ROBERT CLINTON ON LEADERSHIP Robert Clinton has spent a major part of his life studying, writing, and teaching about leadership, especially biblical and ministerial leadership. Two of his books, The Making of a Leader and Connecting, are essential when reading about leadership and mentoring. In December 1999, Clinton participated in a Leadership Network sponsored forum on leadership development and after the forum responded to a series of questions we posed on leadership. EXPLORER: 20-25 years ago we didn't talk about leadership or pastors as leaders. How has that interest developed? CLINTON: Secular society has had a lot of influence on talking about leadership. Early on in the '60s there was a real thrust toward the manager, which is one form of leadership. The whole concept of management by objectives and doing job descriptions for people so we know how to hold them accountable swept over from the secular world into the parachurch world, not as much in the church world. Then I think the culture itself was talking more about leadership, and that influenced the '80s. In the mid-'80s we had major leaders fall, leaders that everybody knew and it just demolished confidence in leadership. It's been particularly devastating in the Christian world because you expected more from them not to fall. So leadership became a focus. At the same time, beginning in the early '80s giftedness became important, and when you start studying spiritual gifts, you begin to recognize that certain people have certain kind of gifts and those people lead. EXPLORER: What's your definition of leadership? CLINTON: A leader is a person of God-given capacity and God-given responsibility to influence specific groups of people towards God's purposes. In some sense all people are leaders as they use their gifts, but the difference in that and what I'm talking about is responsibility to God for the people. They have a burden for it and they're going to answer to God for it. They influence. That's the dominant thing, not their position. EXPLORER: From your observation of churches that are doing an effective job of developing leaders, what are some common elements regardless of their denomination or size? CLINTON: One, they're intentional about it. They have pools from which to select, some way of finding out who in the pool should be selected. Most of them have some kind of training process they send people through. They have some sort of structure for doing it but in churches that are developing leaders, they can immediately put the training into application. In some, not all, mentoring is important. They have personal relationships, small groups, sometimes mentoring in a group context or individual mentoring. That's the dominant way that people are most effectively trained. EXPLORER: What's different now about skill sets for pastoral leaders than say ten years ago? CLINTON: In the United States in the last 15 years, multi-ethnicity or cross-cultural understanding is the major difference. We have to be much more culturally sensitive to lots of things such as structure, how we operate with people, and our congregation. Another one that leaders have to know something about now, which many of them do not, is change. How can we implement things in our church? In the old model you just did it. You told people and they did it. Some people came along and some got off the bus. In the future, people are going to have to know more about how to lead change and how to bridge into it, how to lead people into it so that when change happens, they can get ownership and less trauma. A third thing is they've got to learn how to develop leaders. Senior pastors on the whole don't develop their staffs. They have staff meetings. The staff has programs that they are running and report on. They pray together. They love each other, but they don't think about developing enough leaders. How do I train people to do what I do as opposed to how do I do it? EXPLORER: Why is it so hard for pastors to make the shift from a doer to a developer of people, or a doer to an equipper of others? CLINTON: I think it is because of the models they are taught and have seen. People basically teach as they were taught and operate as they have seen others operate. Most were not taught about developing leaders. They learned exegesis, homiletics, and philosophy rather than people skills. EXPLORER: We talked about new skills of recent years, but are there skills that are essential to being effective in the future? CLINTON: This is not a skill but an attitude that will result in skills. It is adopting the concept of learning posture. If you don't have a learning posture, you're not going to make it because things are changing and you've got to be able to learn. What you learn isn't as important as how to learn. People have to have a learning posture in order to be flexible about learning what's needed as situations change. Also, leaders in our culture, which is an egalitarian culture, are going to have to learn more about how to operate in a participative team context without losing their ability to make decisions as leaders. EXPLORER: Can you unpack that a little bit more? It seems that many pastors talk team, verbally value team, but they can't build a team or operate as a team. CLINTON: That's true or at least not a consensus model. I don't think a consensus model is a good model because one person can control everything. Basically what you want is one among many, and the leader's right to countermand decisions of the many sometimes. A wise leader will make decisions that generally flow with the team but there will be times when the leader will say, we're going to go this way anyway. You need a combination of that but there has to be a sense of ownership and participation at both levels. EXPLORER: What trips up most leaders? CLINTON: Few leaders finish well. The ones that don't finish well predominantly lose it in the middle game, not in the end game. In looking at leaders who don't finish well, I have identified six barriers that stop them. One is pride. There is a proper pride in recognizing who you are and operating out of what God's done for you, but there is also the danger of an inordinate pride, a pridefulness. Abuse of power is another. It happens when leaders operate unjustly or unfairly with people or because of their position and they start taking privileges or they influence people wrongly. A third one is lack of integrity with finances. That includes everything you can think of, embezzling, using funds that were earmarked for something else, not good accounting. Family issues, all the way from divorce or dysfunctional relationships between husband and wife or children, are a fourth barrier. Sexual issues are the fifth barrier and I'm not talking about simply adulterous affairs. I'm talking pornography and other sexually related issues. The last barrier is plateauing. Some plateauing is good. If you've been through something intense, it allows you to take a step back but over the long haul, you've got to move on and off the plateau.