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I was sitting in the most beautiful office I\u2019d seen on the seminary\u2019s campus. It was the last I would visit during my two-day interview for a teaching position.<\/p>\n
As we sipped freshly brewed coffee, the president posed the only question in the entire process that surprised me. He wanted to know whether I would fit the culture of the place.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere,\u201d he said, \u201cwe shoot for no secrets, no surprises, no subversion and lots of support.\u201d<\/p>\n
He taught preaching; of course he had to alliterate. \u201cAre you willing to live that?\u201d<\/p>\n
The content of the question didn\u2019t surprise me; by then I was familiar with the specifics of the culture he was describing.<\/p>\n
What surprised me was that the president of the institution would even have this conversation with a potential hire. Wasn\u2019t this a manager\u2019s job, not a leader\u2019s?<\/p>\n
As a pastor hoping to teach leadership, I\u2019d thought a lot about what a leader\u2019s role is. Several years earlier, I\u2019d been influenced by John Kotter\u2019s classic article \u201cWhat Leaders Really Do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The main point? Leaders and managers do different things. Leaders watch the future; managers attend to the day-to-day.<\/p>\n
My wife and I had practiced Kotter\u2019s theory in the church we co-pastored. By virtue of our particular gifts \u2014 and my particular allergy to administration, spreadsheets and numbers \u2014 my wife, Ginger, became the manager-in-chief. She supervised the staff, met with administrative committees and managed the budget.<\/p>\n
I was the leader, and I tried my best to do what Kotter advocated: cast a vision, communicate the vision and inspire people to act on the vision.<\/p>\n
Yet here I was on a job interview having coffee in the office of someone I hoped would become my leader, and it seemed to me he was dabbling in the work of management, messing around in the business of the day-to-day.<\/p>\n
I now realize I was wrong. He was not at that moment managing the day-to-day \u2014 administering a budget or performing a staff review. Other people had those jobs. He was managing the culture.<\/p>\n
I have come to appreciate that there is one management task the best leaders won\u2019t ignore: shaping the culture an institution seeks to embody.<\/p>\n
This is something my co-pastor wife had tried to teach me once.<\/p>\n
In order to have healthy conflict and function effectively as a team, our staff had decided to adopt a staff covenant, which I\u2019ve written about before<\/a>.<\/p>\nGinger led our staff meetings. At the beginning of each meeting, we reviewed a portion of the covenant, seeking to hold ourselves accountable. One day I got impatient with the conversation and said something circumspect and subtle like, \u201cCan\u2019t we get on with things?\u201d<\/p>\n
After the meeting, Ginger pulled me aside (our covenant said we should have these conversations one-on-one) before I could scurry back to the \u201creal work\u201d of leadership. \u201cYou might consider yourself the leader,\u201d she said, \u201cbut managing the culture isn\u2019t just my<\/em> job. You\u2019ve got to do it, too.\u201d<\/p>\nSo maybe I shouldn\u2019t have been surprised when the seminary president tried to do what I had failed to do in that meeting \u2014 take a leadership role in upholding the culture.<\/p>\n
As an academic (I got the job), I don\u2019t lead an institution anymore, but I work in one every day. I watch leaders, and I read about them. And I\u2019ve come to believe that there are three things leaders can do to help manage a culture.<\/p>\n
First, leaders can create the space for a community to articulate the culture it strives for, how it wants to be<\/em> and work<\/em> together. Peter Block calls this work \u201cleadership as convening,\u201d and it\u2019s an undervalued leadership opportunity. Leaders can summon people, creating the space to make progress on defining the institution\u2019s culture.<\/p>\nSecond, leaders can hold people accountable to that culture, and allow themselves to be held accountable. My wife held me accountable, and at the next staff meeting, I was obliged to tell them \u2014 I hope I did \u2014 about our conversation, apologizing for not taking seriously the work of our covenant.<\/p>\n
Third, leaders can point out when the values and practices of a culture are being embodied well. Even if leadership scholar Barbara Kellerman is right that leadership is facing a crisis, people do still listen to their leaders, read what they write and take cues from them. Leaders are in the best position to reinforce a culture by highlighting when it\u2019s lived well.<\/p>\n
There is<\/em> work that leaders shouldn\u2019t do. When leaders get mired in management, attention to the future gets sidelined. But managing the culture is not the work of department chairs, division heads, supervisors and human resource specialists. It\u2019s the leader\u2019s work, work too important to delegate.<\/p>\n
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