Leading with Clarity: Uncovering Root Causes in Leadership

As leaders, we have a bias to act. We see a problem and we want to just go full steam ahead in solving the problem. But my brothers and sisters, what if all of your activity is solving the wrong problem? [00:00:00]

And he gave me the vision of a saw with a very dull blade, which represents leadership that is just overwhelmed and frustrated. And I think that the message I want to share today is really intended to sharpen your saw of leadership. As I consider what churches are struggling with the most, when I think about what churches of all sizes are really wrestling with, I consider that the number one struggle that churches of all sizes are experiencing is a struggle against confusion. [00:00:35]

Today, my hope is just to give you some insights and some thoughts that will help you lead with clarity. And for those of you who take notes, I'm going to teach from the subject, the criticality of clarity. The criticality of clarity. Now, to give you a little bit of background, so I really appreciate the introductory video, I spent about, I don't know, 17, 18 years in executive leadership in corporate America. What that means is I have experienced building and leading teams from scratch. I have scaled organizations nationally and globally. I have led teams, including distributed global teams where people were predominantly remote. I have also facilitated private public partnerships to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars. But as I've done all of that, I have done it while concurrently serving in local pastoral leadership with my husband. [00:01:33]

And so my husband and I have the great privilege of stewarding the hearts and minds of a local congregation in Gainesville, Florida. And because I have lived my life at the intersection of ministry and marketplace, what has happened is I have had pastors invite me into thought partnership with them about some of the organizational development challenges that they're facing. And I'll never forget one year, this was about, I don't know, five, six years ago, a pastor friend texted me and he said, Nona, I need to hop on. [00:02:36]

I know nobody in this room has ever had to terminate a leader before. So this is probably going to be super abstract for you. But he said, Nona, I need you to help me think through how to terminate a leader. And so we get on this Zoom call and I ask him to explain the situation to me, right? Like, okay, so why is it that you need to terminate this person? And so he begins to tell me that he hired this leader and he had such high hopes for this person. But after being in their role for about seven or eight months, they were not performing according to what he expected. As a matter of fact, the language that he used was he said, Nona, I will never understand how someone can have the audacity to collect a paycheck while doing nothing. That's what he said, right? And so I asked him a few clarifying questions. I said, okay, help me understand what is the process that you used to clarify your expectations for their role? [00:03:13]

And he kind of looked back at me like a deer in the headlights. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, what exactly did you do to ensure that they were clear about what success for their role looks like to you? And he said, well, when I hired them, I gave them a job description. [00:04:14]

with them and he said about once a month for an hour I said okay last question pretend that I am this person I want you to explain for me what success looks like for their role both quantitatively and qualitatively in other words I need you to explain to me how you will measure my success in the role the pastor looked at me and said well Nona I hired them to tell me that and I realized in that moment that that pastor had actually made one of the cardinal mistakes of leadership that pastor assumed that you could solve a problem by hiring someone and delegating it to them in its entirety that pastor assumed that if I just hire the right person they will figure it out does anybody in this room know what I'm talking about anybody ever hired somebody and then you find yourself disillusioned because what you thought they would do they didn't do so what I realized in that moment is that the problem actually wasn't the person not performing the problem was that the pastor lacked clarity on the what the problem was that that person needed to solve and because the pastor lacked [00:04:40]

clarity himself he could not give what he didn't have and so what actually ended up happen happening is that in the absence of that pastor's clarity the person's work ended up lacking focus and direction and one of the worst things that we can do as a leader is tell somebody make it happen without understanding what it is or what happened looks like and so what I want to do today is I want to give you some just practical frameworks for how to get to clarity as a leader because I'm telling you brothers and sisters Satan loves when we are not clear because that lack of clarity actually creates a seedbed where he can sow control and confusion and strife and so this morning I really want to help you think through how do we get to a clear definition of success across the various roles and departments and entities in our church so one of the most important lessons that I've learned across my time leading teams is this the problem that you name is the problem that you solve but the problem that goes unnamed is the problem that goes unsolved so what are the three roles of a leader there are three primary roles that we hold as leaders [00:06:14]

The first is this. We are to define the problem to be solved. [00:07:48]

And I'm going to give you practical tips and tools on how to do that. [00:07:54]

Secondly, we are to structure the team to solve it. I'm gonna also give you a practical tool for how to do that. And then third, we have to give that team a clear vision for what success looks like to us as the leader. [00:07:59]

We have to be very careful to not delegate vision to the people who are following us. You know why? [00:08:29]

Because when they are following us, we actually obstruct their view. [00:08:36]

And so what that means is they can't see what we see. As leaders, we're the ones who have to give people vision because we have the clearest unobstructed view of what God is calling us to. So never delegate vision to people. So tip number one, before you do, don't. Before you do, think. [00:08:47]