The One Who Tried to Change Everything

The hardest job in any organization may be following someone everyone loved. I have watched it play out more than once, in more than one kind of organization, and it tends to end with the same sentence.

Picture a congregation that thrived for twenty-two years under one pastor. Walt was the reason people came, and he knew it without being vain about it. He remembered names. He preached without notes. When the building needed a new roof, he stood up on a Sunday, told a story about the roof over his grandmother’s kitchen, and the money was raised by Easter. Staff loved working for him. Givers trusted him. The council never had to ask how things were going, because Walt told them, and they believed him, and they were usually right.

When Walt retired, the council did what councils do. They wrote a profile built around vision and mission, and they hired Andrea, who had real gifts of her own. She led with her heart. She cared about different things than Walt did. Within three years giving was down, two staff members had left, and the council had reached the conclusion the congregation had been voicing in the parking lot for a year: she tried to change everything.

What the tradition carried

I want to be fair to both of them, because this is not a story about a good leader and a bad one.

Walt delivered. That part of the folklore is true. Charisma carries the day, and so does tradition, and I will not pretend otherwise. People really did follow him, and the church really did thrive.

But look at where the delivery lived. The roof got funded because Walt asked. Givers stayed because Walt knew them. The council felt informed because Walt informed them. None of it was written into a process, a record, or a habit the organization owned. It lived in one person’s memory, calendar and relationships. When he walked out the door, it walked out with him. Nobody intended that. It was simply the tradition, and no one had ever asked the tradition to outlast the man.

Andrea did not inherit a channel. She inherited an absence shaped like Walt. Everything she did to build what was missing, a giving record, a different staff meeting, a new way of reporting to the council, looked exactly like changing everything. And when results fell, the council asked the question we almost always ask. Who did this? They found her, because she was the only one standing there.

She did not inherit a channel. She inherited an absence shaped like Walt.

Two pictures of leadership

Notice that every step of the story is about a person. The council hired for one person’s vision. Andrea led with one person’s heart. The result was judged as one person’s failure. At no point did anyone ask what the organization itself could reliably deliver, no matter who happened to be in the pulpit.

This is the superman picture of leadership. The leader is the source: the one who knows, the one who asks, the one who rescues. Superman’s powers work the same in every city, so when the next one falters, the only explanation left is that we hired the wrong person.

I think leadership is better understood as a channel, and a channel is not passive. Anyone who has watched someone build a following from nothing knows the work it takes: making things worth carrying, deciding what gets carried, showing up on schedule until people can count on you. A channel also cannot ignore its ground. What it carries depends on what it runs across.

A different first year

So what would a channel have looked like in Andrea’s shoes? Not a different personality. A different first year, in three moves.

1. Read the context first

Andrea reads the context before she changes it. What does this church reliably deliver, and to whom? Is that written into a process or a record, or does it live in someone’s head? What happened the last time someone key left? If you were hired to make changes, this can feel like stalling. It is not. It is the first act of change, and the one that tells you what you are actually changing.

2. Find your mates

Then she finds her mates. Walt never did everything himself, even if it looked that way. Someone kept the list of who gave to the roof. A council member always knew which families were struggling. The office manager knew which promises had been made from the pulpit and never written down. Those people already carry pieces of the delivery. A new leader’s early work is to find them, learn from them, and bring them into building what is missing. Each one is a place the delivery can live besides the person in charge.

3. Proceed at critical mass

And she proceeds only when she has critical mass. Not when the plan is finished, and not when the council grows impatient, but when enough of the people who carry the work can see the change and want it. The surest way there is small: pick one thing next to what the church already does well, make a clear promise about it, and keep it where people can watch. Trust in a change grows the way trust in an organization does, one kept promise at a time.

Many owners, one record

Do that, and the story gets told differently. The change no longer belongs to the newcomer. When results wobble, and they will, there is no single person standing there to blame, because the work has many owners and a record of what was done.

That is also the most honest answer I have to the hardest part of Walt’s story. People follow whoever delivers, and they should. But delivery that lives in one person leaves with that person. Delivery that lives in many people, and in a written record, can be inherited.

The question for those still in the chair

So the question is for those of us still in the chair, too. If you left tomorrow, where would the delivery go? And who already carries enough of it to keep it going?

We have to get used to building systems. Not because charisma is wrong, but because it does not transfer.