10

The Courage to Choose Wisely

I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life—about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.

—Parker J. Palmer

Greg Eaton, whom we met in chapter 8, faced a difficult time as a business owner in the years following the 2008 recession. “I was constantly stretched by the reality of living through ’08, ’09, ’10, when the economy was so tough. Wanting to keep the company healthy and profitable and also care for the workforce I care so deeply about, as so many things are shifting . . . Talk about tension.”

In his business organizing corporate meetings and incentive trips, Greg wanted his employees to be as productive as possible and to enjoy what they did—because when they did, it showed. “We clearly are in business to assist clients at a high level of excellence. But what do we do internally for the people here who give the best hours of their day, year after year, to this work so that they feel engaged and know that they’re cared about? That’s what kept me awake during those lean years.”

Of course his employees knew the economy was in a rough spot, but they didn’t know the extent of Greg’s concern. “I was torn between not wanting, but wanting to share a little bit of that tension. And I wanted to demonstrate that I believed in them, as individuals, and that I had confidence that we would get through it.”

Greg was faced with many difficult decisions affecting the bottom line, including rapidly escalating health insurance costs. Although the company covered the employee portion, Greg was aware that the big increase in premium costs meant that many employees were not purchasing additional coverage for their spouses and children. With significant price differences among plan options, he could have made a swift unilateral decision to select the least expensive plan. But Greg chose a different path that aligned with his and the company’s stated values to always relate in an open, honest, direct, and caring manner.

He wanted to bring people from different departments together and have a conversation about choosing a health insurance plan, so he sent out materials for his staff to read in advance, with questions to reflect on as well. Greg explained in advance that when they all came together to talk, they would listen to each other share about how plan options might impact families or spouses. He told them, “We’re not just going to dive in to which plan do we want, but we are going to spend some time looking at the whole person you bring to the room and the other whole people in the room. We’re not always aware of what’s going on for one another. I might make difference choices if I know more.”

On the day of the meeting, people had individual time to reflect and write down their thoughts. Next, they sat together in smaller groups where they could safely share a little bit aloud and hear the questions that others were asking. “By the time the discussion moved back to the larger group, the rough edges of thought were gone, and the collective truth was more well defined,” Greg said.

Greg noted how helpful it was for everyone to prepare for speaking honestly to each other. He watched as people stepped out of their own context and saw a bigger picture. He could see them realizing the ways that different health plans would affect others. As they shared their stories, they began to see that maybe another option would be better for all of them as a whole.

In the end, the decision was Greg’s, but the staff supported his choice because they had heard one another’s concerns and understood Greg’s convictions. The process increased their personal regard and respect for each other as human beings, which is essential to building more relational trust (as we discussed in chapter 4).

Greg recognizes that people become more invested and engaged as employees when they reflect on their own choices and attitudes. By offering a reflective process to his staff that honored their wholeness and trusted their capacity for empathy and dialogue, Greg increased the chances that their own internal plumb lines would guide them, which enhanced their sense of commitment to and fulfillment in their work. But it all started with Greg’s internal choice to lead with integrity.

A man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. These decisions require courage.

—Rollo May

Choosing to Risk

Leaders make countless decisions every day, many of which are invisible to others in their organization. They get credit (or criticism) for prominent decisions, whether those lead to success or failure. Yet the subtle decisions that appreciate over time are those that leave their true mark.

What is the best decision you ever made? The worst? What is the best decision you never made? Many leaders say that the best decisions are often the ones that involved risk without guarantee of reward—ones that took courage.

Leadership is not about making bold decisions but about making life-affirming, thoughtful, well-intentioned choices— and sometimes delaying decisions, too, to allow for better solutions to emerge (in other words, allowing doubt to make space for other options to appear).

Many decisions by necessity carry more weight, even risk, and leaders are trained and compensated for being able to take the right risks at the right time. But wise decisions are not always big, visible pronouncements. Some decisions are internal—such as how Greg Eaton chooses to care for his staff because of his own values as a leader.

It’s risky to try new ways of being in conversation. It’s risky to engage participation that could change your own views. It’s risky to be your whole self. As Dawna Markova writes, “I choose to risk my significance,” choosing to live less afraid.¹

Is there another way to think of risk management? Of course you have to weigh options to ensure that you have good information about the facts, clarity about the possible pros and cons, and the right inputs from others who know more than you do. “Quick and bold” decisions may be more about preserving the status quo for safety’s sake. But risk-taking is more artful when it is based in an open-minded approach, trusting that another, more unusual choice might be possible once you go inward to reflect and to align with the whole.

I wonder if you can get still enough—not quiet enough—still enough to hear rumbling up from your unique and essential idiom, the sound of the genuine in you.

—Howard Thurman

The Courage to Renew and Reinvent

In 2011, Stephen Lewis became president of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) in Atlanta, Georgia. Since its founding in 1954, FTE has been in the business of discernment, helping young leaders explore their passion, purpose, and call by exploring such questions as Who am I? What are my gifts? And how am being called to live into those gifts in the world?

FTE discovered that the same discernment practices to gain “vocational clarity” for individuals were instructive for an organization as a whole. In the aftermath of the 2008–2009 recession, FTE faced serious questions about its identity and purpose. There had been a turnover of three presidents in eight years, and FTE needed to discern its next faithful steps and strategic direction in the face of changing times.

Stephen was inspired to frame FTE’s strategic planning process around Parker Palmer’s Habits of the Heart: (1) recognizing that we’re all in this together; (2) appreciating the value of otherness; (3) holding tensions in life-giving ways; (4) cultivating a sense of personal voice and agency; and (5) having the capacity to create community.

FTE decided to undertake eight listening tours with two hundred people over the course of eighteen months. In retreat formats conducted with their hybrid version of the touch-stones, which they call Conversation Covenants, FTE posed such questions as What kind of leaders do we need now? What attributes would such leaders have? What are the leadership challenges you’re facing in your own context?

Each Habit of the Heart came into play during that time.

1. Recognizing that we’re all in this together affirms that an organization is more than the leader in the corner office, more than the staff, more even than the clients and stakeholders. It affirms the power of wholeness. FTE knew that face-to-face conversations would be the most generative way to glean collective wisdom. More than simply gaining others’ opinions, the process created a sense of collective buy-in.

2. Appreciating the value of otherness allows an organization to leverage differences in a healthy, not manipulative, way. A team can exist and thrive only when its members value each other’s perspectives. But the idea was larger than that for FTE. As a sixty-year-old organization, FTE had primarily worked with constituents in the Protestant mainline. Recognizing that the Christian community of faith is much broader than that prompted FTE to prioritize building relationships with people, partners, collaborators, and allies of different theological perspectives. “We recognized this whole notion that these others bring particular gifts to our work and to our conversation that are missing,” said Stephen.

3. Holding tensions in life-giving ways affirms the practice and power of paradox. FTE’s tension is in recognizing that despite an overall decline of Christianity in North America, it is growing within communities of color and immigrant communities of color. Another tension is the declining enrollment across the board in higher education, particularly within theological institutions—yet there is fast-growing enrollment among communities of color. The paradox of decline and growth revealed an opportunity for FTE to refocus its efforts with a greater commitment to diversity and inclusion of communities of color, whereas their ministry focus in the first sixty years had primarily served white Mainline Christian communities.

A third layer of tension is that young adults want to make a difference in the world; the tension lies in trying to understand how faith informs the ways in which they can live a faithful life of service when they don’t necessarily see a community of faith, or Christian communities, as the primary place in which they can attend to their deepest passion or sense of call in the world.

“The question then is,” said Stephen, “how do we develop strategies that recognize that some people will want to be and serve as leaders within a traditional church context. Other people will want to serve in leadership for the church in very innovative and new emerging ways. Still there’ll be others who want to be ministry leaders in other organizational forms.”

Successful strategies can emerge when leaders understand the complex landscape in which they operate and can hold multiple tensions, not in an antagonistic way but in a both-and relationship. As the three examples in the previous paragraphs reveal, there isn’t just one set of tensions, but many—which is true of the complex world in which we live and work today. Paradox often looks more like a daisy of many petals than a two-pronged pair of opposites.

4. A sense of personal voice and agency affirms that everyone’s voice needs to be heard and that all of us can make a difference. Gaining clarity about your vocation is a process of listening for and answering where the world is calling you to apply your unique gifts, talents, and graces. Organizations must ask, What is our unique niche? What is our value proposition? What is it that we as an organization uniquely offer to our field? What is it that we offer to the bigger world? What is it that we offer to our constituency that they may not get anywhere else in particular?

Organizations can have a vocation—a sense of voice and agency. So at FTE they ask the question this way: What aspect of the future will never come to fruition if we do not answer our call as an organization or take our next most faithful steps toward that call?

Stephen noted, “This habit helps us remember that FTE’s voice is one of many in the ecology of voices and institutions that are trying to find their own unique niche in service to creating the world anew.” Part of that is about vision and mission, but it’s also about strategic and scenario planning. FTE asked, What is our unique sense of voice and agency when the economy is strong and people have good feelings about religion and communities of faith and leaders of faith in particular? FTE’s voice and agency would need to look vastly different when the economy is not strong and there’s waning interest within communities of faith. By considering different scenarios, FTE could think strategically about how best to be agile and exercise its agency and voice in different scenarios of possible futures.

5. A capacity to create community affirms the importance of an interdependent web of relationships in fostering the other Habits of the Heart. That’s why FTE spent more than a year listening to stakeholders and potential partners who knew or were aware of FTE and could help the organization become more self-aware and grow into greater clarity about its mission and work. Stakeholders serve as a mirror and reflect what those inside an organization cannot always see. FTE had the courage to risk being vulnerable and to listen not only for its strengths but also for where it needed to grow and improve. It was willing to do so because FTE leaders trusted their partners. As Howard Thurman once said, and as Stephen and the FTE team knew, “I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me.”²

What came out of FTE’s listening process was greater clarity about its strategic direction. Stephen summed up what people said: “If FTE doesn’t do anything else, I hope it will continue to build a platform and its reputation to convene meaningful conversations about the next generation of leaders shaping the future of the church and academy.” This was an important insight for FTE because there is a distinction between convening meaningful conversation and hosting conferences or events. That clarity informed the organization’s changing its name (but not its acronym) from the Fund for Theological Education to the Forum for Theological Exploration.

“With a little creativity and a little courage,” said Stephen, “people can pivot and advance their organizations’ work in meaningful ways that help create a more hopeful future.”

Trusting the Process

How often do you choose out of fear or choose out of trust? Wise choices come from clarity of thought and a connection to what you can trust deep inside. Your wise inner leader has integrated all your skills, talents, experience, competencies, and capacities, as well as the facts you have gathered, and is accessible to guide your actions and choices.

Examining good data helps us gain much-needed clarity and alignment. And even then, all the data in the world can’t always guarantee the results needed. Good leadership is not about controlling outcomes but about responding to the current knowns and trusting yourself and your team despite the unknowns.

Having access to your inner resources and the support of a committed group of people fortifies you to take risks to choose wisely and to know that, no matter what happens next, you’re still in it together, capable of meeting whatever comes.

Each time you pause to engage in these reflective practices, you are honing your art of discernment. That improves the likelihood of making decisions with less fear and regret, with more courage and trust. Choosing wisely is a way of finding “integrity and the courage to act on it.”