Slinky Dog Leadership

 Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture was

Most of you are old enough, or perhaps I might say seasoned enough, to remember the Tylenol poisonings in 1982. Just a quick refresher, someone added cyanide to Tylenol pills in the Chicago area, which killed seven people. In the immediate aftermath there was much conversation about what to do. The FDA actually recommended to Johnson and Johnson that they only recall the pills in the Chicago area, and were opposed to a nationwide recall to try and keep the country from panicking. Members of the board wondered if perhaps it could be more targeted in order to keep the economic income down, and many predicted the end of Tylenol as a brand, and perhaps even the end of Johnson & Johnson. But instead of following that advice, the CEO, believing in the first line of their credo, “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” And so, the CEO instead recalled Tylenol from around the country, as well as working with the media to issue emergency warnings, which then led to new safety standards for bottles, amongst other things. Their response is now studied for leadership principles in times of crisis.

I’ve been thinking about that example in this past week in comparing it against the way that Boeing has responded to their current crisis with the loss, basically, of a door during flight from one of their planes, on top of their crisis in losing two similar planes to crashes several years ago in which they tried to blame everyone but themselves. But this week the CEO of Boeing said that they supported the FAA’s decision to ground these models until they found out what went wrong. But, my thought was why did they need the FAA to take this action for them; why didn’t they ground the planes themselves and have the FAA agree with their decision? Leadership is hard, but sometimes we know the right decision and what to do, to be out front, even if we might have to pull others along with us, being proactive, which is what Johnson & Johnson did, versus being pushed to do the right thing, being reactive, which is what Boeing appears to be doing.

And so with that, we continue in our series Toy Box Leadership looking at lessons of leadership and life that we can learn from classic toys with which many of us grew up, or for some it might have been toys with which your children grew up. And again, I’m indebted to Ron Hunter, Jr and Michael Waddell for the idea. Last week we looked at Play-Doh and the call to be molded and formed in the right ways, in order to do the right things, which for us as Christians begins with baptism. And today we move on to the slink-dog, which was popularized by the Toy Story movies. Now the more familiar classic slinky was designed by Richard James, a mechanical engineer in the Navy when he was working on a method to measure horsepower in battleships when a tension spring fell of his desk, and then rather than hitting the floor and stopping, it instead started “walking” the way slinkies do across the floor. He immediately saw the possibility for a unique toy, and invented a machine to coil wire into a two-inch spiral. Initially sales were sluggish until Gimbels Department Store, the other one in Miracle on 34th Street, allowed demonstrations to be held during Christmas 1945, and the rest is history with some 250 million slinkies having been sold since then. It was James’ wife Betty, who came up with the idea for Slinky Dog in 1952. She also came up with the name slinky, which means sinuous in Swedish. I’m sure that all our physicists already know this, but slinkies follow what is known as Hooke’s Law, which says that when an elastic body is placed under stress, that its shape will change in proportion to the applied stress, and for slinky dog, when it changes shape and becomes longer and sleeker, it will eventually stretch enough to cause it to slink back together to return to its original shape. And thus, the magic isn’t really magic at all, it’s science and to be expected. And the same is true for us and leaders around issues of change.

And so, the first thing to know about the slinky dog is the rope at the front. Without the rope she won’t work, and the same is true for leadership. To be a leader you have to take the rope of leadership, or more colloquially, take the reigns of leadership, and if you aren’t willing to do that, then you shouldn’t step into a leadership position. And I will note that not only are there seasons for leadership, and that might not be the season you are in, but there are different types and roles for leadership, and one might be the right fit for you and another one might be a terrible fit for you, and those places can change over time. So, you have to take the rope and then you have to be willing to pull the rope in order to get people, or the organization, or whatever it is that you are leading moving. I’m sure that most of us have been under a leader who refused, for whatever reason, to actually do anything, and sometimes there is something said for that. But usually that’s not actually being a leader, that’s more being a seat occupier. Because, as Proverbs says, without a vision, the people will perish. And so, to be a leader, you have to lead, which means you have to be pulling people towards something else, some vision and direction, and the pulling part is crucial. You cannot push the slinky dog; it simply won’t work. In fact, it will push its head down and collapse. It has to be pulled, and so the same it true with groups. You cannot lead from behind, you have to get out and pull.

Now is it possible to pull in the wrong way, or the wrong direction? Yes, and there will be people who will try and pull at the tail end, although this will usually be people who are trying to resist everything and trying to keep everything where it is, or even worse, trying to pull it back to where it once was, and we’ll come back to that in a moment. But it’s even possible to pull at the front in the wrong direction, and just about every leader has made that mistake at one point or another, but when a leader is listening and communicating at their best, going in the wrong direction is much harder to do. But when you pull the slinky dog, the front will start moving, but what happens to the back legs? They stay where they are, and so with any movement forward, any giving of a new vision, or even still working on an older vision and moving forward, there are going to be people who don’t want to move. And so, you have to expect that’s going to be the case. All of us will fight change, depending upon what it is, although most of the time it’s not the change we are having a problem with, but instead it’s the sense of loss over what’s being changed. And then there are the resistance because it goes against what we expect or desire.

We see that in today’s gospel passage. There are lots of books written about the leadership principles of Jesus, although honestly, I think most of them are a little foolish and sometimes self-serving, but we can certainly see some of this today. In the passage immediately before what we heard, Jesus calls two of John the Baptist’s disciples to come and follow him, and one of them is Andrew who then calls his brother Simon, who is then renamed Peter. Jesus takes the rope, and pulls on it, pulling new people forward, who then lead others. Then Jesus calls to Phillip, “Follow me,” and he does and then Phillip calls to Nathaniel to follow telling him they have found the Messiah and he says “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” That is, Nathaniel is not responding to this call. He’s digging in his heals a little bit, resisting the pull of the front of the slinky dog and keeping the back end where it is. And you can hear the bias he is expressing not just to Nazareth right, but to everyone who is from that place. Have we ever made a statement like that against someone? Deciding against them not based on anything really doing with them, but instead with some characteristic about them? Because, after all, we know all about those people, right? But, Phillip tugs on the rope a little harder, a little more, causing the backend to release and catch-up and then Nathaniel meets Jesus and becomes convinced. Now what would have happened if Phillip hadn’t tugged a little harder? Or what if Nathaniel had decided he just wasn’t going to go? What would have been missed? And so, the same is true in leadership.

There are times in which you will pull, set a vision, and some people won’t follow. Now if no one follows then you’ve got a serious problem, because then you’re not leading, you’re just out walking by yourself, and one of the biggest things that can happen is that you can get so far out in front, so far out on the limb that they cut the limb off behind you, and sometimes that’s even when you are doing what they asked you to do. And if a slinky gets pulled that far the coils will get damaged and never go back together again, and usually that’s on the leader. The leader has to pull and pull hard enough and far enough to get movement and to pull people out of their comfort zones, which Jesus definitely does time and time again. And again, know that while there will be some early adopters and those who are gung ho who will go with you, but that some will still stay behind. And there is nothing with that in and of itself, but the difference is the why and the how. This is where the leader can’t give up on pulling and think that they are never going to move and so we have to go back to them until they are ready. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham for his activities there, he received a letter from eight white clergy arguing in opposition to what he was doing, and I will note that two of those were Methodist Bishops, and on the other side King received his Ph.D. from a Methodist seminary. One of the things they argued was to give people time to adjust and make the decisions that Dr. King was calling for, to which King responded in his now famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, in which he says that there has never been a “well-timed” social action movement, but that more importantly the “’wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’” And so, you have to know why people are resisting and listen to what they have to say.

There are sometimes very legitimate reasons why people don’t want to move, and if you listen you can learn more, communicate better and even make changes as needed in order to pull people along with you. And if you are resisting you can play a role in this too, and not simply to complain and tell others why they are wrong and why you are right. At another church we were working on making a fairly significant change, and while I fully supported it I was not the one doing the pulling because I wanted and needed the congregation to own it and make it their own. But a member of the congregation whom I liked and respected came to me to talk about it. I knew that he wasn’t a supporter of it, but he said if this is going to happen then you need to be the main puller and then he told me how he thought it could be made better. Remember he was opposed, but he was telling me how to improve the idea and how to get it passed. In the end he ended up voting in favor of the motion, and I had even more more respect for him after that. And sometimes it simply takes time because when you pull the slinky dog, the back end stays where it ends, but then will quickly catch up, as it springs forward, so be patient and don’t give up because you get resistance.

And you also have to know that some resistance is simply because they want to be contrary, they want to be the metaphorical tail end of the animal. I’m sure that most of us, if not all of us, have known someone who is just fundamentally opposed to any changes or new things that are proposed, and seek to make sure that everyone knows they are opposed. And if that’s you, just a friendly request not to do that. Now there is nothing with being opposed to things, but being opposed either just to be opposed, or because you are opposed to all change, or to whom is proposing it is not helpful to anyone. And what leaders have to know, which is a little different than what the slinky dog knows, is that some people are just never going to come along. But, I will also note that it’s never too late to spring forward to catch up to the changes. And I think that’s what Nathaniel does, although his springing forward happens very quickly, at least as it’s reported to us, and because of that, of answering the call, the pull of leadership, of discipleship in this case, it changes his life.

And so what the slinky dog teaches us about leadership is the need to first grab a hold of the rope of leadership, then to be able to cast a vision, and communicate that vision, in order to pull the organization, or group, or even one person forward, and then to pull strong enough to work to change but not too hard that you get too far ahead or damage the coil, and then to be patient and wait for the back end to catch up, and then to do it all over again. It’s also to know that there will be some who are opposed, and not to be afraid of their reaction so much that you stop leading, and to know that some will catch up and buy-in, and some never will, and that’s just the nature of it. Because while we hear the stories of those who answered the call of Jesus, how many others didn’t, but that never stopped Jesus and his ministry, and he certainly didn’t give up simply because people opposed him and his ministry. But what the slinky dog also teaches us is that all the parts are important. The head needs the tail end as much as the tail end needs the head, and it also needs all the coils in between. It takes the tension of moving forward and the hesitation of the backend that keeps it all going and making it work. The leader and the pull are important, but they are only one portion of the whole thing, and without all the parts then the slinky dog can’t work, but when we all work together, when we all communicate, when we all listen, and when we are all patient with each other then we can all be the body of Christ and work to do the work that God has called us to, to answer that call and spring forward into God’s kingdom. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.