Conversations with Leaders: Dr. Roger Parrott on Opportunity Leadership
Stop planning and start getting results
This week’s conversation is with Dr. Roger Parrott on his book Opportunity Leadership: Stop Planning and Start Getting Results. Dr. Roger Parrott is President of Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi and is currently one of the longest serving university presidents in the nation. He was recognized as one of “The 10 Most Visionary Education Leaders of 2021” by Education Magazine. Under his leadership, Belhaven was named one of “America’s Best Colleges to Work For” by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Roger is the author of Opportunity Leadership: Stop Planning and Start Getting Results and The Longview: Lasting Strategies for Rising Leaders.
You believe ministry leadership got a wake-up call during Covid. How so?
For ministries, the jarring and speedy adjustments we made during COVID-19 were a forced push to step into the core of what I call “Opportunity Leadership.” The pandemic is the most straightforward example of why traditional planning is ineffective. Did your ministry plan for it? Did anyone? Of course not! But we all dealt with it, made adjustments rapidly, and even found ways to significantly improve our “normal ministry”—even though a simultaneous worldwide pandemic was not included in the five-year plan of a single ministry leader.
You’ve called on ministry leaders to give up long range planning. Really?
In ministry leadership, we have a fundamental choice to make, and although the answer is easy, the implementation is difficult:
Would we rather try to achieve a set of ambitious goals by revving up the engines of our ministry powerboats to create the best programs, structures, benchmarks, and future our well-informed collective thinking can imagine? OR
Would we rather find our destination in sailboats, prepared and equipped to catch the wind of God and to go only wherever that wind might take us?
While the second choice is clearly our desire, too often we plan, work, and lead as if our ministry direction is totally dependent on the power we can generate and the best course we can envision. We may feel proud when powerboats of ministry are big, well built, and polished, but even a small, poorly crafted, and worn sailboat will outdistance a powerboat every time—because only the sailboat can catch the wind of God.
How do you define this new model of leadership?
This is not a new leadership model. It is the living out of a biblical model that I’ve framed as “Opportunity Leadership.” It is grounded in waiting in anticipation for God-given opportunities to develop that mesh seamlessly with our mission, gifting, and capacity—propelling us to destinations that are heavenly ordained. As a result, we become leaders who hone traits that enable us to become highly sensitive to the wind of God and create an organizational culture that allows us to respond to new opportunities with urgency, adeptness, and energy.
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