Legendary golf instructor Harvey Penick wrote a best seller entitled Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book a few years back. An instruction manual, the book also touched a deep emotional need. Readers responded to Penick’s heartfelt love for both a sport and those who shared his love of it.
Readers of Deep Change and Leadership on the Line will find similar passion in these two books. Both express love for the topic and for those developing their skills.
In Deep Change, Robert Quinn says one person can transform the larger organization of which he is a part. To choose otherwise is to begin a process of either “active exit” or “slow death.” The latter, which many ministry professionals will resonate with, is “a meaningless and frustrating experience enmeshed in fear, anger, and helplessness, while moving surely toward what is most feared.”
But unlike many other books on leadership, Quinn stresses the necessity of deep change at the personal level before attempting organizational transformation. He provides a litany of useful strategies: overcoming fear of change, gaining new perspective on ourselves and our jobs, and giving ourselves time to change. His chapter “Confronting the Integrity Gap” forced me to admit discrepancies between what I say I believe about my work for Christ and his church and how I act.
Fortunately, Quinn encourages us to operate out of opportunity, not guilt. Thus, he challenges readers to pursue excellence (which he wonderfully describes as “a form of deviance in most organizations”), “discover the vision within and run on that,” and do the best we can to combine our individual power with that of the many. This approach has the potential to create deep change in both leaders and the organizations they serve.
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The authors of Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, recognize that leading is a risky business. Nevertheless, leadership is worth it because it “provides meaning in life … [and] creates purpose.” Yet leadership contains inherent dangers too, including getting marginalized, attacked, diverted, or seduced.
For genuine change to take place at the organizational level, leaders must “get off the dance floor and get to the balcony.” This superb metaphor communicates the necessity for leaders to get the bigger picture if they want to facilitate transformation. Heifetz and Linsky offer concrete strategies on how to think politically, orchestrate conflict, and hold steady to ensure not just the leader’s success, but also that of the group.
Although the authors’ personal and business orientations are rooted, respectively, in Judaism and business, I was struck by how Christian their advice is. This is nowhere more evident than in the last section of the book, “Body and Soul.” Here, they instruct leaders to manage their hungers, anchor themselves in community, and, perhaps of greatest importance, pay close attention to the emotional and spiritual condition of their hearts.
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Their admonition to develop a “sacred heart” rooted in innocence, curiosity, and compassion could have been drawn from the Sermon on the Mount.
Do either of these business books have a downside for pastors? Deep Change may be overly optimistic about an individual’s ability to impact an existing organization. I’ve sometimes found that leaving a church is the better part of both wisdom and valor. Leadership on the Line occasionally reveals the pluralistic mindset of its authors. It also downplays the reality that organizational conflict is often as rooted in different personalities as in contrasting ideologies.
Having noted these weaknesses, I heartily recommend both books to Christian leaders. Passionately written from the head and the heart, these books not only encourage us to grow as leaders, but give some helpful tools for doing exactly that.
Scott Wenig Denver Seminary
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