Would you recommend that?
Definitely not. We certainly would want people to do the right thing, which is to tell the truth, because there’s more to a situation than what’s going to rebuild that trust.
The thing to keep in mind is that some people will view many of these as competence violations that are unintentional, but a whole different set of people may conclude it’s an integrity violation.
An important thing [for the leader] is making clear that this was an unintentional act and providing the evidence framing it as an unintentional violation, assuming it was.
Q: That’s an unintended mistake versus a willful kind of moral transgression?
That’s exactly right. Making sure it’s framed very clearly and known to be the case that this was not a willful immoral action, because most situations are quite gray as to what it was, and it’s best to address that.
Q: Based on your research, how would you recommend that people in leadership positions address building and retaining trust?
First, know where you stand with your people. Self-awareness is critical and can be a very difficult thing to have.
Let me go back to the basketball study. I sent feedback to all the teams that participated: here’s where you stood as a team and your coach stood, and here’s where it is relative to every other team.
After I sent the feedback out, I got a very interesting call from a coach who was a successful coach throughout his entire career; the question he asked me was, “Why don’t they trust me completely?” Here’s a guy who is trying to do the right thing, wants to believe his team trusted him completely; that actually wasn’t the case.
Everyone wants to be trusted, but it’s rarely the case that leaders are where they would like to be.
Two, recognizing what’s the appropriate balance for you showing that character, that competence and that caring. How can you show that your own way? Everyone will do it differently, but it’s important that every leader find a way to establish those three attributes.
The final thing is recognizing that every leader is going to make mistakes; trust is going to ebb and flow. Recognizing in the long term that they need to take it on -- situations when they do something their people don’t like, unintentional mistakes or whatever -- to be able to take that head-on. Failing to take it head-on, our work would suggest, is the worst strategy. Of all the responses -- apologizing and denying or any of that -- silence is certainly the worst strategy.
Read more from Kurt T. Dirks »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Communication is integral to the mission of the church, but it can go awry in myriad ways, both obvious and subtle. Communication in the Church helps congregations create healthier ways for their members to relate to one another for greater personal and congregational success. The book offers practical guidelines to help readers become more effective in how they build relationships, lead meetings, experience trust, practice forgiveness, use power, and bridge cultures.
Communication in the Church distills the latest social science research for readers including clergy, lay leaders, continuing education planners, students, scholars, and others. Each chapter includes real-life scenarios, sensible guidelines, practical applications, and suggestions for further learning. This book aims to help readers communicate more effectively-from leading more engaging and productive meetings to preventing or addressing communication breakdowns.
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
Copyright © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Alban at Duke Divinity School
1121 West Chapel Hill Street, Suite 200
Durham, North Carolina 27701
, United States
No comments:
Post a Comment