Max De Pree lives in two worlds. Looking at the shelves on the east side of his office, you might think you were sitting in a pastor's study. Theological and church history books stand in testimony to Max's faith. The western shelves, however, tell of his vocational interests: business and management, among others. Max has shown leadership and vision in both worlds.
Former CEO and now chairman of the board at Herman Miller, Inc., Max De Pree came up through the ranks of the furniture company started by his father in 1923. His vision is part of the reason Herman Miller consistently appears on Fortune magazine's list of the twenty-five most admired companies in the U.S. Max, for his part, has been named by Fortune to the National Business Hall of Fame.
Max De Pree also is an active church member and serves on the boards of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and Hope College (Reformed Church in America) in Holland, Michigan.
Max's best-selling books, Leadership Is an Art and Leadership Jazz (Bantam Doubleday Dell), quote from the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress as they present a humane, sensible approach to vision and leadership. LEADERSHIP editors Kevin Miller and Richard Doebler met with jazz-aficionado Max to ask how pastors can improvise on the theme of vision.
LEADERSHIP:
Vision can be difficult to understand. Why?
MAX DE PREE:
Most of us tend to see life the way it is, not the way it could be. It's somehow simpler to see life as though we were looking into a mirror. Seeing reality is difficult day by day. But it's even more difficult to see it five years from now. Some people have a gift for being visionary, but they're not widespread in the population.
LEADERSHIP:
How can you tell if someone's a visionary?
MAX DE PREE:
It's hard to classify people, but you can watch what they do and listen to what they say. Some, like those in the arts, tend to be on the visionary side, more comfortable with abstraction.
A leader, however, doesn't have to have a gift for vision or be the author of the vision. Vision can come from a number of sources. But the leader should be the carrier of the vision–explaining and illustrating it. Leadership is like teaching third grade: it means repeating the significant things.
LEADERSHIP:
How specific should a vision be?
MAX DE PREE:
That depends on the way you define vision. There are overriding visions. For instance, the congregation of which I'm a member has a motto: "To know him and to make him known." That's a wonderful, overriding vision. We will never fully achieve it, but that's okay.
On the other hand, part of vision should be achievable. A company may have a vision for a specific product–something that can be manufactured within a certain time table. A congregation may decide to build an orphanage in Albania or Rumania, for instance–a marvelous vision. Part of the vision ought to be achievable, within budget and on time.
LEADERSHIP:
What's the difference between a good idea and a vision?
MAX DEPREE:
One of the myths about vision is that somebody with a good idea has a vision. You don't have a vision just because you have an idea. If you don't have risk connected with it, you probably just have an idea. Risk, you see, is a normal part of vision.
LEADERSHIP:
Are there other myths about vision?
MAX DE PREE:
That vision makes it possible to do anything. Believing such things can lead to serious consequences. One immediate consequence is feeling frustrated when you can't achieve your dream. You don't have the talent, the budget, or the time to do everything.
LEADERSHIP:
Since we can't do everything, how do we stay focused on the vision at hand?
MAX DE PREE:
Leaders need to understand who and what matters, because not everything does.
A big percentage of our work can be thrown away. Usually we get trapped in it because somebody told us we had to answer our mail within two or three days and pay attention to what everybody sends us. But just because people send it to us doesn't mean we have to do it.
Not everybody has the right to assign you work. For example, a lot of people write me with praise for my books and say, "Here's my manuscript. Will you read it and tell me what I should do?" or "Would you please write a blurb for it?" or "Our group has been working along these lines for years. Can you come to Atlanta on November 17 and speak to us?" While I'm grateful for their good reactions, I've realized these are people I don't know, and they can't assign me work. Once I got to that point, I no longer felt guilty about turning them down.
There's a great deal of junk in our lives -junk phones calls, junk advertising, junk meetings. Junk will sap our energy.
LEADERSHIP:
Vision says: "We are going to do some things well." But that implies we are not going to do some other worthy things, or we're going to bypass other worthy people. How can pastors resolve the tension between focused vision and ministry to all?
MAX DE PREE:
The truth is, we can't do everything. We have to decide what it is we're going to do.
When I was CEO, I carried a card that fit into my suit coat pocket. On it I listed six or eight things for which I was accountable. Then, when people would ask me to take on something, I'd pull out my card and I'd say, "Here are the things we agreed I'm to work on, right? Well, that's not on my list. That problem belongs to somebody else. Ask them, not me." This helped me keep focused.
LEADERSHIP:
Pastors may find that difficult because, in a sense, the parishioners are helping pay your salary, so they have some right to assign work to you. If a member says, for example, "I really want you to get behind this community prayer breakfast," and it's not on your list of eight things, how do you tell that person to get somebody else?
MAX DEPREE:
I think you say, "Great idea. Let's talk about it a minute." Then you ask about that person's hopes for the prayer breakfast: "What would you like to achieve? What are your expectations?" Together you discuss who might be the best persons to deal with those things. Maybe you end up with three names–people who would be really good with the prayer breakfast.
As long as you work with them through that process, most people won't feel snubbed. You're helping them find the help they need to succeed.
The discipline to stick with a game plan is crucial.
LEADERSHIP:
How should churches or pastors think about who they are and what they want to be?
MAX DE PREE:
If I were the new pastor of a church, I'd start by going to a few faithful area ministers and asking what they do in ministry. I'd ask for their thoughts about this church I'd been called to, about the community and what I needed to know about it.
You could invite three or four people for coffee and dessert and say, "I've got this thing on my mind. Give me some help. I want to run the risk of saying some foolish things, but give me your reactions."
One of the great failures of leadership is the inability to ask for advice. Many people know a great deal, but we have to ask them to tell us what they know. Generally people are not going to volunteer advice on how you can save your hide.
When I was young I was transferred into the sales department. One day I had lunch with a friend who had been running the New York sales office for years. As we walked back to the showroom, he took me by the arm and said, "You're off to a good start, Max. But one thing you have to keep in mind: If you want help, you're going to have to ask for it."
Our culture sees asking for help as a sign of weakness, but it's not. It's a sign of strength.
LEADERSHIP:
Can there ever be too much vision? Can too much vision tire a church out?
MAX DE PREE:
When a church is worn out, it may be that it's not being renewed. When people work in second gear all the time, never getting into overdrive, doing a lot of piddly stuff year in and year out, they get tired out. But usually we're not worn out by tackling meaningful challenges. As a matter of fact, a leader ought to give high-performing people tougher challenges. Keep stretching them toward their potential. What makes us weary is a lack of renewal that comes from the satisfaction of work well done and well rewarded, followed by new challenges.
LEADERSHIP:
So a demanding vision can actually be energizing?
MAX DEPREE:
Absolutely. In the church sometimes we'll call up somebody in mid-August and say, "Sorry we're late, but we wonder if you would like to teach the eighth grade Sunday school class starting right after Labor Day? It doesn't take much preparation. It's not a lot of hard work. You can do it. We know you can."
That's no way to get anybody to reach his or her potential. It's wrong to offer people easy work. Few things in life are more insulting than to be offered an easy job.
Many years ago my wife and I attended a church that was having some special problems with a high school class. These kids were tough to handle. So they asked a capable, experienced woman in the church to help. "Mary," they said, "we'd like you to take this class. They're unmanageable, and we don't know what can be done with them." They challenged her in a wonderful way.
She said, "I'll take the job on one condition: That you ask Max De Pree to teach it with me." They said, "Why don't you ask him?" So she did–caught me completely by surprise. But what impressed me was when she said, "This is the toughest job in the church. I've agreed to do it only if you'll help." She created the right environment, and I accepted her challenge. We put together a program for those kids. She had a lot of good ideas, and we did a number of things that turned out beautifully.
LEADERSHIP:
How do you help people not to resist vision or fear its challenges?
MAX DE PREE:
In most other organizations people feel they have more to gain by following a visionary leader. But in a church, people seem to think vision will make things harder.
In some churches we find many non-participators–people who like to remain anonymous. One of the things that draws people to large churches is that they can remain unknown. It's more difficult to challenge those kind of people with a vision. They are less inclined to identify with it and take ownership of it.
Church leaders need a critical mass of people to become advocates. I think there's a simple two-step path to that: First, everybody has to understand what the vision is. Second, they need to accept it.
At that second step, we can fall into a trap: We think we need to have agreement for the vision. We don't. What we need is acceptance. We adults do many things we don't agree with but do accept. Leaders need to recognize that.
LEADERSHIP:
When you're making your vision understood, how much of the fine print do you let people read? Do you sell only the benefits or do you also make the costs clear?
MAX DE PREE:
You start by taking everyone seriously. Treat people as adults. I'd say, "We can't have a great vision unless there are risks. Here is a vision that's going to be hard work. It's going to cost us something. It's going to take some time. We're going to make mistakes."
Also, develop candid ways of discussing progress. That's one of the key jobs of the leader. The hard part is to discipline yourself to make difficult measurements. Don't measure just what's easy to measure; measure what's significant. Often the most significant stuff is the hardest to measure.
LEADERSHIP:
What should a pastor measure?
MAX DE PREE:
One thing is the excitement and the quality of the children's programs. Do the young people stay in church when they're in high school? Do they come back and visit after they go to college?
I would also try to measure the spiritual maturity and biblical literacy of the adults. I have the feeling many who say they're Christians don't understand church doctrines.
I'd also like to find a way to measure how people integrate their lives into their Christian faith. There are no pat answers, since we all work in different contexts and have different gifts and interests. But it's important to lead people to integrate their lives into their Christian faith, not the other way around. Congregations need to integrate their daily lives–their family practices, their work, their enthusiasms and hobbies, whatever it is they do–into their faith.
LEADERSHIP:
After you've taken these measures of your church, then what?
MAX DE PREE:
Acknowledge the sacrifice and achievement. After you evaluate, celebrate what's been done. In a healthy organization you're celebrating all the time–both officially and unofficially.
One of the things we do at Herman Miller is have a lot of awards, most connected to continuing education. When you link awards or celebrations to continuing potential, you're encouraging people to reach their potential.
The church doesn't have to have a large budget for this. We give large awards, but we also use desktop publishing to design and print out certificates. People hang them on their pin-up board and keep them there for ten years–especially if the CEO signed it.
LEADERSHIP:
How can pastors improve their ability to understand and cast vision?
MAX DE PREE:
Talking to peers who share the same kind of risks helps connect you to vision, not just ideas. Books and education can help, but in the game of leadership, you learn best when you're out there actually risking something. If a pastor links up with other pastors in other cities who have similar problems, they can help each other evaluate what they're doing.
LEADERSHIP:
What mistakes can a leader make in the area of vision?
MAX DE PREE:
Not being vulnerable. If I feel my position as a leader means I don't need help, it's going to be difficult for me to implement a vision. If we protect ourselves because we're afraid of the creative person or afraid of change and innovation, we can't really lead.
Another problem is when we can't separate our egos from some issue. If I identify too strongly with a project or a church, I can't be objective about it. Everything that comes up touches who I am, affirming or threatening me. We have to learn how to separate ourselves from the issues of the church; things can happen whether we're around or not.
My brother-in-law came off an Iowa farm and went to seminary when he was around 35. He pastored white Protestant churches until he moved to Bushwick, New York, where he pastored a black church for many years. Then he retired and moved to Grand Rapids where he bought a church building in the heart of the black community.
The primary thrust of the church is the after-school program for the children of the neighborhood. Over 100 children show up. He recruits people to teach sewing, accounting, remedial reading–whatever is needed. Then in the summer, he leads a day-long, six-week course concluding with graduation exercises. He's doing all this -even the janitorial work–though he's now in his 70s.
But every Sunday he holds a service and preaches a sermon. At the most, eight people attend. One day somebody asked him, "Isn't that kind of hard, preaching to only eight people?"
"Nothing hard about that," he said. "The Lord called me to preach. He never said anything about how many."
It takes a lot of maturity and grace to have that sense of calling and that kind of
LEADERSHIP:
Is it harder to motivate people in the church or in a company?
MAX DE PREE:
Sometimes it's more difficult to motivate them in church. But most of your really good people in the corporate world are also volunteers: they all have standing offers and could easily go somewhere else. They don't have to work for you, so they're volunteers too.
LEADERSHIP:
Why do good leaders with good visions sometimes fail?
MAX DE PREE:
Good visions fail when leaders can't separate themselves from the issues or are afraid of the consequences or changes that vision demands.
But sometimes nothing can help the vision. When the leader or the people lack resources or are untrained or incompetent, then they're not the right people to implement that vision.
Sometimes the organizational structure cannot contain the vision, and it has to go outside the organization.
Many years ago we invented a product that revolutionized the office world–the open office. When we were ready to introduce it in 1968, our sales department said, "We can't sell that. That's a dumb product. Nobody will want that." To get that product to market, we had to bypass our own sales department.
LEADERSHIP:
If you couldn't use the sales department, how did you sell it?
MAX DE PREE:
One key person in the sales department, Joe Schwartz, thought the product was a work of genius. He said, "I can sell it. This is absolutely needed." He invited facility managers from major corporations to come together, and he asked them what problems they faced.
When they arrived for the second day of meetings, he had our new product line on display. Then he would tick off the problems they had talked about the day before and show how this new system could solve their problems. They began to buy the product directly from him–bypassing our own sales department.
Joe is retired now, but his ability to capture a vision completely changed the office furniture industry worldwide.
That's an example of how the organization often is just not ready for a vision.
LEADERSHIP:
Can pastors bypass obstacles like you bypassed your sales department?
MAX DE PREE:
It may be a lot harder in the church. But one has to find out if there's anyone in the church who feels a compelling need for change. If the general attitude of the congregation is that their programs are fine, they're doing okay, maybe working on a vision is not the thing to do.
There has to be some soil for change. If you're a pastor who works best out of vision, perhaps you should not accept an invitation to a church that has no soil for change. Find a church that relates to your strengths, interests, and goals.
But if you're already in a church with a long history, it's still possible to find soil for moving ahead. Have a series of conversations: What would people like? What do they wish for? What legacy do they wish to leave? If you get enough signals that there's room for something more, then, with a lot of participation, you can start to develop a vision.
LEADERSHIP:
Sounds like you're cultivating that soil, turning it over a little bit–almost creating a desire for change.
MAX DE PREE:
Yes. You start by asking questions that help them see different horizons. Instead of telling them, you simply ask enough questions so they'll discover for themselves that they have some problems. It's hard to effect change in an organization unless people feel a compelling need to change.
LEADERSHIP:
Some pastors feel pressure: "We need more drive to carry the vision. The people aren't getting the vision." What do you do with that feeling?
MAX DE PREE:
Realize there can be different kinds of visions.
My wife and I recently attended an evening service at a megachurch. They were receiving into membership more than a hundred people. There was a crowd there, and the event was led by three pastors -very efficient.
Then yesterday, we had several people join our own church: the teenage son of our senior pastor, two people just returned from lifelong missionary service in Japan, two widows age 70-plus who had recently moved to town, and a family from Kenya. Our pastor introduced each person–even his son–talked about each one's family background, and helped us get to know all of them.
The lesson is that there's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one cat to be skinned. The great thing about the diversity in the church is that there's a place for all of us.
LEADERSHIP:
So vision may not be as tough as we make it?
MAX DE PREE:
We could relax a little more than we do. I heard Peter Drucker say that leaders shouldn't attach moral significance to their ideas: Do that, and you can't compromise. Sometimes those of us with big vision can act as though we're on the moral high ground while everyone without a vision is teetering on the edge of hell.
Yet for a pastor keeping forty families together in South Dakota, the last thing he or she needs is some inflated vision. You've just got to keep those people together. That's the vision.
Copyright (c) 1994 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
