Find Balance in the Mission

Aug 27

Good leaders often find themselves negotiating multiple even competing values. Great leaders balance the disappointment and the losses with shared meaning and purpose. There are no win-win solutions amidst transformational change.

Today’s content addresses how you can balance stakeholder expectations and change at the same time.

Leaders must manage the tension between maintaining core values and adapting to new challenges. It’s the mission that creates the balance.

None of us took on leadership roles to disappoint anyone. In fact, many of us were asked to step into leadership with the hope and expectation that we could rally the team around a specific problem, bringing a solution that would make everyone happy.

As faith leaders, most of us became leaders because there is a God that we love, and there are people that we love, and we want to introduce the people we love to the God we love by building a ministry or an organization that they would love.

But when changes are needed to help our beloved organization thrive or even survive in a changing world, leaders are required to make hard decisions and tough choices that often cause pain and howls of protest.

And, change is hard.

For the adaptive change leader, the goal can never be about pleasing the stakeholders by solving their problems, but rather it must be about leading the organization through personal and shared transformation in order to accomplish its mission in a changing and often disruptive world.

The mission is always the trump card that always wins the hand.