Presbygrow

Donna J. Markham, Spiritlinking Leadership: Working through Resistance to Organizational Change. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999

Reviewed by Robert Shaw

Dona Markham is keenly aware that transformation causes pain and conflict, yet transformation is essential to a thriving organization. After making the case for continual organizational transformation to engage an ever changing culture, she describes a leadership style that manages the associated conflict and pain which she calls Spiritlinking Leadership.

Spiritlinking Leadership fosters strong interpersonal relationships and inter-disciplinary collaboration to link people together so they can sustain the conflict and pain of continual transformation while maintaining a clear understanding of an organization’s mission. Her objective for conflict management is not elimination or reduction of conflict but fostering the personal relationships so that conflict remains healthy. On page 54 boxed text proclaims: “Sometimes, the Leader’s Most Important Task Is to Increase the Pain.”

While she primarily uses health care organizations to provide examples of what to do and what not to do, her prose is built atop a solid theological framework that is visible just beneath the surface of her prose. For example, consider the definition boxed on page 76.

“SYNERGY:
The Energy-Laden, Unexpected Accord
-or Communion-
That Emerges in a Group So That Momentum Can Be Channeled toward the Good That is Held in Common”

Throughout the book Markam highlights key sentences in boxes and marginal notes. Each chapter ends with a series of questions to encourage readers to reflect on the application of Spiritlinking Leadership to their organizations.

The challenge after reading this book is to create a congregation and judicatory organization structures that implement Spiritlinking Leadership. The simple committee structure with each committee having clear non-overlapping responsibilities with committee chairpersons deciding strategic plans and imposing those plans on committees is inconsistent with Spiritlinking Leadership. Spiritlinking Leadership fosters relationships such that every participant of a worshiping community feels their contribution is vital to the success of the organization and their opinions are incorporated in the ever evolving strategic plans to achieve God’s mission for the congregation. Thus Spiritlinking Leadership will create a unique structure suitable to persons involved and their God given mission.