Situational Leadership

Below you'll find an excerpt of Hersey and Blanchard's (one minute manager) leadership study entitled Situational Leadership. Below that you'll find my thoughts on how this relates to spiritual movments in Nebraska.

According to Situational Leadership, as the readiness levels of individuals increase, the followers' ability and willingness fluctuate. When first beginning a new task, where they have had little, if any, prior knowledge or experience, most individuals are tentative or insecure. Then, when they begin to get into the task, followers respond to the leader's assistance. This builds confidence which increases as skills are acquired.

If they overcome this stage of development and learn to perform the task with help from the leader, most individuals then go through a self-doubt stage where they question whether they can perform the task well on their own. The leader would say that they are competent, but they are not sure of the their competence. These alternating feelings of competence and self-doubt cause the variable commitment; sometimes excitement, other times self-doubt. Once the self-doubt is overcome, the followers move from doubt to peak performer.

One of the acronymns that we use in Nebraska (you'll find it in the Passport) is MAWL. Model, Assist, Watch, Leave. As more mature believers, we model for new believers and underclassmen how to share their faith, lead a Bible study, and basically follow Jesus on a moment by moment basis. Next, we assist them as we do it together. This means that we invite people to lead...they're not left alone to succeed or fail, but rather, we're right there beside them, leading together.

After assisting, we begin to pull back and let the new leader have greater responsibility. At this point Hersey and Blanchard would say the emerging leader is experiencing variable commitment - sometimes experiencing excitement, other times self-doubt. This, in my opinion is the trickiest position for us. As we have our eye on the next step of leaving, we now have the responsibility to remain in the 'Watch' phase to help the new leader in any way possible (prayer, conversation, encouragement, etc.) get to the point where they are able to make the leap to leading on their own. Then we leave and do it again with another emerging leader!

One of the ways this basic model of discipleship breaks down is when the emerging leader does not replecate the tutelage which they received after they have been leading on their own. What can we do to help MAWL perpetuate among new leaders?

Before Hersey and Blanchard performed an academic study on this principle I believe Jesus modeled for us the same type of leadership. For the sake of length let me just pose some questions:

Model: Did Jesus model for his disciples how to 'do ministry'? (sharing their faith, prayer, etc.)
Assist: Did Jesus assist his disciples as they began to take on greater responsibility?
Watch: Did Jesus step back and let them lead ministry while he was there watching?
Leave: Ummm... Did Jesus physically leave :) and let the disciples take on the task of leading?

I'll come back to this.

-Ethan