Radial Leadership Development: Making Progress by Going in Circles

Effective leaders achieve goals, grow personally, and expand their influence over time. Naturally, that progression lends itself to linear images like pipelines and pathways, and for good reason. If resources-plus-time do not move an organization forward, leaders and followers alike will find themselves at the end of the road.

Still, those images do not capture the multi-dimensional dynamics leaders both create and encounter when they lead. Lessons learned once are not filed and forgotten nor do they simply become leadership-muscle memory. As the leader advances their context grows in scope and complexity. At every transition effective leadership means leveling up skills mastered long ago.

The leader is always circling back to re-learn and re-apply lessons they learn along the way about self, skill, strategy, and social dynamics. The result is that effective leaders move ahead by going in circles that become deeper and richer, but never end.

The Intuitive Stations

The leader’s early-stage development covers his or her growth from intuitive social influencer to intentionally leading peers, constituting the first three of the seven radial stations on the vortex.

Leads Socially

Core Agency: Relational Influence / Marker:  Low self-awareness

By initiating the cycle with social influence exercised without structure, without intent, and with low self-awareness, we recognize that whatever the outcome of the ageless born-or-made debate is, all leaders have a gift—or x-factor if you prefer—that gives them influence.

The natural capacity of some people to move others has significant implications for those whose work it is to identify and cultivate leaders. To begin with, they need to pay thoughtful attention to the youth in their organization and community, starting with people in their pre-teens. Intentional observation and purposeful queries will identify who is influencing (for good or ill) the ecosystem at the youth group, dormitory, or breakroom.

Once social leaders are identified, they can be affirmed and encouraged. If they are responsive and willing, they can then begin to be shaped. The aim of this station is to foster self-awareness of their influence and reflection on its source, impact, and potential. The origin and fruit of a leader’s influence always matters, but at this point it matters less since intentionality is low and character is, at least possibly, malleable.

Leads Self

Core Agency: Internal Influence / Marker: Emerging self-awareness

Internal influence drives us all. In fact, self-leadership is the first and often most effective form of influence, even if it is not always a positive one. The social leaders identified above are no exception and may be positively self-directed by the time someone imagines cultivating their gifts. Still, everyone can grow, and it is the work of those who develop others to help social leaders deepen their sense of self and consider how they can govern their motives, thoughts, and behaviors to realize their best potential and serve others. Given the profound internal influence we exert over our inner life and its outward expression, self-awareness is essential. Leaders need to know what is happening in them and why they do what they do, feel what they feel, and think what they think.

This radial station is, therefore, primarily internal and self-reflective, but it requires more than contemplation. The development of self-aware self-governance requires leaders to apply key skills that will be used throughout the full array of the loop. They will learn to envision a future, set goals, evaluate progress, identify obstacles, and deny and reward behaviors.

Leads Peers

Core Agency: Intentional Influence / Marker: Autonomous Confidence

The social leader of the first radial station clearly influences peers. However, in the third station peer leadership is qualitatively different. Peer leaders blend natural giftedness and confidence born of self-governance with intentionality to lead others in constructive directions. Although they are not titular leaders, they begin leading others and learn some of the most important lessons they will ever grasp. These leaders have what we can call “autonomous confidence.” They do not wait for a commission to influence their environment. They just act.

The art of leading without positional or resource-based persuasion is perhaps the foundational skill of the effective life-long leader. Any relationship, regardless of the titles involved (short of the most base, destructive, and dehumanizing kind), has a voluntary dynamic near its core. To be sure, economic need, social pressure, or organizational command structures (e.g., military) have profound impact on the leader-follower connection, but non-compliance options, even if they are drastic and passive, almost always exist. More importantly, coercion is never desirable. Leaders always need to get things done, but “want-to” is always better than “have to.” This critical station offers rising leaders the chance to mature their influence when all they have is the persuasion of an honest relationship and a good idea.

The Intentional Stations

Leads Team

Core Agency: Vertical Vision / Marker: Accountable Confidence

The next station is realized when an informal leader is asked by peers or other leaders to take on a defined position. When this happens, intuitive leaders must adapt their style and transition from instinctive influence to tactical planning. Of course, instincts are always at play, but intuition is non-transferable, and leadership requires, among other things, designing and articulating the path forward. This marks a transition into the intentional leadership radial stations.

Although familiar skills are deployed, specific assignments, accountability, and the larger organizational structures that surround the leader will require him or her to adapt and lead in new ways. What is more a team leader’s context grows in multiple directions. Not only is he responsible for his own group, but his team exists in a larger, complex system that the leader does not control. This requires a shift from autonomous to accountable confidence. At this station, the leader needs confidence that they can motivate and guide their team to deliver on objectives assigned by superiors. Failing to adapt from autonomous confidence to accountable confidence will prove fatal to their progress, limit the scope of their influence, and stall their growth.

Leads Ministry

Core Agency: Strategic Vision / Marker: Delegated Credibility

Leaders always lead a team. However, as they develop the complexity of their task multiplies because the team is composed of other leaders who influence actors who work on their teams. That ripple-effect calls for new dimensions of perception, influence, and skill.

As noted, team leaders (introduced above) are responsible for a single group that is charged with specific tasks serving a relatively limited objective. For example, Christian education could include different teams for pre-school through adult, plus administrative personnel, publishing personnel, etc. Each team provides a unique service under a common heading. According to their station, team leaders should be empowered to make their own tactical plans to accomplish their mission.

Consequently, the ministry leader must learn the art of influencing her domain without the benefit of consistent contact with most of the members in her composite group. She must learn the art of leveraging her position by authenticating it with established credibility through others. The goal is to transfer the vision through team leaders to teams and so effectively delegate confidence in the strategy. Ministry leaders need to cultivate the art of influencing across the membrane between their team leaders and the teams they lead.

Of course, relational connection and professional credibility are essential, however, they are insufficient. For influence across team membranes, the ministry leader must build and communicate a compelling strategy which requires a level of advanced organizational awareness.

Until this station, leadership has depended on what can be called binary internal responsibility. That is, the team leader operates between their supervising leader (one point) and their team (second point). Ministry leadership, however, requires multi-dimensional, non-binary awareness of one’s domain as it relates to the entire organism. This multiplier is exponential. Ministry leaders need to perceive individual team dynamics as unique entities, the influence of each team on the others, the collective progress of their ministry, and, finally, its relationship with the broader organization and its mission.

Given the scope of responsibility and removal from the frontline work of specific teams, the ministry leader will be required to build strategies while they rely on others to design tactical applications. That demands an acute learning-curve which will not be addressed here, except to note that this station makes a dual demand on the leader. If they see all dimensions clearly, but only respond with technique and tactic they cannot provide a cohesive vision of their connection to overall strategy and philosophy of ministry. The system will sputter or stall. In the same vein, if they communicate clear objectives, assign resources artfully and define inter-team relationships within a coherent strategy, but are blind to the distinct social systems in which their domain exists, the plan will create a lot of fruitless activity. They need to fuse both into Strategic Perception.

Leads Church         

Core Agency: Visionary Planning and Mobilized Execution / Marker: Compelling Authority

No matter how substantial a ministry the leader oversaw as a staff member, the responsibility to lead an entire ministry ecosystem has complexities that demand more nuanced perceptions and actions. In large measure this is true even if the congregation has a smaller budget, community census, and leadership team than a ministry they previously led as a staff member. The chief complication the senior or solo church leader faces is the paradox of ecclesiastical authority, especially in North American culture.

The Church leader has at once more and less authority than other leaders in the congregation. That paradox is common to leaders at the head of many organizations, but it is exaggerated by the spiritual reality and sociology of congregations. Consequently, this station represents a substantial learning arc and potential pitfall if the leader’s learning agility has reached its boundary. As in the last station of the leadership cycle array, the way forward is to look backward and recall lessons learned as a social leader, and to see growth along the way.

Obviously, the Lead Pastor is empowered with authority. No apologies should be made for that fact. Indeed, God will hold the leader accountable for exercising the office and its powers to get something done. However, two factors mitigate the church leader’s real-world leverage. The first is common to all organizations and the second is unique to spiritual communities, at least since the tectonic shifts in the West’s “social imaginaries” as Charles Taylors calls them.

Leaving the church’s peculiarities asides, moving from ministry (or Department) leader to church (or Organization/Business) leader adds org-chart layers between the leader and the individuals, actions, and assignments they must direct. Whereas they once exercised “extended authority” through team leaders, the church leader must extend their influence through at least two levels of leadership including two sets of accomplished leaders (ministry and team leaders in our parlance). Each of these involve unique personnel, team cultures, physical proximity, interaction rhythms, expertise, and experience. Moreover, it is unlikely that the ministry leader has experience and first-hand credibility in every dimension of the work. Without regular direct access or task-credibility the church leader must learn to move the organization via an extrapolated influence that extends beyond titles, org-charts, and personal work history.

Before we continue exploring leadership in that context, however, we must account for peculiar realities of church life. In brief, whatever the org-chart may indicate, the church has no solid black lines of accountability in the standard institutional sense. The Church, after all, is not supposed to be like the world. Its relationships are not strictly commercial or structural, but organic and familial. While that is all true its application in the world of staff, and much more so with volunteers, is easily misunderstood in ways that complicate or even undermine legitimate authority.

Volunteers, after all, do not work for the leader in the full sense. And to the degree they do, it is assumed that their sacrificial participation in the effort grants them influence on the shape, scope, and speed of the work in ways that make oversight and accountability difficult. This dynamic is also at play with paid staff. Although to a lesser degree, staff can presume the values of the spiritual, familial, grace-centered community they serve should trump common employee-employer considerations. Their passion, gifts, and equality before God can be cited as reason to mitigate issues of subordination, competence, or production schedules, especially since ministry productivity can be such a mystery (some plant, some water, etc.).

The result is that every org-chart line in a church is a dotted line. If this seems like an overstatement, fire a staffer and watch how the congregation responds. Outside of a corporation’s stockholders demanding to know why a C-level officer was dismissed no other enterprise’s constituents (customers/congregants) would likely demand an explanation for why someone was let go. And even that would be different. The congregants will be motivated by genuinely personal, relational, and theological passions that demand a full explanation of why their pastor/friend/leader was dismissed. Sadly, those reasons can almost never be fully shared and to the degree that they are they will likely not satisfy. Leading is always hard, but the convoluted intersection of spirituality and institution works for as well as against the church leader. The purpose of this observation is simply to map the landscape that leaders at this station of the radius must navigate.

To safely traverse the terrain, the leader must learn the art of vision-planning and, what we will call, compelling authority. Having a vision is essential and casting vision is critical, but organizations and their leaders and teams will flounder if the senior leader cannot fuse the vision with a robust plan that the leaders and front-line actors believe in as much as the big idea it pursues. Our radius has already required the leader to move from the tactical to the strategic. Now, the leader needs to point to a motivating destination (vision) yet do so without forgetting the strategic and tactical bone-fides that were earned in the previous stations. Good leaders see far, but they also remember what it is like to lead in the near-space real-world constraints of teams and teams of teams. Their organization and its people need to know the “how” of the vision or its “what” and “why” only frustrate. Cast a vision and then build a bridge or actions to it that foot-soldiers can understand and believe in.

The most brilliant plans still become shelf-ware, tucked away in workers’ cubicles, if the senior leader cannot actuate their plan across organizational dimensions two or three times (or more) removed from them. That calls for extending the lessons learned in the transition from team to ministry leadership. The movement between those radial stations requires the leader to exercise “delegated credibility” which is the transfer of their position and credibility through their team of leaders to the teams they lead. Ministry leaders use goal setting, reporting cadence, and metrics to oversee their team of leaders by both the process they design and the personal credibility they inspire. To progress along the radius from ministry to church leader they must sustain these tools through delegated credibility applied to their own direct reports and then add “compelling authority.”

Compelling authority is a composite characteristic of accomplished, empowered leaders whose professional and personal credentialing-story is known and believed by the community they lead. A credentialing-story is a true narrative that affirms and magnifies the leaders right to the position they hold. That story establishes street-cred that rank-and-file team members can relate to and elevates positional authority to compelling authority.

Like all leaders from the team station onward, church leaders have formal authority. However, theirs is extreme since they are in the senior position and possess its title, prerogatives, and organizational apparatus. That is substantial, but insufficient. To effectively lead the individual’s integrity, intellect, experience, accomplishments, and personal presence must compel the community, especially those with whom they have little direct contact. Sadly, this can degenerate into mythologies about the leader and foster grave dysfunctions, but that does not invalidate the need. The Apostle Paul had a credentialing story and told it when it served the Church. When true and noble (even if not dramatic and flashy), a credentialing-story acts as a force-multiplier to the leader’s positional powers. Anyone can order a subordinate to act and sometimes that is all that can be done. However, fostering peak performance, creativity, endurance, and sacrifice takes more than a title and a whip. It requires holistic credibility to make orders and plans genuinely credible beyond the threat of a boss.

This is not a call to bluster or wear out clichés about Alpha leaders. You can impress some of the people some of the time with those tales, but they will soon figure out who they are following. In fact, this is a call to make the journey around the radius authentic and formative. The leader cycle is about incorporating the skills and experiences of each station into our person as well as onto our resume. If that process is taken seriously, the leader will possess a personal credibility that authenticates their positional authority.

Leads Peer Leaders

Core Agency: Relational Influence / Marker: High Self-Awareness

Leadership always influences beyond the organizational and relational reach of the leader. This is true all along our radius because even the initially unintentional influence on others shapes them and becomes part of their actions, thoughts, and other relationships. Returning to the beginning, when the nascent leader enters the radial cycle as a social leader, they are usually unaware of their “power” to change situations and people. In a way, their leadership gifts are simply “ways of being” and so they are easy to imagine as pure, so to speak. As they develop and become intentional, formally commissioned leaders with expanding authority and tools at their disposal, it becomes easier to rely on organizational apparatus and, sadly, lose both the purity of action young influencers possess and the elemental relational skills that empowered their first fruits as a leader. Over time it is all too easy to rely on history, office, and authority when traversing the leadership radius.

The Church or Organizational Level Leaders cannot make that mistake if they want to lead peers across institutional lines. When leaders find themselves leading peers, they find themselves back where they started. No matter what resources they bring to the table, the core of their influence is necessarily social just at it was when they started their journey. To be sure, their skills have sharpened, their credibility has been established and the tools at their disposal have expanded exponentially. However, all of that is also true of the man or woman across the table.

With this in view, it is essential to renew the social skills that first put the leader on the influence path. Obviously, the skills and instincts of social leadership have been present at every station in the radius, but they have never been as essential as they are when peers lead peers toward a collaborative vision that requires each leader’s completely voluntary commitment. Whatever value the common vision adds to each peer leader’s primary charge, it is always an outside demand and always competes with the limited resources and unlimited list of needs their organization faces.

Effective peer leaders keep that mutuality in mind and adroitly shift their influence from compelling authority and institutional mechanisms (reports, deliveries, strategic plans, etc.) to an almost exclusive reliance on personal relationship, especially at the first stages of a collaborative effort before commitment is secured. This demands acute self-awareness.

The patterns leaders develop over decades of titular and structural authority eventually become as much a way of being as social influence once was. It is not necessary (or even helpful) to forget the skills learned along the way, but it is essential to suspend them when leading peers who may well actually be the smartest person in the room. To be the most influential person, however, will require clear awareness of how the leader is driving the discussion. If they rely on assertions of certainty, organizational leverage, preferred methodology, or other items from the established leader’s tool shed the impact will be muted at best. Those factors may or may not be relevant, but the fulcrum upon which influence tilts the room is altogether different.

The peer leader uses genuine listening and artful question-asking skills applied with integrity to draw out the needs and values of peer influencers and then guides them to a collaborative nexus. In other words, he or she does on purpose what they did by accident among their friends years earlier. Hopefully, they do it now with the maturity and muscles developed over time and relied upon daily to act without the leader’s poise and clear self-awareness during real-time discussion. [O1] That, in turn, demands the death of ego. When emerging leaders unknowingly influence others during the social leadership station of the radius, their lack of self-awareness ironically helps them move others. At this latter point on the dial, however, self-awareness is the essential instrument by which the peer leader keeps him or herself in check and gives room to the input, passions, and influence of other high-level leaders.

At a minimum, the leader will have to possess tactical humility, but a genuinely humble character is much more effective and sustaining. Like all leadership, peer leadership can be leveraged by threat, promise, and positioning, but that collaboration is tenuous and shallow. The catalytic leader of peers is ready, perhaps even eager, to see the objective realized by others, the team led by others, the credit given to others. Along the way to that end, he or she is willing to forsake preferred strategies and tactics if the right mountain is summitted. They are, once again, social leaders.

Of course, organizational needs do not always follow logically conceived progressions. Sometimes leaders are forced (or force themselves) past stations they have not experienced or mastered, but the leadership skill scope does not make exceptions. When the organization’s need or the leader’s influence-greed force them to leap over developmental steps, they will need to retrofit unlearned lessons while they struggle to manage higher level skills.

Granting the reality of unpredictable organizational needs, the leader’s development will generally fall along the radial cycle over a lifetime of service. The skills it identifies are cumulative and serve as qualifiers for the succeeding stations, at least in healthy organizations. Consequently, leading peers marks the circumnavigation of a leader’s radial journey. From this point, he or she will repeat the cycle throughout their career and engage deepening opportunities to grow at each station. As they do that, the stations become a reinforcing vortex that moves the leader forward by going in circles.