Manager Wanted

For me, management is like art. I may not know how to create a masterpiece, but I know it when I see it.

I think the worse thing a company could do is hire me as a manager. To be a manager means being someone who can organize and coordinate. A manager is someone who can take the vision and make it function. As one who can conceptualize how it should be done, I can get it started, but if it’s going to be efficient in the long haul, it will need someone who can make the pieces fit. In the thirty years I have been in ministry I have started a number of projects including church planting among tribals, non-formal training programs in the US and in other countries. But in all that time I have never managed any program beyond its initial launch. I’ve given up more titles of responsibility than you can count…pastor, head of training in Kenya, Overseas Director, Asia Director, VP of Training, all were positions I held at one time. I gave them up because I know, as an entrepreneur, how to create, but I don’t have the gifts to manage it.

Miller, in his book Barbarians to Bureaucrats. Corporate Life Cycle Strategies: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, identifies well the differences between a leader and a manger:

"Managers must understand the difference between leadership and management. Leadership provides the vision, values, and purpose that creates motion. Management channels the energy leadership creates."

In America, there is usually a clear line between the visionary leader and management. This is not true in India. In Asia, the leader and the manager is all-in-one. Nine times out of ten institutions (be they business or church) are a high grid/high group hierarchal structure with those at the top of the extended family calling the shots. The problem is that those who are at the top many times don’t know how to manage anything and as a result the organization does not function well. It survives only because the core group of family isn’t going anywhere (look for another job or go to a different church), but it does not grow because outsiders are not included except for what they can provide to the group.

My wife and I have been attending a fellowship in the city for over two years. We go there primarily because the pastor is a marvelous expositor of the Word. We attend church, not to have an emotional encounter, but to be spiritually fed. However, attending this church is often an exercise in frustration as the service, prior to the preaching, is an excruciating experience. The worship team doesn’t know how to lead the congregation in singing, most of the time the tech team can’t get the choruses on the overhead screen, microphones squeal, offering is a last minute scramble to find the offering baskets and ushers to pass the plate. If the pastor is out of town, which is often, the substitute speaker is woefully inadequate in his presentation. We continue to attend this fellowship because of the friendships we have built and for what it is, in spite of what it isn't. Because of our commitment to the assembly, we support its purpose, but are saddened by its loss of potential. With a little management, it could be more effective and has the prospect of having even more of an impact in the community.

Apart from this blog, which I am certain no one in the congregation will read, I would not, I cannot, give suggestions on how to do things better. Why? Because in a high grid/high group social environment it’s extremely difficult for change to take place and besides, as an outsider, I have no role.

Our local church is just one example of the how organizations operate in this country. If we went to another fellowship it would likely have the same structure. I am not suggesting that the high grid/high group structure is inherently wrong nor that the low grid structures are superior (explanation in the next blog). However, those in the West, who hope to do business or ministry in this country, need to understand that things work here based on the hierarchical (chief, extended family) system. If it works well it’s because the hierarchy possess both vision and management gifts. It’s a rare combination indeed.