Clever: A Book Review about Secular Leadership Principles for the Church
“Clever people are highly talented individuals with the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the organization makes available to them.”
Right before the housing market crashed, Rob Goffee and Garth Jones wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “Leading Clever People.” Goffee and Jones open their article by quoting a Swiss pharmaceutical CEO stating he spends billions each year developing new and creative ideas—because the latest intellectual know-how will gain a decisive competitive advantage.
Two years later, this article gained enough momentum and validation from the business and entrepreneurship community that Harvard grabbed Goffee and Jones to turn it into a complete book—Clever. Leaders from all sorts of organizations and businesses have consulted Goffee and Jones since to try and think through leading highly gifted personnel who are often quite challenging to direct. In this review, I will provide a quick overview of the book, four lessons on leading clever people, and how those lessons may or may not transfer into church leadership.
Overview
Rob Goffee is the Emeritus Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School. Gareth Jones is a visiting Professor at the IE Business School in Madrid and a Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School. In 2009, Goffee and Jones published this book to redefine what it takes for organizational leaders to motivate and move their best and brightest effectively to a common goal. With the world moving away from industrial physical professions to creative and innovative technology, Goffee and Jones seek to provide leaders at all levels with practical solutions for harnessing the best in their people's creative talent.
Goffee and Jones helped me define clever in terms of organization and personnel capital. To start with, “Clever people are highly talented individuals with the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that the organization makes available to them.”[1] Human capital is an immaterial factor that plays a considerable role in an organization's valuation. Clever people perform within the organization's structural boundaries of safety while possessing the capability for explosive innovation and creativity. In short, clever people need structure & resourcing, while companies need a return on investment (ROI)—it’s a win-win.
The danger with these clever unconventional people is that they are often challenging to lead. Goffee and Jones warn, “in an era of employee mobility, if you fail to engage your clever people intellectually and to inspire them with an organizational purpose, they will walk out the door.”[2] Therefore, Goffee and Jones recommend leadership tactics to engage, motivate, and move these gifted people toward the organization's vision.
Four lessons
STRUCTURE: The first lesson is creating a sense of organization, process, and structure to empower clever people’s work.[3] Surprisingly, this is not counterintuitive. Goffee and Jones contend for humbly leading clever people with a light touch of structure to focus their creativity and increase their effectiveness by focusing their production.
CONTEXT: Second, leaders need “to tune into clever people’s context: to see the world through their eyes.”[4] Goffee and Jones call this situation sensing a blend of observation and cognitive skills somewhat akin to emotional intelligence. The key to increasing situation sensing is to be slow to speak.[5] Analyze their temperament where they strive and expand their physical infrastructure to maximize output. Major tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook all illustrate how changing the physical working context can exponentially increase creative output.
RESOURCING: Third, Goffee and Jones argue for giving clever people space and resources, reasoning that “once leaders have given them space and resources, there is rarely a need to motivate them.”[6] Clever people who crave organizational security want to work. They want to spend hours on their unique concentration. They need space and funding to execute. Within this execution also comes the freedom to fail. Clever people need confidence from leadership’s encouragement to push limits, fail, and try again.
INSTRUCTION: Lastly, the fourth major lesson I took from Goffee and Jones was to tell them what but not how. The authors quote an interview with Craig Fields, who said, “Clever people don’t need to be told—and generally don’t want to be told—how to get something done. What they need is instruction on what they need to get done.”[7] The difference is clearly defined goals and objectives rather than step-by-step instructions.
I found these four lessons helpful for leading in my current professional capacity. However, how do they (or do they at all?) transfer over into leading clever people within the church?
leading clever people in the church
Should we lead clever people with structure, context, resourcing, and instruction in the church? When done carefully, I think so.
I think there are benefits to incorporating this type of leadership. When we talk about leading the church, this isn’t only referencing paid vocational staff. In the church, all members are to be workers, appropriately utilizing their gifting for God’s glory. However, when we are referencing those “clever” people—those bringing disproportionate value based on the resources given to them—we are likely referring to the individuals the local community has identified as gifted for vocational ministry. Certainly, there are clever people within the lay congregation. People who have little to no resourcing and still bring exceptional glory to God and value to the community. But within the context of this book, we are talking about those who are receiving organizational resources to create greater value for the whole. Within the church, I see this as the vocational staff. And if we are to take Goffee’s and Jone’s advice, then church staff should operate in structure, context, resourcing, and instruction that rightly aligns to God’s mission.
STRUCTURE: God is orderly. Scripture speaks often about organizational process, design, and structure. Think about how God formed the world. He spoke it into existence and created order. God instructs Israel to camp in specific formations in the wilderness according to tribes. In the Law, God outlines the processes for feasts, festivals, sacrifices, ceremonial cleansing, and daily social life. God also provides lists of materials and dimensions for the tabernacle and temple. In the New Testament, the church is governed with Elders and Deacons, given processes for confronting sin, instructed to perform orderly services when gathered, plan for caring for orphans and widows, and arrange intentional discipleship from older to younger. Yes, the church service should have an intentional structure, but so should the staff's roles, responsibilities, and activities from Monday through Sunday.
CONTEXT: There appears to be significant freedom within God’s Word for vocational practitioners in terms of occupational context. David likely wasn’t writing his songs of praise in a windowless room at his desk. Jesus often went out into nature to pray, be alone with the father, and teach the disciples. Peter and the apostles, early after the resurrection, went daily into the temple to worship God and declare the goodnews of Jesus. Leading those gifted and clever people the local community has agreed upon to invest resources in means they might not have the same office hours as the US Post Office. If we want our worship leaders to lead the congregation through music, then we should be willing to embrace the idea that they might not be at an office Monday through Friday from 8am-5pm. They might need to go out into nature, go to a local concert, take a prayer walk on the beach, or spend focused time in solitude. Structure and context need a healthy balance so that when coupled with resourcing, it fuels accelerated excellence in production.
RESOURCING: God has equipped his church with many skillsets and gifts to proclaim his glory to the earth. While the preaching, teaching, and shepherding with the Word remains central to all organizational life within the church, the multitude of giftings that serve the body and proclaim the gospel happen outside the building walls. Pastors and church leaders should explore how to resource their staff to utilize their gifting with the equipment and in the context that helps them flourish.
INSTRUCTION: Church leaders and pastors should provide clear guidance from God’s Word to their staff for God-honoring professional practices. The biblical boundaries for executing God’s call on each person’s life should not be ambiguous—as scripture is rarely ambiguous. But church leaders must be readily careful not to create processes, business administration, task organization, or rigid structure when God’s Word is silent on that subject. The leader’s responsibility is to accurately explain what God is calling their church to do and then let their clever people execute that gospel call within the boundaries of permissive biblical activities. Explaining the what in a clear biblical structure, and not how, enables the Spirit of God to guide his people according to the inerrant word.
[1] Goffee and Jones, Clever, 3.
[2] Ibid, 16.
[3] Ibid, 37.
[4] Ibid, 42.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, 48-49
[7] Ibid, 50.
