Do You Make these 7 Leadership Mistakes When Dealing with Conflict?

Victor (not his real name) is a local church pastor who sought me out for a consultation. By the time we managed to work out a time to meet he'd been in conflict with some congregational members for eight months. He had been in his mid-sized congregation for three and a half years and thought everything was going well. That is, until he began confronting personal attacks, hearing about "secret" meetings, and noticing changes in some of his church leaders' behavior toward him.

After struggling for eight months and not getting anywhere, Victor starting seeking help in understanding what was going on and what to do about it. To his credit, Victor was also seeking to understand his own functioning in the midst of conflict. He started to recognize long-seated patterns in how he responded to the difficult experience at his church. It did not take long for Victor to name seven mistakes he was making in how he was dealing with conflict. Victor actually wrote down the list of the seven mistakes he was making and worked hard at consciously changing the way he was behaving.

What sustains excellence in ministry?

The power of peer-group learning is explored in the book So Much Better: How Thousands of Pastors Help Each Other Thrive." The book presents findings by the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Peer Learning Project, with contributors from a variety of denominations and educational and church institutions. 

One key finding is that excellence in ministry is a product of a sustained commitment to lifelong learning. The book identifies the ways peer learning groups promote personal and professional growth. These include the following specific practices (p. 171):

Gathering regularly for prayer and worship

Examining each other's leadership activities

Analyzing congregational contexts

Identifying points of needed knowledge or skill

Designing or engaging in appropriate learning activities

Practicing what is learned in leadership initiatives

Evaluating the results for new educational directions.

If you are a part of a peer learning group, that checklist can make for a helpful evaluative tool. How many, and how well, does your peer learning group practice the elements on the list? If you are starting a peer learning group the list can be helpful for establishing parameters for a peer learning covenant. 

Israel Galindo is Associate Dean for Lifelong Learning at the Columbia Theological Seminary. Formerly he was Dean at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. He contributes to the Wabash Center blog for theological school deans. 

Homeostasis finds a way

One phenomena of the power of homeostasis is that whenever a leader attempts to bring about change he or she will most certainly encounter sabotage. While we can find some comfort in the notion that reactivity is unimaginative, and therefore predictable, sabotage has a thousand faces. The fun thing about sabotage (if one can be non‐reactive about it), is that while we can expect it, we will always be surprised at the forms it takes.

If a leader's job is not about bringing about change, then what's a leader good for?

A sharp student in my systems theory class was struggling with the idea of how trying to bring about change in a system is not willful. He had accepted the idea that a leader's job is not to “change the system.” But he was trying to reconcile that idea with the fact that leaders do bring about change in systems: organizational, developmental, change for the better, change toward maturity, change of perspectives, etc. 

How to Deal With a Wall

One of the first dollars I made on a job was knocking through a wall in a New York City brownstone. I used a sledgehammer and it took me an entire day. I was twelve years old and I was paid a dollar in the form of a 1922 silver Peace Dollar. Not a bad deal for a 12-year-old, especially since I’ve still got that coin and its value has increased over the years.

Thoughts on congregations as communities of faith

Congregations are, primarily, authentic communities of faith—despite the fact that they are also organizations. That’s an insight worth keeping in mind for every congregational leader. The tendency for leaders too often is to address congregational issues from an administrative approach in an attempt to control outcomes. Symptomatic of this tendency is the popularity of management books among clergy. Administration and management can work at one level, at the organizational level, but they will not work at the “communal” level. (Read an excerpt on what makes a congregation a real faith community from the book The Hidden Lives of Congregations ).

Checking your prejudices

One important educational task is to help students uncover their prejudices. Prejudices cause students to “pre-judge” ideas, concepts, and truths and, when unchecked, can block learning since learning requires the accommodation of the new to the old: adding new knowledge to existing knowledge; dismantling old structures in order to build new ones, or giving up beliefs in order to embrace new truths.