Have you ever remarked that another leader was “well-connected?” These are the ones that know a lot of people, those that can get things done via relationship, instead of authority. A leader with a good network can often achieve much more than a person with a lot of power. The reason for this is a kind of Leadership Thermodynamics:
[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]1) The authority of a command diminishes over time and distance as it travels from the person who invested it with authority by commanding it.[/highlight] The father from the general and the longer after battle, the more complaining you hear in the trench. The farther pulpit and the longer after Sunday, the more the people question the pastor. The farther from the King and the longer after his coronation, the slower the pigeon flies with his orders. The authority of a command winds down in a kind of leadership entropy over time.
[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]2) The only way for authority to increase, for a command to gain traction over time and distance, is if people with an influence over a network of people give the command more authority by functioning as a network accelerator along the way.[/highlight] When they hear the command, they then talk to those they influence, below, above or beside them, about the command as an idea. They talk about its value as an independent concept worth discussing and worth doing. It’s no longer a command; it becomes a cause worth fighting for. Network accelerator leaders influence their connections to get a thing done for it’s inherent value, because their authority is relational, not positional. In doing so they reverse leadership entropy and miraculously break the laws of leadership thermodynamics.
[highlight class=”highlight_yellow” style=””]3) The most influential way to lead is to begin as one of these network accelerator leaders in the first place. [/highlight]You’ve seen it. Although a leader has the power to give commands—to bark out orders—they still speak in terms of ideas. They still try to gain people for a cause and they still build a network they are trying to influence through relationship, below, above and beside them. The best leaders start their ideas off with this kind of DNA, which makes it all the more likely that the idea will be accelerated by those who lead other networks—thus becoming so much more than a program to implement, a command to obey, or an order to execute. The idea becomes a movement to join.
This is the reason that we all should be building a personal network of people we influence. Along the way we can take the best ideas, the greatest dreams, and accelerate them among our network of those we influence. Those of us with little authority can only really influence things this way. And those of us who have more authority—we need to do it most of all, because the weakest kind of leader is the general who can only hold the line by making orders, by hunting down deserters. The weakest pastor is the one who can only use the bully pulpit to create programs and ministries, rather than speaking them into existence through ideas. The weakest king is the one who commands his soldiers to die for him, instead of inspiring them to want to.
And who wants people to just obey our orders anyway? We’re in the movement business!
So how about you? How do you see leadership entropy in action? Or how have you seen someone act as a network accelerator?
Hey Dave,
great article!
one of the key things i took away from my internship at Spring Lake back in the day was a conversation i had with Dennis Jackson, where he mentioned that as pastors we lead out of either position or personal influence as you also noted. That conversation will always affect the way i lead as a pastor.
Your article to points towards some great ideas for implementing change and vision. Rather than a top down general order, leading out of personal influence allows a pastor to organically present an idea and vision within the community. When we establish personal influence it can help remove the “us” (leaders) “them” (constituents) dichotomy that people often feel exists. A vision does not mean much if it is disconnected with the reality of people in the trenches. But if our people have the sense that we are in the trenches with them, it helps change seem, i think, more organic.
I think this type of leadership is especially important among those in the 18-35 demographic.
Great thoughts, Aaron. Yep… I sense this kind of leadership is becoming more and more expected and the norm, and very authoritarian leadership cultures are even finding they are finally needing to change their way or they lose their best people.
This has reminded me of my interactions with Kingdom Building Ministries over the last ten years. They are an organization which has an expressed policy of as little internal growth as possible. Instead they give all their ideas, concepts and models away and tell their students to take them as their own.
“Letting go of the intellectual property rights” I think this is an important shift that leadership has to take. If we really want our network to grab a hold of and accelerate the influence we are wielding we’ve to let go of it… take our name off of it. We should invest in our network by creating a leadership culture of solidarity of thought. Like you said “we’re in the movement business” so the less we claim this or that policy or program as my idea or her idea or their idea, all people in the movement will be more willing to adopt it as our idea which will create more honest and effective acceleration.
The economist Tim Harford talks about this sort of thing in his book “Adapt”
Good stuff. Thanks Dave.
Great stuff, Eric. Love the idea of taking our name off of our ideas.* I’ll have to check out that book.
*This post is (c) 2012 by David Drury and may not be reblogged, quoted, tweeted or mentioned in jest without the express written permission of the National Football League.