Leadership Development

Toward a Community of Leaders: Building on CHHSM's Experience in Leadership Development

By Bryan Sickbert and Daniel Pryfogle

CHHSM has engaged in an exploration of leadership for more than three years now. At this juncture, we can draw several conclusions:

1. CHHSM is expected to cultivate integrated leadership - leadership that clearly connects professional excellence with faith-based purpose.
2. Integrated leadership is fostered through leadership formation, a process of learning that situates skill development within a larger framework of lifelong vocational discernment in community.
3. Leadership formation is a collective task for CHHSM - our most important task as an association of faith-based organizations.

These three conclusions are the touchstones that must characterize CHHSM's future leadership work: our goal is integrated leadership, our approach is leadership formation, and our calling is to do this work collectively.

Since 2005, CHHSM has participated in the Faith-Based Leadership Institute (FBLI) through the Center for Faith-Based Leadership (CFBL). FBLI was modeled after CHHSM's Transformational Leadership Program (TLP), which began in 1996 and merged into FBLI in 2005. Through these two programs CHHSM has consecrated nearly 150 Diakonal Ministers. In August 2009, the CFBL Board of Directors voted to discontinue FBLI. The last class, in which there are eight CHHSM participants, will finish in December 2009. The end of FBLI presents CHHSM with an opportunity to envision and implement new strategies for this essential work.

Apart from FBLI, CHHSM already offers other leadership programs. Walking the Talk, CHHSM's consulting venture, assists members with leadership formation in the context of organizational development. Through the annual meeting, CHHSM provides skill-building workshops for senior leaders and middle managers plus opportunities for CEOs and board trustees to reflect on timely topics. The Vocation of the Trustee, a governance program, is periodically offered to members. Finally, through CHHSM's regional gatherings, the association indirectly engages leaders in conversation about their purposes and practices.

That last sentence contains a phrase that suggests a future direction: conversation about purpose and practice. At our best, CHHSM creates the space for rigorous conversation that shapes us personally and corporately. In this ongoing conversation, which is both critical and creative, we learn genuine intimacy and vulnerability with one another. We experience the integrity of the conversation as it leads to commitment and action. And we celebrate the conversation as it deepens trust, affection and mutual respect in our collegial fellowship.

When CHHSM engages members in this conversation, we most fully live into our mission to "sustain and advance the work of healing and service as a ministry of the church of Jesus Christ." Providing opportunity and skillfully leading the conversation about purpose and practice is a mandate that is most central to CHHSM's mission. It is our "unique proposition," to use marketing language. It is what we do best when we are at our best: forming leaders in community. That is why our CHHSM philosophy says, "(A)s ministries with a common faith tradition, we need to be part of an intentional community of mutual support." We recognize that this conversation, this leadership formation in community, is not an option but the very reason for our being as an association.

We are aware that the conversation can and does occur in multiple ways. It happens formally in CHHSM gatherings. It continues informally in sidebars and after hours. For those of us who have been connected for years, the conversation is a lifeline. It encourages and sustains us. It helps us make sense of our work. It establishes and reinterprets our relationship to the church and world. It is critical to our ministry and ministries.

We sense an opportunity in CHHSM: to be more intentional about the conversation. That will mean providing more formal structure for the conversation and making more explicit why and to what end we are called to leadership formation in community. Yet we can do this in an appreciative manner: by reminding each other that at our best this has always been CHHSM's way.

Consider the heritage of diakonic service that inspired many of our ministries. That heritage was advanced, indeed embodied, by conversation about purpose and practice. At different points in history, the conversation had structure, or "order"; in some instances, particularly in Germany, the state-church relationship provided structure; in other instances, the conversation was carried by a literal order, the Deaconess movement. Whether literal or figurative, the order made explicit the reason for these ministries - to participate in God's work in the world - and bound people together in shared tasks.

Throughout the history of the church, orders have emerged for various purposes, often in times of institutional decay. Orders led renewal movements; they sought to remind the institutional church of its central mission. Today, traditional monastic and "new monastic" orders attract those who have a common mission as well as a desire to share communal patterns of ritual and service. Orders have "charisms," or callings, to which individuals respond. Some orders are residential; others are non-geographical. An order may have multiple "houses" scattered across a nation or multiple countries. An order may dispatch its members to service in various places and draw them back periodically for community life. Are there not parallels here with the "intentional community of mutual support" envisioned by CHHSM?

CHHSM can be conceived as a contemporary expression of an order that binds leaders of diakonic service in shared disciplines and a covenant of mutual support. Nurturing and expanding this order is our core calling. Since 1996 CHHSM has deliberately cultivated this community of leaders through the education and consecration of Diakonal Ministers. Many of these leaders recognize that a continuing conversation about purpose and practice is essential to their personal development and the effective leadership of their organizations. But how do we structure this conversation? What framework shall we provide that makes the conversation inclusive, effective, and inspiring?

As a community of leaders, CHHSM could be marked by the following characteristics - and indeed at our best these have been our very qualities:

• Relational: Leaders, and perhaps organizations, choose to covenant together, to support each other as each seeks to be faithful to God's call. Membership involves relational practices, disciplines such as meeting together, traveling together, learning together, praying for each other, mentoring and coaching.
• Accountable: Leaders and organizations are attracted to membership because of its high expectations. Something is asked of leaders and organizations in terms of time, money, and the relational disciplines noted above. The leaders and organizations that choose to live this way want the high expectations.
• Theological and spiritual: Leaders and organizations are drawn to continually discern the personal and corporate meaning of their work in the world.
• Historical: Leaders and organizations see themselves as working in a stream that has nourished UCC-related ministries and the wider church for generations. They desire to bring others into this stream.

If these characteristics are already present, how do we build on this foundation? How do we cultivate a community of leaders in more explicit and effective ways? How might our formation in community fulfill and extend CHHSM's mission to "sustain and advance the work of healing and service as a ministry of the church of Jesus Christ"? These are questions for us to discern in the days ahead.