adaptive leadership

Adaptive Leadership for Preachers (Part 4): 10 Steps to Lead Creatively, Effectively, and Pastorally (A Guest Post)

Adaptive Leadership for Preachers (Part 4): 10 Steps to Lead Creatively, Effectively, and Pastorally (A Guest Post)

To preach is to lead. Preachers lead by proclaiming how, where, when, and why the gospel influences and guides our hearts, decisions, and actions, individually and corporately. The need for preachers to lead their congregations through change is always difficult, but perhaps it has never been more difficult than it is now. Today’s guest post by Backstory Preaching Mentor and Leadership Coach, the Rev’d Dale Matherly, offers ten steps we can apply to lead faithfully, authentically, and skillfully.

Adaptive Leadership (Part 3): Raise the Heat (A Guest Post)

Adaptive Leadership (Part 3): Raise the Heat (A Guest Post)

Engaging in Adaptive Leadership involves managing the “thermostat” of your congregation. If it’s too cold in your system, people get stuck in work avoidance. If it’s too hot in your system, people respond with a “fight, flight, freeze, or appease” response. To make progress toward transformation, we must set the system’s temperature above a threshold of learning, and then keep the temperature below the limit of tolerance. Here’s how.

Adaptive Leadership (Part 2): Navigating the Gap to Find Solutions to Complex Challenges (A Guest Post)

Adaptive Leadership (Part 2): Navigating the Gap to Find Solutions to Complex Challenges (A Guest Post)

Unlike technical challenges with clear, go-to solutions, adaptive challenges are about changing priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties for a compelling purpose. Solving these challenges requires deep learning to develop new tools, relationships, methods, and practices. “Adaptive leadership” is necessary for these challenges involving significant culture shifts or organizational changes that don’t come with a blueprint.

Adaptive Leadership (Part I): What preaching can teach us about how to solve congregational conflicts (a guest post)

Adaptive Leadership (Part I): What preaching can teach us about how to solve congregational conflicts (a guest post)

In ministry, there are often conflicting ideas about where resources should be focused or what ministries should look like. In other words, there’s a gap between our values or beliefs and the reality before us. Dale Matherly, Backstory Preaching Mentor, suggests we can look to our preaching framework for help navigating the gap and casting a vision of the future that unifies our congregations around a shared destination.

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