Passivity and leadership

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, one of the readings for the sermon this week will be Exodus 16.1-3; the other reading will be from Leadership for the Twenty-First Century by Joseph Rost. You can look up the passage from Exodus on your own [link]; here’s the passage from Rost’s book:

Followers are part of the leadership relationship in a new paradigm of leadership. What is different about the emerging view of followers is the substantive meaning attached to the word and the clarity given to that understanding. The following five points give the concept of followers substance and clarity.

First, only people who are active in the leadership process are followers. Passive people are not in a relationship. They have chosen not to be involved. They cannot have influence. Passive people are not followers.

Second, active people can fall anywhere on a continuum of activity from highly active to minimally active, and their influence in the leadership process is, in large part, based on their activity, their willingness to get involved, their use of the power resources they have at their command to influence other people….

Third, followers can become leaders and leaders can become followers in any one leadership relationship. People are not stuck in one or the other for the whole time the relationship exists…. This ability to change places without changing organizational positions gives followers considerable influence and mobility.

Fourth, in one group or organization people can be leaders. In other groups and organizations they can be followers. Followers are not always followers in all leadership relationships.

Fifth, and most important, followers do no do followership, they do leadership. Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership. There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership. Followership makes sense only in the industrial leadership paradigm, where leadership is good management. Since followers who are subordinates could not do management (since they were not managers), they had to do followership. No wonder followership connoted subordination, submissiveness, and passivity. In the new paradigm, followers and leaders do leadership. They are in the leadership relationship together. They are the ones who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….. Followers and leaders develop a relationship wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and that is leadership. [pp. 108-109; emphasis in original]

Rost’s analysis of leadership is one of the best I’ve seen. The book is pretty dry, but it’s worth wading through the academic prose to get to the ideas.

Ideas like: “Passive people are not followers.” I see this happening in liberal religion right now. There are the passive people who sit and complain about having to take on responsibility for their own well-being (as happens in Exodus 16.1-3). There are the passive people can also hide behind individualism as their excuse for not being active followers; “doing your own thing” all too often translates into doing things that don’t effect real change (as happens in Exodus 32.21-29, which I almost used as one of this week’s readings). Individualism is my preferred form of passivity.

I didn’t see it, but this is what happened

Carol was sitting in her home office, working on the book she’s writing and looking out the front window at the people coming and going at the Whaling Museum across the street. I was sitting in the kitchen-dining-living room, eating lunch and reading the Sunday New York Times.

“The tea’s ready,” I said. I had said this several times before, but when Carol is writing she sometimes doesn’t hear things.

“I wonder what’s going on at the Whaling Museum,” she said. “This guy with a white beard, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, walked into the museum a few minutes ago, and now he just ran out.”

“Hmm,” I said. When I’m reading, I sometimes don’t hear things.

“It just looked funny,” she said. “He was this little slight man, and he was running away from the museum.”

We heard a siren. A police car pulled up in front of the museum. The cop went inside. “Something’s happening,” said Carol.

Another police car pulled up, blue lights flashing. We could hear another siren getting closer.

“I wonder if I should go over and tell them what I saw,” said Carol. “He ran down towards the waterfront.”

Suddenly it sunk in to my thick head: Carol had just seen something that might be important. My head snapped up. “Yeah, you better go over there — and hurry, so you can tell them which way he ran off!”

While she ran across the street to the museum, I looked out the window: four police cars parked in front of the museum, and fifth car, one of their SUVs, drove off towards the waterfront while I watched.

Carol came back and said someone had just held up the front desk of the museum with a penknife. She had given her story to the police, but hadn’t stayed around long enough to be interviewed by the reporter. “I went up to the woman at the desk and said, ‘Did you just get held up?’ and she looked at me and snapped, ‘Who are you?’ At first I was going to be pissed because she was so short with me, but then I realized, she had just been held up.”

What a stupid place to rob: very public, guaranteed there will be lots of witnesses, guaranteed five police cars will show up within a minute. Probably someone stealing money for drugs, too strung out to care any more.

The New Bedford Standard-Times Web site already has used to have a short report on the incident, on their breaking news page [link], which reads in part:

The culprit was described as a white male wearing square sunglasses and a charcoal gray hooded sweatshirt and sporting a large bandage on his chin.

Employee Pamela Lowe said she was working the counter at the main entrance when the man entered the museum, jumped the counter and demanded money.
She said he was brandishing a small knife.

He then jumped back over the counter, she handed him the money and he fled on foot.

Warm weather

On the front page of today’s newspaper: “Where’s winter?” 60 degrees Fahrenheit in New Bedford yesterday; 68 in Boston. This morning, it was warm enough that I didn’t need an overcoat walking to work. I stood out in front of the church before the worship service to say hello as people walked in. “A nice April morning,” said Paul as he walked in. “Feels more like May,” I said. After he walked in, one of those Asian beetles that looks like a ladybug landed on the stone threshold of the church. You’re not supposed to see insects outdoors in early January.

The lack of winter has me feeling disoriented. I like winter: clear cold air, ground frozen hard, snow. When we lived in California, I did not like the lack of winter. And now here we are back in New England, but there’s no winter. The lack of winter has been bothering me enough that I woke up in the middle of the night last night, and lay awake for a quarter of an hour, turning it over and over in my mind:– is this the beginning of serious global climate change? will the Arctic ice cap totally melt this summer? are all the worst-case scenarios true? — all those crazy thoughts that run through your head late at night.

I took a long walk this afternoon in the spring-like air, and it was just so pleasant.

Church marketing blog

Peter Bowden of UUPlanet sent me a link to Church Marketing Sucks, a blog that is devoted to creating good church marketing. Some good material on this blog. For example, I liked this recent entry:

January 5, 2007
New Year Poll
(Filed under: Poll Results)

Last week we asked about your church marketing hopes and dreams for 2007. The perennial favorite, a web site that doesn’t make people cringe, took the top spot with 34%. Next came the novel concept of planning with 25%, followed by braqnd consistency at 21%. More of the same and as few typos as possible tied for 8%, and only 4% are planning a church name change in 2007. [Link.]

(You have to think that typo is in there just for laughs.)

The top three hopes and dreams are probably a good starting place for many churches, although I’d say planning should be in first place.

Hidden upgrade

Over the past week and a half, I’ve been cleaning up some technical problems on this Web site. One problem in particular has been bugging me:– I wanted to make it easy to print entries from this blog, because every once in a while I want to share something I write here with someone who doesn’t have computer access. In a sense, this represents a problem in accessibility.

The blogging software I use, WordPress, comes with a default setting that strips away all formatting when you try to print from a Web browser. So I wrote a new stylesheet specifically for printing. Which should have been an easy task.

But it wasn’t, and it took me a couple of hours to debug the new stylesheet. You see, most Web browsers do not comply with the CSS2 specification — which means that if you try to print a page from this blog from Internet Explorer, say, or Safari, things won’t work quite right. Most importantly, printing from Explorer or Safari will mean that when there’s a link in the text, all that will print is the text you see on the screen. But if you print from CSS2-compliant browser like Firefox, the address of the link will also print out. (I have made the rest of the site printer-friendly, too — with the same caveat.)

Two conclusions: (1) Everyone should use Firefox as their primary Web browser (besides, it’s free). (2) Until we see better compliance with basic Web standards, creating Web sites will continue to be overly time-consuming — which creates problems for small non-profit groups and small congregations.

Do-It-Yourself:
Printing with CSS — general principles, from “A List Apart”
CSS styles for print in WordPress

Overview

Our congregation’s CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) chapter asked me to meet with them this evening and talk with them about Unitarian Universalism. Which forced me to a quick overview of the current state of Unitarian Universalism. Here’s my short list of what we stand for these days:

  1. We’re non-creedal. We explicitly state that we don’t tell you what to believe.
  2. But we have boundaries, too. One of our boundaries: you shouldn’t come into a Unitarian Universalist congregation and tell other people what to believe.
  3. We’re pro-science. For example, we do not find evolutionary biology to be threatening to our religion.
  4. We’re disorganized. Like the rest of the religious liberals (or spiritual progressives, if you like that name better), we can’t seem to get our act together organizationally speaking.
  5. We’re “post-Christian.” To my friend the rabbi we look like Christians, but more conservative Christians are quite sure that we are not Christians. So I’d say we’re post-Christian and proud of it.
  6. We’re relatively open. No human community is perfect, and we have our moments of intolerance, but as religious organizations go we’re pretty open.

As one example of a definition of Unitarian Universalism, I passed out printed copies of Time Berners-Lee’s online essay WWW, UU, and I — which I still think is one of the best expositions of what it means to be a Unitarian Unviersalist in our time.

Then I talked a little bit about where Unitarian Universalism seems to be heading. Acknowledging that we’re too anarchic to really agree on a direction in which to head, here’s my short list of preferred destinations:

  1. We should be moving towards a new way of organizing. The organizational structure of most Unitarian Universalist congregations keeps us at 50 to 100 members. We should adopt a scalable organizational architecture. I like the idea of small groups linked in larger web formations (see Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics for a good discussion of this, or the Small Group Ministry Network for another approach).
  2. We should be interpreting the Western religious traditions (Western Christian, Jewish, and European pagan traditions) to support the healing of Nature and the earth.
  3. We should be working on building dialogue between secular non-religious folk and religious liberals, helping both groups to find common causes on which they can work together.

Towards the end, we also talked about how various religious liberal groups — pagans, Unitarian Universalists, liberal Christians, liberal Jews — could work together on the same sex marriage issue. We all pretty much agreed that this is the big issue facing religious liberals in Massachusetts today. (So I told the CUUPS group about the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry and Mass Equality — send them money, and sign up to receive email updates from them!)

That’s my quick overview of Unitarian Universalism. Your results may vary. No guarantees that I will agree with myself tomorrow.

The high cost of low wages

In the December, 2006, issue of Harvard Business Review, Wayne Cascio has a short article titled “The High Cost of Low Wages,” taken from a longer article he did for Academy of Management Perspectives. In the article Cascio, a professor of management at University of Colorado, compares the salaries of two retail giants, WalMart and Costco.

WalMart’s subsidiary, Sam’s Club, competes directly with Costco. Yet while Sam’s Club pays an average of about $10 an hour, Costco pays an average of $17 an hour. In the cut-throat business of retailing low-price merchandise, where wages make up a substantial part of costs, how can Costco afford to pay wages that are more than 40% higher than Sam’s Club wages?

Cascio points out that the “fully loaded cost of replacing a worker who leaves (excluding lost productivity) is typically 1.5 to 2.5 times the worker’s annual salary” — but to be conservative, Cascio pegs it at 60% of a worker’s annual salary. In addition, Cascio points out that each year Sam’s Club loses “more than twice as many people as Costco does: 44% versus 17%.”

Bottom line: even though Sam’s Club pays far less, the annual cost of employee churn for Sam’s Club is $5,274 per worker, whereas it’s only $3,628 per worker for Costco. Cascio concludes: “In return for its generous wages and benefits, Costco gets one of the most loyal and productive workforces in all of retailing…. These figures challenge the common assumption that labor rates equal labor costs.” [Emphasis mine. Reprints of this article may be purchased online: Link.]

While Cascio does his calculations for the world of retailing, I believe the same principles apply to congregations. Churches often pay low wages in the mistaken assumption that they are saving money. However, low wages can contribute to high turnover. And in the church world, it takes far longer to build full productivity in an employee than it does in the retail world, suggesting the full cost of replacing a church worker is substantially higher than it is for Costco or WalMart.

Given the phenomenon of Baumol’s cost disease [which I defined in a past post: Link], I believe that churches also have to find ways to boost productivity. Generous salary and benefits packages alone won’t boost productivity — good management and evaluation are obivously necessary as well. On the other hand, low salary and poor benefits are likely to contribute to lower productivity — if you pay WalMart-level wages, you’ll get WalMart-level work.

Paying low wages and providing skimpy benefits packages may seem to save money for churches in the short term. But the most cost effective solution is to cut back on staff turnover and to boost productivity, by providing excellent salary and benefit packages.

For reference: Tables of salary guidelines for Unitarian Universalist churches can be found online: Link. Salary guidelines for the American Guild of Organists can also be found online: Link.

At the Massachusetts State House

“Join Us at the State House January 2,” said the announcement from the Religious Coalition for the Freedom To Marry, or RCFM.

Join us for an ALL DAY RALLY at the State House in Boston as we ask legislators to stop the discriminatory ballot initiative. Tuesday, January 2, 2007. All day, beginning at 7:30 AM. We welcome supporters to come whenever you can — before work, lunchtime, after work or school. Bring signs and banners, especially ones that show your faith. Show legislators, the media, and our opponents that People of Faith Support Marriage Equality.

I had a staff meeting and one phone appointment this morning, and then I drove right up to the Riverside T station, and took the trolley into Boston. By quarter of one, I was standing on Beacon Street across from the State House, looking at the people on the other side of the street who had rallied to oppose same sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Standing on Beacon Street

The woman standing next to me was taking a long lunch hour to stand in public witness of her support for same sex marriage. Someone had left a hand-lettered sign leaning on the fence behind me. “Do you mind if I get that sign?” she said. I got out of the way. She picked it up and looked at it critically. She read the sign out loud: ” ‘Another Ally for Same Sex Marriage!’ Had to make sure I agree with it before I hold it up,” she added. “And that’s me, another straight woman for same sex marriage.”

Bob S. and Jean K. from my church arrived at about one. “You didn’t wait for us,” said Jean. I had misunderstood the telephone message she had left at the church, thinking I was supposed to drive up as soon as I could and not wait for them. Bob found another hand-made sign to carry: “Jesus Loves Equality.” Across the street from us, two people held up a twenty-foot long bright orange banner that read, “JESUS IS LORD” — representing a slight difference in theology. A woman standing on the other side of Bob looked at the big bright professionally-done orange banner, and said, “Yeah, but if you ask W-W-J-D, what would Jesus do….”

“He’d’ve performed same sex marriages,” I said, finishing her sentence when she trailed off. “I didn’t want to say that, because I’m Jewish,” she said. “Well, I’m a minister,” I said, “so I can say it. Although Jesus didn’t actually perform marriages, as far as we know,” I continued thoughtfully to myself, but no one was listening to me.

More than half the signs on the other side of the street were identical white-on-green signs saying “Let The People Vote.” On our side of the street, we all noticed that most of their signs were professionally printed, while most of ours were hand-made. Compared to us, they looked like well-organized shock troops against same sex marriage. I decided we looked more like a grassroots movement — but I was biased in our favor.

The Constitutional Convention was supposed to convene at 2:00 p.m. Jean, and then Bob, went in to the State House to watch the proceedings. I have little tolerance for political maneuvering, and said I would stay outside. But the wind began to feel colder and colder. Then a voice said, “Is that Dan Harper?” Standing right in front of me were the father and stepmother of Jim, my brother-in-law. “We’re going in to the State House,” they said, and I decided I was cold enough to tolerate the political maneuvering.

In the bowels of the State House

Of course, we didn’t get in to the actual room where the legislators were deliberating. We got to watch it on a projection screen, supporters of same-sex marriage on one side of the room, the other folks on the other side of the room, the middle occasionally patrolled by a state cop or a park ranger. I felt as if I were back in high school — the bland institutional space, the somewhat rickety old projection screen, the authority figures. But there was Dwight from Fairhaven, and Andy and Bev from the New Bedford area, and one of the ministers from the Tri-Con UCC church in my old hometown, and a few other people I recognized.

At two o’clock, the Constitutional Convention convened, and they voted on the measure to place an anti-gay constitutional amendment on a state-wide ballot. If 25% of the legislators voted in favor, then the ballot proposal would move forward to next year’s Constitutional Convention for another vote; if 25% of the legislators voted in favor the second time around, then the measure would go on the ballot. Which would mean (I’ll bet my boots) that huge amounts of money would pour into the state to support that anti-gay amendment, and even though polls show that the majority of Massachusetts voters support same sex marriage all that money could sway people. That’s why we don’t want a vote on civil rights.

The vote was taken. More than 25% of the legislators voted to place the measure on the ballot — 61 out of 200.

Recess

The legislators voted for a one-hour recess. I went out and got some lunch, and then went back to stand with the same sex marriage supporters across from the State House. Someone from the Mass Equality office came over and told us that the legislators had voted to reconsider the first vote. By now, the sun was getting low and there weren’t many people on either side of Beacon Street.

A young woman wearing a RCFM sticker showed up on a bike. She was a high school Latin teacher, and she biked down to the State House as soon as classes had ended. Two other woman showed up, all of us churchgoers, and we talked about our respective churches. One woman belonged to Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston (“Yes, our building does take up a lot of our time,” she told me); one woman belonged to Old South Church across from the Boston Public Library, and the Latin teacher belonged to Hope Church. “The UCC church in J.P.?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “That’s supposed to be a really cool church,” I said. “It is,” she said. We agreed that a cool church has to be multi-generational, multi-racial, and totally hip.

We all noticed that the people on the other side of the street were, on average, much older than the people on our side of the street. You saw more hip clothes on our side of the street, too. But then, I’m biased.

The ending

The people on the other side of the street erupted in cheers. Someone from the Mass Equality office came over and told us that the legislators had voted to allow the anti-gay amendment to move forward to next year. We all filed over to the lawn on the east side of the State House for a closing rally. As we walked past those other folks, I swore I heard them singing “Cumbayah” (so un-hip).

We gathered in the darkness. Someone from Mass Equality told us that we have made progress — the vote to move the amendment forward was lots closer than anyone had thought it would be — Deval Patrick, our governor-elect, had been calling legislators all day, and yesterday too, trying to shut this amendment down — and seven of the most virulently anti-gay state legislators had gotten voted out of office back in November. “The new legislature will be a whole new ball game,” said the man from Mass Equality. Then the executive director of Mass Equality told us that now we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work — we don’t have much time to work to defeat this next vote — “As soon as you get home, start calling your friends and neighbors and getting people mobilized,” he told us.

The beginning

Consider yourself mobilized. If you’re a Massachusetts resident, contact your state legislator tonight (find your legislator here, and then click on their name to get contact info for them). If you’re a U.S. resident but not a Massachusetts state resident, consider making a donation to Mass Equality [link] — because if same sex marriage gets outlawed in Massachusetts, you know it will be a very long time before you get same sex marriage in your state.

More coverage on this issue:

Bay Windows posted a minute-by-minute account of the Constitutional Convention, and has posted which legislators voted for and against the anti-gay amendment (“N” or no votes are on our side) — Link.

The Boston Globe Web site, Boston.com, has posted a very short article — Link. (In the photo showing supporters of same-sex marriage supporters, I must be just out of the picture — I was standing a couple of people away from the guy with the flag and the guy on the right.)

The light of the sun hanging low over the western side of New Bedford harbor practically blinded me; when I got closer to the water, it reflected up off the flat surface of the water, and I had to look down. Down at the asphalt pavement littered with broken shells left when the gulls dropped a quahog or a mussel to break it open and reveal the tender mollusc body inside. Broken shells and some bones, picked clean, probably bones of a small gull — that bone looked like a humerus, that one perhaps an ulna — and the tail end of a fish skeleton, left by returning sport fisherman, and picked clean by the gulls.

Out on the still surface of the water, sea ducks dove underwater to catch small fish. The fish in the harbor are filled with toxic waste, PCBs, which will accumulate in the fat of the ducks. The fish in the harbor are evolving to become tolerant of the toxic waste, although it took many generations of fish and lots of death to get there. The same will probably happen to the ducks.

A breeze riffled the surface of the harbor. I turned away from the sun. Three gulls flew away at my sudden movement. One immature gull, too stupid to know when to fly away, stayed, facing the sun behind my back. No haze to soften outlines or hide sharp edges: I could see each feather on its head.

The ducks aren’t bothered by the traffic on the highway. They see me and fly low across the water, their wingtips tapping its calm surface. On Pope’s Island, I can see every detail of a Lark Sparrow hiding in the bushes, even though I have forgotten my binoculars: the harlequin pattern of its head, the clear breast with a dark spot in the center.

Walking west, the sun blinds me and forces me to look away. Then it dips behind the city, the few last rays lighting up the top of the old New Bedford Hotel dimmed by clouds moving in from the west, and the sun sets for the last time on this year.