Tonight my voice teacher is having her first performance group of the year. Her adult students (voice and piano) come together to perform for each other. Even though I love an audience, whether speaking or singing, I’m a little nervous. I’m singing an Italian aria, “Intorno all’idol mio,” by Antonio Cesti (1623-1669) (who was a Franciscan priest in addition to being a composer). I’d like to sing it from memory, but singing in Italian without the music is scary.

My teacher, Judi Stabler, says when you try to sing like somebody else it sounds bad. So the task is to find the way to let your own voice come out. I had a lot of bad habits that I’ve had to work on letting go of. So as my voice improves, I sound like myself, only better. I can hear the difference, and so can others.

In the same way as we grow into our leadership, finding our voice as a leader, our true self comes out more fully and in a more mature way. So being ourselves doesn’t mean we just hang around in our pajamas and say, “Here I am, take it or leave it.” Instead, we express ourselves more fully and truly in a way that has increasing depth and integrity. This does not happen overnight, and it never happens 100%, just as with my singing. On any given day I may sing better or worse, and on any given day I may get tripped up as a leader, or do better than I ever thought possible. It’s a process.

Where are you in your growth as a leader? What can you do to explore your own voice more fully?

When I was a pastor in Massachusetts, one year a cousin visited us for Easter, and came to hear me preach. I found it a little nerve-wracking as always to have a family member in the congregation. But later, another cousin told me he said I seemed like myself in the pulpit.

Thomas Merton says in New Seeds of Contemplation, in a chapter titled “Integrity,” “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.” (p. 98) What does it mean to be ourselves in the pulpit: the particular preacher we are intended to be by God?

The tension of preaching is always to be our true selves in the pulpit, in a way that truly connects with the listeners. Sometimes preachers say what they truly think, but the listeners don’t understand what they are saying, or are upset by it. When we preach in a way that says, “take it or leave it,” without leaving room for disagreement and conversation, our leadership suffers. At other times preachers preach in a way that pleases the listeners but isn’t really expressing their own true convictions. When we are hiding in the pulpit, the power of preaching suffers, and we pay a price internally over time.

You can take the long view, too. You will preach differently to a congregation the first year as opposed to the fifth as opposed to the tenth as opposed to the 20th. If it’s about relationship, then the relationships take time to develop. The year my cousin visited I’d been preaching to that congregation for a decade.

Are you yourself in your leadership role? It’s true, as I said in my last post, that people relate to use through our role, and we must recognize that. At the same time, the more we can be our unique self within that role, the more we will bring the gifts to our leadership that no one else can.

I recently read Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller, a Portland writer who brings a fascinating sensibility to Christian faith. The subtitle of this book is “nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality.” One passage in particular struck me: “everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It’s a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn’t want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.” (p. 29)

Or, as Edwin Friedman used to put it, “a self is more attractive than a no-self.” When we lose ourselves in our leadership role, over-accommodating those we lead or those who supervise us (whether a real boss or a governing board), we compromise our truest effectiveness in leadership. While there’s a time for flexibility, when we constantly give ourselves away in some fundamental way, we give up the greatest gift we have to offer, our unique self.

And when we lead out of who we are, with a deep comfort with ourselves, people know it. They find it compelling. So much that passes for leadership nowadays, even in church, is calculated and artificial, or anxious and frantic. When we can calm down and lead out of ourselves, those we lead will find it reassuring. This doesn’t mean we are guaranteed they will follow, but the odds are a lot better that we can move forward and accomplish something together.

As the leader of a congregation, I remember heading home after meetings feeling like I was going it alone. I would think that no one else seemed to get the whole picture the way I did. I felt frustrated that others had a more narrow or short-term perspective than I did. Leadership can be lonely. Facing that loneliness means confronting several paradoxes that are part of the leadership challenge.

1. Relationships are vital to leadership, and you must stand alone as a leader. Leaders must pay attention to relationships all the time. We need to make a real connection with the people we lead, with integrity and out of our true self. At the same time, no one else stands in the role we do, and that can be lonely. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky in Leadership on the Line make the point that people do relate to our role as much as they do to us. When we leave the role, for many people the relationship is not the same, if it exists at all. And while we are in the position of leader, we need to recognize that our relationships with people in many ways are based on our role.

2. Openness and collegiality are usually beneficial, and leaders need to keep their own counsel at times. Prolonged secrecy and rigid hierarchy do make it harder for organizations to function well. But there’s also a time to keep quiet, and just do what is necessary. For example, if you need to take a stand with a difficult staff member, or even fire them, you may need to make a statement. But overexplaining or bringing too many people in on the process can get in the way of a good decision. When we make a decision and move forward, saying too much can be as much of a problem as saying too little.

3. The primary burden of leadership falls on us, and we need to share the anxiety of leadership appropriately and strategically. The person at the top does bear a responsibility that no one else can carry, that he or she cannot escape. As Harry Truman understood, “The Buck Stops Here.” We cannot delegate that. But if we carry all of the anxiety for the future of the group, we’ll do ourselves in and limit the growth of others.

Sometimes we need to say, “I’m not sure what we’re going to do about this.” Or, “When I’m gone, this problem is still going to be here.” Or, “I’m really worried about this area.” We can thoughtfully consider questions such as: who else needs to share this burden? Who has some resources to think about the future, or who has the potential to grow in that direction? Where does the responsibility lie, besides with me? We don’t evade the real responsibility of leadership, but we don’t carry the whole thing on our shoulders, either.

These paradoxes will never be resolved: the need for relationships vs. our aloneness in leadership; the balance between openness and thinking our own thoughts; and the unique burdens of leadership vs. the shared burdens. Paying attention to them on an ongoing basis will help us maneuver over the bumpy road leaders often face.

A church is not a family, and it is important to understand that. All the talk about “church family” can get in the way of clear thinking, setting of goals and limits and moving forward. At the same time, the principles of leadership are the same in the family and outside.

I recently wrote down some of my principles for parenting teenagers:

1. It is important to have a bottom line, about how they relate to you and function in the household.
2. The more they can make decisions and take responsibility for their life and future the better.
3. You cannot control their behavior, only how you relate to them.
4. Being anxious, nagging, giving them lectures “for their own good” is counterproductive.
5. Respecting the boundary between you and them is good for you and good for them.
6. Having goals for your own life rather than goals for their life is better for you and better for them.

I believe these principles apply to leadership in organizational life as well: having a bottom line, allowing others to take responsibility for their own future, focusing on our own functioning and goals rather than trying to control or convince others, and recognizing that our sense of our self is not depending on the “success” of our leadership efforts.

This last is a very important spiritual question for me. Do I truly believe in grace or not? Do I believe in God’s acceptance of me apart from my ability or success as a leader? If I’m honest, I know I don’t always, but I keep working on it.

How many leadership books have you read? I’ve read countless. How many seminars have you attended? I’ve lost track.

But I’ve concluded that the activity that promotes better leadership more than any other is working on ourselves within our family of origin: getting more neutral about the hot areas of family life, learning more about the family story as an adult, rather than believing the childlike version we learned when we were young, and getting connected with more people in the family.

For me, I’m the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter of a pastor. I have to manage my tendency to be bossy and my need to be good and have people like me. As I’ve been able to work on my overfunctioning, and learn to tolerate other people’s displeasure, I’ve become a better leader. Working on these issues within the family has more bang for the buck, in terms of the impact on the rest of life, than in any other arena. This work is never done. I’ve been at it for almost 15 years. The good news is there is always another opportunity to practice.

Could you sum up your thoughts on leadership? I was asked to do that this week as part of a panel discussion at the Healthy Congregations Here are some of the initial thoughts I jotted down and shared:

If it’s foggy in the pulpit, it’s darned cloudy in the pews.

Leadership is taking as much responsibility as we can for ourselves and our functioning, both in terms of our clarity about where we are heading as a leader, and how we relate to those we are leading. This is never easy; it’s ongoing hard work. It is both immensely challenging and immensely satisfying.

The thing about leadership also is that you never really get away with it. Homeostasis, or balance within systems is very strong. When we can be humble about our ability to impact the system, and do our best to be present within it with as much clarity and integrity as possible, we’ll do better.

Sometimes we can make choices about where and when we lead, and sometimes we can’t. We can’t change families, for example. We are stuck with them. And if we change to another congregation or position, we have to remember that we take ourselves with us, or as Jon Kabat-Zinn put it in the title of one of his books: Wherever You Go, There You Are.

I’ve been reading Bob Hyatt’s PastorHacks ministry productivity blog. Some of it is way too techie for me, but a number of his posts have to do with plain old self-management. His Sept. 28 post on “9 Things, Pt. 4″ addresses how to handle telephone calls. The Sept. 14 post, “9 Things, Pt. 3,” talks about in-person meetings. He talks about the way we often feel mean when we set limits. But when we are able to set appropriate limits, we help both ourselves and others, and we can keep moving toward our ministry goals.

Last weekend my colleague Elaine Boomer and I went to Grand Lake, Colorado near Rocky Mountain National Park, before the Leadership in Ministry workshop we both teach in. In Grand Lake, the weather was much colder than usual, with some snow in the mountains the first morning, and snow in Grand Lake the second morning. Trail Ridge Road, which runs through the park, was closed. We drove as far as we could, which was right up to the Continental Divide, and took a little hike. Even a short hike on a rocky trail at 10,000 feet takes some doing, at least for me. I had to pay attention to my feet, my body and the environment.

At the workshop, I heard stories about unexpected and sometimes frustrating events in ministry. I saw the thoughtful way these clergy are seeking to respond to the challenges they face, by working out how to manage themselves in the midst of the ups and downs of ministry. Perhaps ministry is like a continual hike on the Continental Divide. Keeping your footing means paying attention to yourself, what’s around you and what’s ahead, all at the same time.