Managing in the Pews

For most of my career, I worked in high-tech architecture/design and project management, an environment that rewards clarity, efficiency, and strategic thinking. Success depended on working with highly focused, like-minded individuals - mostly NTs or STJs in Myers-Briggs terms - whose idea of collaboration was a rigorous discussion of proposition development, critical paths, and risk mitigation. No one cared much about how anyone felt about a Gantt chart. The work was about results, and results were what mattered.  

Now, I find myself managing projects in my Catholic parish, where the landscape is rather different. The people I work with are committed, enthusiastic and well-meaning, but the collective mindset is not exactly steeped in hard-nosed strategic planning. Instead of an environment driven by logic and efficiency, I find myself navigating one where process is often as important - if not more so - than outcome. Many of my colleagues are SFJ types, far more attuned to relationships and communal harmony than to deadlines and deliverables. There is an instinctive preference for organic decision-making, where discussions meander and decisions emerge (hopefully; sometimes) through consensus and a sense of shared goodwill.  

This presents a certain challenge. I am accustomed to looking ahead, defining objectives, and mapping out the clearest path to achieving them. The expectation in my former world was that once a plan was agreed upon, everyone would execute their part with minimal fuss - that we would value being right.

In contrast, the parish environment places a high value on discussion, inclusivity, and making sure everyone feels heard - at the expense of forward momentum. There is, I have discovered, a fine balance between ensuring people are involved and actually getting things done.  

The structured, results-driven approach works in an engineering environment because that’s what the work demands. The more relational, feelings-driven approach is dominant in a parish because a church is, fundamentally, a community. The difficulty arises when someone trained in one system suddenly finds themselves trying to operate in the other. My usual toolkit - clarity, efficiency, directness - does not always yield the intended results. A practical suggestion can be perceived as dismissive. A perfectly reasonable deadline can be interpreted as unwelcome pressure. My normal tendency to focus on the objective facts of the situation can come across as cold or unsympathetic. Even unkind.

From my perspective, this is simply a case of different priorities. From the perspective of my new colleagues, I suspect I seem a bit... severe. They are unfailingly polite about it, of course, but I can tell that my way of thinking is not what they are used to. A certain distancing can be a bit of a clue. The emphasis in parish life is on relationships first, tasks later. The work may well get done - but only after everyone has had the necessary conversations, and preferably over coffee. And only after a fair amount of cat-herding.  

So, I am adapting. I have not abandoned my own approach - how can you dispense with logic and planning? - but I am learning to operate with a little more patience, a little more flexibility. I am adjusting my expectations of how quickly things will progress. I am accepting that sometimes, a warm and slightly vague agreement is as much of a commitment as I am going to get.

And, perhaps most importantly, I am reminding myself that not every problem requires a technical solution. Sometimes, the best approach is simply to listen, nod, and trust that, eventually, things will move forward. There's usually another way...