Every congregation, every organization is facing the option of deep change or slow death. Context matters in achieving your mission and we are living in the midst of a paradigm shift that is still taking place at supersonic speeds. We must learn to change in order to stay true to and achieve our mission in a new and ever-changing context.
I could make the case for that statement, but I discover that almost everywhere I go people recognize that this is true. The challenges that most of us have is that we were not trained to “lead change.”
In her Ted Talk, “How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust,” Harvard Business School professor, Frances Frie, offers three keys to deep change. She echoes Tod Bolsinger’s assertion in “Canoeing The Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory” that people will only follow you off the map, if they trust you on the map.
Frie suggests that there are three components to trust – empathy, authenticity, and logic. These are like three legs to the stools of trust, and if anyone is missing or weak, the deep change process is threatened. Leaders are likely to have learned logic in their formal education, but what we know about anxiety is that when, in pursuit a mission a system gets anxious, logic goes out the door. Where did you learn authenticity or empathy? For congregations and businesses to thrive in this new era, organizations must provide leadership training that includes these three components – logic, authenticity, empathy.
The team at The Leader’s Journey can help you with that. We offer personal coaching and leadership development for individuals and teams.
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