yesterday i posted in my ‘leading without power’ series, suggesting a ‘new powerless leadership’ metaphor of “champion of hope”. and it made me think about some scribbles i wrote for myself a couple weeks ago, after my visit to zappos.com. i spent two days at the zappos insights bootcamp, learning with 25 other business leaders from around the world how zappos runs a very profitable business passionately anchored in 10 core values, with a vision of “delivering happiness”. yesterday, as i wrote that bit about how great leaders in this new world we live in need to be champions of hope, i thought of zappos, and how their leadership totally embody this kind of leadership, even while they don’t know the ultimate source of hope. on one hand, i find this beautiful and amazing, that the grace of god allows hope to so permeate an organization that doesn’t exist for the kingdom; but on the other hand, this makes me a bit meloncholy, realizing how few churches reflect the same.

my scribbles, written on my iphone while waiting for the plane door to close:

“Delivering Happiness.” Zappos is all about delivering happiness, to employees, vendors, customers.

I sensed some internal resistance to this idea during the two days of bootcamp. I wondered if – from my Christian mindset – joy would be a better framework than happiness. Happiness is, I reasoned, a nice-but-temporal feeling, tied to circumstances, whereas joy is deeper and more internal. But during the 2nd day, I decided I was just being arrogant and condescending, imposing my own self-righteousness on a thing of true beauty.

The Zappos employees DO seem happy. And the handful of customers I’ve interacted with, either during my visit, or in my own conversations, sure seem to be happy about Zappos.

Maybe that’s enough for a for-profit business like Zappos. It’s certainly more than any other business delivers!

But it has continued to nag at me.

Two weeks later, this idea came to me:
Happiness is awesome, a very wonderful and noble thing to deliver. It doesn’t need to be discarded for something else; but just as the vision of Zappos has “evolved” from “largest selection” to “best customer service” to “delivering happiness” (with more in the middle), I think there might be a natural next step, an evolution, something transcendent:

Hope.

What if Zappos can deliver hope?

What if that’s what their already doing?

Certainly, on my 65 minutes of eavesdropping while Pat spoke with a lonely costumer from Appalachia, she delivered something more than happiness. Yes, she delivered happiness, but there was something spiritual, something transcendent about what Pat provided to this lonely man. She gave him hope. Her patient listening, validation and treating him with dignity – treating him as a person worth spending an hour with – had to offer him an internal, and not merely external or circumstantial sense of goodness in the world. Pat offered possibility and potential. And I’m quite confident that the hope that man experienced had some kind of refining, transforming, yes, even transcendent aspect to it. I think that man and his whole existence was – in some immeasurable way – changed. I think the trajectory of his life was, in a way that could only be measured in the tiniest of fractions, altered. But this fractional shift in trajectory could have significant long-term impact.

Some would quickly dismiss this as hyperbole, and suggest that it’s absurd to say that an online shoe retailer could offer something transcendent like hope. But what if it’s not an exaggeration? What if Zappos (and other companies, for that matter) could provide a sense that, out of our dissatisfaction with the way things are, something better is possible.

Hope isn’t wishful thinking or optimism: hope is longing wrapped in expectancy.

My fellow Christians might not think this is possible apart from faith. But if we (Christians) consider real hope to be much more than wishful thinking or optimism, but “a confident assurance of things to come,” how can we not apply that definition to the experience of the lonely man on the hour-long call, even if he is completely unaware of the hope he’s experiencing; even if Pat is only nominally aware of the hope she has dispensed?

in this series of posts (part 1, overview; part 2, competency facilitator; part 3, culture evangelist; part 4, mission curator, part 5, storytelling host) i’m ruminating on the suggestion that leadership in the church needs to move away from the traditional notions of hierarchical power we’ve embraced for so long. and i’m unpacking 9 new metaphors for “powerless leadership”. here is metaphor #5:

Champion of Hope

i’ve been doing more than my normal share of thinking about hope in the last year or two. in some ways, at all started when i was asked to speak on the subject of hope at a youth ministry event very early in 2010. i did some thinking and praying and digging, and realized that there are a handful of things that often rob us of hope in our churches:

• optimism and pressure to be content. it’s not that optimism is a bad thing.  it’s just that we’ve spiritualized it in the american church and re-labeled it as hope.  but they’re not the same thing.
• being well-resourced. honestly, what church leader would choose being under-resourced over being well-resourced.  but as i meet hundreds — thousands, even — of church leaders and youth workers around the globe, i’m amazed how being well-resourced can lead to a variety of destructive things (hoarding, protecting, confidence in things) that make hope impossible.  because hope has embedded in it some longing.
• living without pain. i’ll expand on this a bit more in a second, but pain seems to be the necessary b-side to hope.  or maybe it’s the other way around: hope is the b-side to pain.
• technique. we loves us some technique in the american church, don’t we?  technique is a distraction, and quickly becomes (in many, if not most cases) the object of hope.

but my perspective on hope was rocked by my trips to haiti this past year (which i have blogged about extensively). and that idea that suffering and hope are two sides of the same coin really started to click for me.

as i wrestled with this more (including developing a book proposal that’s under consideration at some publisher or another), i read more on hope — particularly some stuff by bruggemann. and i saw the biblical pattern: honest and healthy dissatisfaction with the way things are –> crying out to god, admitting your need for god and dependance on god for a rescue –> the gift of hope. it’s most clearly seen in the exodus. and it’s seen again in the exile. it’s even seen in jesus’ cry from the cross.

but here’s how this applies to ‘leading without power”: organizations need to have hope (not just individuals). while this isn’t talked about often, it’s intuitively true. we’ve all been part of, or visited, organizations (churches, business, whatever) that lack hope, and ones that seem to be bursting with hope. really, this isn’t just christian organizations — my visit to zappos.com, the online shoe retailer, gave me a visceral experience of hope embodied.

but the leader who wants to lead without power (because, really, there’s NO WAY to hierarchically force someone to have hope!) becomes a champion of hope in the organization. the powerless leader listens for and is present to suffering — not brushing past it or sweeping it under the rug (easier said than done, btw). and in the midst of that safe articulation of struggle, the powerless leader points people to the source of hope (jesus), rather than cul-de-sacs of optimism, technique, and other hope thieves.

a few practicalities:

1. remember Romans 5:3 – 5 — …we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

2. provide reminders of who we place our hope in; reminders of what our hope feels like; reminders of why we have hope.

3. cultivate a language of hope with your team, and with parents.

love this. good perspective.

(don’t know the real source, but found this on the daily what, via neatorama)

as our haiti team videographer, ian robertson, passed along two more videos from our trip, i was struck by how they captured the suffering/hope dynamic i’ve written about here so many times since the trip. they only take a few minutes to watch, so i’d encourage you to catch a more visual glimpse of this suffering resulting in hope reality than i can paint with words.

suffering:

hope:

i keep hearing from youth workers and other church leaders who are putting together trips to go. and that has me stoked. i’ve become firmly convinced, in the last decade or so, that our best missional living occurs when we find where god is already moving, and join up with that movement (rather than trying to create our own). one way you can do that is by checking out options with adventures in missions, here.

the church i attend was in a sermon series called “god-o-nomics” (a play on freak-o-nomics), really about what faith looks like in financially difficult times. days after i returned from haiti, i was chatting with our teaching pastor, ed noble (who i’ve known for more than 20 years, and was my boss in omaha a couple decades ago). after hearing some of my stories, he had this sense that what’s happening in haiti, and what i experienced there, was a hyper-version of the topic for the final sermon in the series, which was about “both struggling and being ok.”

so ed gave up 20 minutes of his sermon time to interview me about our trip, and how it connected with this topic.

people really connected with it, and i was pleased with how the whole thing connected with our own experience in tough times (even though the magnitude is clearly very different).

here’s a link to the mp3 of the sermon (my part is the first 20 minutes or so). and here’s ed’s blog post about it.

today, i am thankful that i was laid off.

it’s a choice, more than a feeling.

i cannot, no matter how much effort i apply to the task, think of a single challenging, painful, or hurtful experience in my life, whether by my own doing or done to me, that i would now wish away. i cannot think of one of those that god didn’t use for growth or benefit or shift or some other good purpose.

i cannot believe that this current situation would be an exception to that rule.

so, today, i choose to be thankful that i was laid off, in the belief and hope (the christian kind of hope that is, more equal to confidence than wishing) that this is all very, very good. in 5 years, i won’t be willing to trade this for the world.

(looking forward to a houseful of 20 thanksgiving dinner guests today, also!)