Response to “Implied Authority”
The team was unable to reason with her and despite the apparent overwhelming need and ministry opportunities, they ended up severing ties with Gladys and traveling to a new location.
One of the challenges here was the lack of relationship on the front end. Gladys was never fully educated on the World Race and what the participants were expected to do, trained to do and desired to do. Having no good understanding of the vision, she over-reacted and ended up impeding the ministry that could have occurred. These ministry partners are ones that are hard to screen out but ones that must be if ministry is to occur.
Taking Responsibility
There’s a principle of society that says “perception is reality.” The basic premise is that reality is somewhat irrelevant to people, it’s merely what I PERCEIVE to be reality that truly matters, especially in highly tense or emotional situations. There is no better case study than when broken expectations come into play. When you develop a new ministry, broken expectations are one of the only constants and the visionaries and leaders of the developing venture have to manage them.
Mid-way through one of our races, these “broken expectations” came out in full force. We had reached the halfway point of the year and were at a breaking point mentally, emotionally and physically. These elements should not be discounted for the purposes of the case study.
Field leadership had dealt with the attitude, the complaints and the frustrations for months and could feel the imminent eruption as the mid year debrief approached. I sat down with my co-leader with our lead debriefer and tried to explain with as much urgency as I could muster the severity of the situation.
People were unhappy. They had not experienced many things they had expected (ie. Ministry was not what was expected, contacts were not the caliber of what was expected, logistics were chaotic, teams felt as if there was no support from leadership or the home office….and on the list went).
Leadership has some decisions to make. It was never a secret that the year was going to have a “raw” element to it with things not completely planned or decided. Flexibility had been preached from day one. Yet, here they were: mutiny afoot.
How does leadership approach this situation a) with field leaders and b) with participants?
