The Team that Built This, Won’t Build That
It is not an immutable truth, but it is close to it
The sort of people that create new things are usually not the teams that build over time. Both are necessary, and both are powerful. But these people are inherently different in their worldviews.
Venture capitalists study the attributes of founders. There is a lot of material on the Internet about what these are. In most of these lists, you find things like persistence, grit, flexibility, openness to feedback, and sales skills to be among the top items. I would suggest that perspective is a huge part of founding something. By this I mean that founders can take on the perspective of the user or person being served by the new venture. They have built-in empathy. They often see themselves as subversive and dismissive of the status quo. They evaluate opportunities by the amount of change possible. They often have a narrow focus. Ministry founders are known to talk about righting an injustice or filling a missing gap.
Builders, those people who come after founders, are better understood as stewards. They are less apt to be risk-takers. They are aware of what works and what does not. They read and employ “best practice” material. They are more pragmatic and able to work systematically using less intuition and more data as a guide in decision-making. They care about sustainability and drive value from the accumulated contributions of others.
I have met a small number of leaders who can straddle these two worlds. If you are tempted to think you are one of them, you might want to do some serious soul-searching because it is rare. People like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos come to mind. Because these types of highly gifted leaders do succeed, we run the risk of seeing them as normative, but they are not. They have simply been in the small cohort that has risen to the top.
Ichak Adizes’ Corporate Lifecycle model confirms this reality. He describes the various stages of organizational growth. He suggests that leaders should be chosen based on what the organization needs at its different stages of growth. A failure to make necessary changes in leadership types creates problems. One problem is the Founder’s Trap, in which the building up of the organization is thwarted by a founder who cannot make the appropriate transition to the next phase.
Those of us who are leading institutions in need of innovation and redeployment face a dilemma. We may not be the people to make that kind of change happen. Different solutions to this have been proposed, such as Govindarajan’s Three Box Solution. The book, The Founder’s Mentality also has a framework for recapturing the early stages of founding. Yet another common practice is to hire consultants, outsiders who have no investment in the institution, to bring about change. They can put the sacred cows on the barbecue in ways that insiders cannot. They see the world with a perspective often lost in the systems the organization has created.
The team we as leaders have assembled for the building phase is, of course, the core of the problem. People typically were recruited to solve specific problems, such as a CFO brought in to provide financial controls and reporting to ensure proper management. They become obstacles because they are doing the job you hired them for. When you prioritize risk-taking over management, for example, you are changing their job description. This is repeated throughout various teams. Some, such as compliance-oriented human resources staff, are particularly prone to this sort of specialization.
These are the fundamental issues that keep ministries from plunging into innovation in a serious way. They are not easily solved. If the leadership team is small and was initially recruited with agility as a goal, change is much easier. But larger legacy ministries, from soup kitchens to churches to global missions agencies, have hierarchies of teams with highly specific functions. The investment necessary to reorient around new priorities is huge.
I have written about this before. I repeat myself because this is the challenge I hear about most when I talk about innovation with ministry leaders.