When I was the senior pastor of a denominational church, I had two pupils. During a particular week, when I had given everyone in the office the week off, one of them, Greg, entered my office. He was looking at entering the ministry and wanted to know everything there was to know about everything regarding being a senior pastor. Since everyone was off the week, I couldn’t take the time to introduce him to everyone and have them speak about what they do, so we walked the offices and I explained how everyone fits in with the bigger picture. I stressed that every pastor in our church was responsible for the vision of their ministry, and fitting that in with the vision of the church as well as the denominational vision. I instructed him to make time to meet with the other pastors, so he could develop a holistic view of our church, and how a senior pastor fits in with each component part.
Later that week, I met with my other pupil, Ty, to discuss how he had been progressing in his seminary studies. He said he was struggling. You see, his whole life he felt like he was being pressured to be a youth minister, but really, music was his whole life. He wanted to do something with that but felt like it wasn’t his decision. As his mentor, and as a senior pastor, the responsibility of shaping him and leading him fell on me. Instead, I chose to bring in our worship leader, and our women’s outreach pastor.
As leaders, we frequently feel the need to always be the ones responsible for the furthering and development of our team members. Transformative leadership is considered to be one of the best forms of leadership for healthy and productive teams. Lately, these transformative leaders are called servant leaders.
This horribly toxic belief is positively fucked.
Don’t be a servant, be a steward.
Frequently when you read up on what servant leadership is, they won’t use the term servant, they use the term steward as if they are interchangeable. They are not.
Servant leadership places a strong emphasis on serving others, they are responsible for providing for their team's needs. It’s short-sighted, it’s controlling, and it doesn’t address the long-term needs of the team. Steward leadership focuses on the big picture. It acknowledges that the leader can’t know everything or always provide solutions to the follower's issues. It places a higher value on long-term growth and proactively provides encouragement to the team members and team leaders.
After our meeting, Greg stopped coming by my office. He would duck out of service a few minutes early. At some point, I was able to corner him and ask him how things were going and why he had stopped coming by the office to talk. He said he had lost respect for me. That a pastor’s job is to be a servant to the flock. The fact that I didn’t address his problems when he brought them up and instead directed him to talk to the other church leaders was a serious failure as a servant leader.
He's technically correct.
Further, he hated the idea of the head of the church not providing a direction and vision for the organization as a whole. “A leader's job is to ensure that everyone falls in line with what the leader wants,” was his delightfully fascist adjacent response.
As a leader, it is impossible to have a deep understanding of every team that works under you. You can have a meaningful understanding of what they do, how they operate, and how they fit in with the whole of the organization. However, if you need to speak to anything beyond the superficial understanding you have as a leader, your first thought should be to rely on the expertise of the member leading that team.
In a previous “Your Project Team Sucks” article, the Cap'n uncovered concerns related to a solutions team that refused to listen to the development team. The longer conversation (not included in the article), admitted that the solutions team saw what they were doing as benefitting the development team and that they did it to ensure that they wouldn’t encounter any problems during the development phase. They were taking the Alfred the Butler approach to protecting little pre-Batman Bruce; that is, sheltering them from the truth, and blocking them from imagined threats. Their focus was on the immediate, rather than promoting the growth of the team as a whole. Servant leadership fails to understand that sometimes, you have to struggle, you have to do the hard thing, you have to be stretched in order to grow.
When I recommended Ty meet with the women’s outreach pastor, he was very confused. What he couldn’t see at the time, was that she had been the head of the school (run by the church), but never felt like that was her calling. Instead, she wanted to use things she was passionate about, baking, cooking, knitting, and pottery into something that could benefit the church. After talking to her, she formed a women’s outreach program, in order to keep women of all ages engaged with each other, not only for religious purposes but also to have the ability to socialize with other women. I said, shit, that’s exactly what Ty is experiencing at the moment. Who better to talk to him about these struggles, than someone who experienced the same damn thing.
This is steward leadership.
You don’t expect a steward to be piloting the ship, you expect the steward to address the needs of the passengers, even if that means referring them to someone else.
Therefore, it is important to understand that as project managers, or leaders, you shouldn’t ever feel like you are in a position where you must address every problem yourself, that you must serve your team directly. Instead, be a majordomo. Be the head steward that knows exactly who is best equipped to provide that guidance and leadership to your team members. Be the key to facilitating those important meetings. Lead and guide when you can, and trust and delegate when you can’t.
Ty now is teaching church children and young people how to play various instruments and is loving it. He attributes this new found passion to the women’s ministry pastor, which is a bit annoying since he wouldn’t have ever thought about meeting with her, if not for my input, but that’s the point of being a steward. It isn’t about taking credit for the team's growth, it’s about ensuring that the team grows, regardless of who facilitates that growth.
Hi Mike, servant leadership is the standard of great leadership. It's taught as part of the PMP exam. You have demonstrated that you don't know a thing about management, since you can't even get the terms straight.
KYS