The mixed blessing of corporate change tools

There is a section in your local bookshop dedicated to leading businesses through change. Most of it is well written and compelling. But exactly how relevant is it to the church?

Change management is a significant topic in the business world. Any business management course will have a segment on it, and change experts like John Kotter, Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, and Jim Collins have made millions writing books on the art of change leading.

Leading change is not an easy job in any setting. And this, of course, is true of corporate settings. Whether big or small, businesses, like all organisations, are wired to resist change and stay within their homeostatic limits. This is why a huge proportion of corporate change initiates fail. However, what the corporate change guys propose is that true and lasting change can be achieved if leaders ask the right questions, develop the appropriate amount of urgency, pull together a change alliance of key people, craft a compelling vision, communicate for buy-in, nail some early wins, etc.

This is all very helpful for pastors seeking to create change. I’ve got an enormous amount out of reading corporate change material, and I recommend some of this stuff to my coaching clients.

That said, there are a couple of underlying assumptions that the change gurus make. When pushed about how relevant their work is to the non-profit sector, they respond that all organisations are composed of the same stuff (people), and people respond to change in predictable ways (usually not well). So, change is change; people are people, and organisations (whether bottom-line driven or not) are organisations. What works in a business should work equally well in a school, NGO or church.

For reasons I outlined the other week, leading change in churches is harder than leading change in other settings because churches are fundamentally different from other types of organisations.

Churches are spiritual, voluntary, and mostly non-hierarchical organisations. And these distinctions are significant. The fact that your church is a spiritual organisation means that your people will regard some of your ways of doing things not just right or appropriate but sacred (mess with the sacred at your peril). The fact that your church is a voluntary organisation means you will need to gain a lot more buy-in before making change, and probably pace changes a lot slower than most CEOs would. The fact that your church is most likely non-hierarchical means your people will quite likely be expecting you to behave more like a chaplain than a leader.

There is, however, one other major missing factor in all corporate change management literature. God. It seems a slightly obvious point, but God is an important component of church life. Whereas corporates (and non-profits) may champion the importance of vision, it is unlikely that they will perceive their organisations’ vision as the preferred future that God is calling them to.

The easily-said-not-so-easily-done secret to successful church change is to convince your people that change isn’t just what you, the leader, want; it isn’t just what is best for the people in your community and the church itself; it’s what God wants.