As much as we would like to believe otherwise, here\u2019s some truth about leaders of organizations from Robert I. Sutton, an organizational theorist at Stanford University:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The truth is that bosses of everything from small groups to Fortune 500 firms don\u2019t matter as much as most of us believe. They typically account for less than 15 percent of the gap between good an bad organizational performance, although they often get over 50 percent of the blame and credit. Bosses of small (and young) workplaces have the biggest impact, especially on human reactions like turnover, satisfaction, and health. Yet even those bosses are over-romanticized, and their impact is magnified in our minds. In fact, even when bosses have no influence at all, we still heap on the credit and blame. When experiments at Stanford and Caltech were rigged so it was impossible for leaders to influence team performance, members still gave the appointed \u2018leader\u2019 most of the credit and blame. Members of poorly performing teams were even willing to spend their own money to get rid of their \u2018lousy\u2019 (if irrelevant) leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“If you are a boss, this is your lot in life. You can\u2019t change it, so you better learn to deal with it.” [Good Boss, Bad Boss<\/em> by Robert Sutton (New York: Business Plus, 2010), p. 49.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Based on my own experience, all this is true of ministers. As a minister, I have gotten credit for successes that I had little to do with, and I have been blamed for failures that I had little to do with. I\u2019ve seen the same happen to chairs of congregational boards. As Sutton says, that\u2019s life \u2014 best to learn to deal with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As much as we would like to believe otherwise, here\u2019s some truth about leaders of organizations from Robert I. Sutton, an organizational theorist at Stanford University: “The truth is that bosses of everything from small groups to Fortune 500 firms don\u2019t matter as much as most of us believe. They typically account for less than … Continue reading “A truth about bosses”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religious-institutions","tag-robert-i-sutton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11986,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/11986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"