The Metropolitan as Leader-Manager

“Every pastor chooses how he will lead a flock: As a risk taker, as a caretaker, or as an undertaker while it slowly dies.” – Rick Warren, Saddleback Church

Among the long list of unique skills, professional training, highly specialized knowledge and countless trivia and details the Metropolitan must master, at least two essential functions make all the rest of it work: effective leadership and good management.

In common parlance the terms leader and manager are often used interchangeably. It’s true that they do share some common characteristics but each also has unique features. The leadership element is immediately and visibly apparent in the Metropolitan – he wears beautiful vestments! Every week his leadership is on display and under full review: teacher of the faith and preacher to the faithful. Attired in beautiful vestments, a collar and a cross, he stands as eschatological symbol of the ultimate purpose of life – loving and serving God and others. The Metropolitan ostensibly also leads through good example and therefore, with moral authority. Though as the Metropolitan, he may fall short of the ethics of the gospel, still he will understandably struggle to live according to the gospel.

Though the Metropolitan may delegate many if not most managerial responsibilities to the Chancellor, an office manager or a Consistory office administrator, he simply cannot delegate leadership, for if he does this the UOCC faithful are without the helmsman that they need. Interestingly though, many of the best bishops/Metropolitans learn to share leadership responsibilities with others – the Chancellor, the chairs of the strategic planning committee, the chairs of the governance review committee, heads of organizations, etc.

One of the most significant challenges for the Metropolitan is to distinguish between leadership and management because he must function well in both modalities – a very difficult task indeed. He needs to be cognizant of which hat he has on and if it is the proper one for the task at hand. Given the challenges before the UOCC today, this is particularly important.

Leadership and management are complementary and one cannot function effectively without the other. Any effort to completely separate the two would be a mistake. Simply stated, the leader’s job is to inspire and motivate; the manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. Perhaps the comparisons and contrasts found below will assist delegates to the XXIV Sobor, who will be voting to elect the next Metropolitan and Chancellor, to provide some insight into who can best and lead and manage the UOCC for the next number of years or decades:

· The leader innovates; the manager administers.

· The leader is an original; the manager is a copy.

· The leader develops; the manager maintains.

· The leader focuses on people; the manager focuses on systems and structure.

· The leader inspires trust; the manager relies on control (not in a bad way).

· The leader has a long-range perspective; the manager has a short-range view.

· The leader asks what and why; the manager asks how and when.

· The leader’s eye is on the horizon; the manager has his eye always on the bottom line.

· The leader originates; the manager imitates.

· The leader challenges the status quo; the manager accepts it.

· The leader is his own person; the manager is the classic good soldier.

Leadership means taking initiatives that challenge inertia, complacency and what St. Basil called, “the tyranny of custom.” This means that there will be an emotional price to pay, for effective leadership requires envisioning, creating, innovating, inspiring, challenging, planning and developing. If the emotional (and sometimes physical) “price” of leadership is doubted, check out how people responded to the leadership of Moses, the prophets, Jesus or St. Paul.

In the secular business world leaders’ and managers’ roles have changed remarkably quickly since the age of information. In the industrial age it was possible to clearly separate leaders and managers. A foreman in a factory probably wasn’t required to think much beyond what was being produced or the people that were producing it. His job was to follow orders, organize the work, assign the right people to the necessary tasks, coordinate the results, and ensure the job got done as ordered. The focus was on efficiency. In recent times, however, where value comes increasingly from the knowledge of people, management and leadership are not so easily separated. People look to their managers, not just to assign them a task, but to define for them a purpose. And managers must organize workers, not just to maximize efficiency, but to nurture skills, develop talent and inspire results. In developed countries workers’ primary motivation is less and less about putting food on the table for their family and more and more about personal fulfillment and a purposeful life.

Consider women volunteers in church life. Though certainly always individuals with unique interests and talents, for many generations they were often defined and involved by function. “The ladies are in the kitchen cooking for the festival.” Today, when there are more women going to college than there are men and in a time when women pursue professional careers almost as frequently as men do, the challenge for both a leader and a manager, whether man or woman, is to find meaningful volunteer opportunities for women and purposeful involvement in parish life. The late management guru Peter Drucker identified the emergence of the “knowledge worker,” and the profound differences that would cause in the way business and nonprofits were organized. With the rise of the knowledge worker, “one does not ‘manage’ people,” Mr. Drucker wrote. “The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of every individual.”

In church life, leadership is associated with bringing the Church into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully developing those opportunities so that the community – in values, actions, priorities and programs – is more and more closely emulating the life of the church as revealed in the pages of holy scripture and in the lives of the saints – a personal and corporate movement that leads to acquiring more and more of the Holy Spirit.

Leadership is about vision, about people embracing the vision, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing meaningful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it’s about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, rapidly secularizing culture, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in the UOCC.

Management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, defining volunteer opportunities, staffing, measuring performance and problem-solving. These will help the UOCC to create an environment where it can dependably do what it knows how to do already very well to sanctify time, space, creation and most of all – people.

In conclusion, the quote cited at the outset from Rick Warren is an important one to keep in mind as we prepare ourselves to select the next Metropolitan. Do we want our next Metropolitan to be a risk taker, a caretaker, or an undertaker while our Church slowly dies?

Most leaders want to be risk-takers but end up as caretakers (simply maintaining that which is in existence already) or undertakers (watching over a dying church): Why? Often because of the age old attitudes which refuse to budge. The statements “we like things the way they are” or “this will see us out” or “we can't do that, we tried it fifty years ago and it didn't work then”. These statements can be killers. By illustration, a doorstop can serve two purposes……… It can either be used to wedge the door open, surely its intended use, or it can be used to wedge the door shut. If we are looking to our next leaders to be risk takers for Jesus Christ, then we need to ensure that we are not doorstops who prevent the door to riskiness being opened. Instead we need to be doorstops who keep the door to opportunities (risky or otherwise) wide open. We too must learn to take risks. May God grant us wisdom and discernment as we chose our leaders!

- Adapted from an article on Leadership by Orthodox Ministry Services by Martin Zip