Adult Development in Organizations

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Navigating the Channel of Life

A Model of Adult Development in Organizations













Rich Lamb
MHOD 512 Adult Development in Organizational Settings
Instructors Raymond and Mary-Ellen Rood
April 2, 2004

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Imagine a human life, your life or mine, as a person in a little "sunfish" sailboat, a one-person, one-sail
boat with a rudder to keep the boat steady and straight and a tiller at the stern for steering. One skilled
sailor can handle this spry little boat. Further imagine a river flowing into a long narrow bay opening
out onto the ocean. Childhood is like the river--the current of the river carries the little boat along,
sheltered by the banks from very much wind (though, of course, not completely). Human development
of a certain amount comes naturally. Of course, we hear of stories of childhood shipwrecks, but
normally, with a little bit of skill and luck, the boat makes it down the river and out onto the bay.1 The
bay I am thinking of looks something like the San Francisco Bay, as I spent 11 years in that area during
and after college.

But the narrative of this little model changes a great deal when the boat floats out onto the bay,
for at this point, life is no longer about "Sail, sail, sail your boat, gently down a stream," and, as any
thoughtful and honest adult will recognize, life is not "but a dream."

I imagine the task of adult development to be the task of taking that little sunfish up the bay,
against the sometimes fierce but always steady headwind of adversity, uncertainty, scarcity, and entropy,
and out into the open waters of the ocean. This is nearly a Sisyphean task, as progress must be made
against the wind. There is no coasting or gentle progress with the tides.

On the other hand, the wind, while providing resistance to direct progress, also provides
motive force for the little sailboat. In fact, without wind the little boat would literally be dead in the
water. (And without adversity, uncertainty, scarcity or entropy, we would have little impetus to grow
and develop.) But, in the hands of an able sailor, this trim little boat can make great progress indeed.
So the boatsperson, you or I, puts hand to the tiller, hoists in the sail, and sets off in what is called a
"tack", traversing a course roughly 45º off of straight into the wind.

So we move along, clearly making progress. We feel the wind in our face, but it is not a
discouraging drag on our demeanor, but the exhilarating wind of speed, the evidence of progress. At
this point in our lives, we tend to over-extrapolate. "At this rate of speed, I'll be out of the bay and
into ocean waters in no time." It doesn't help that the myth of rapid progress is reinforced in every

1 "Loevinger suggests that virtually all adults move successfully through the first three stages. Some then get
stuck at the self-protective stage, while others move on to the conformist stage and no further. Most adults,
however, reach at least the transition that she calls the self-aware level, and many go beyond this to the
conscientious stage or further." Helen L. Bee, The Journey of Adulthood (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
2000), p39. In my own reflection on the state of childhood around the world, I am reminded that my theory of
adult development, indeed arguably any theory that we have looked at, is probably helpfully descriptive only of
Western or economically developed societies. For many children in global poverty, the boat slipping gently down
the stream is very far from an accurate picture of their blighted lives. I don't deal with this darker side of life in
this model or paper, though it weighs on me in my ethical choices in life.

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bookstore display, every personal interest magazine cover story, nearly every commercial advertisement
to come before our eyes. (In other words, just because someone becomes a millionaire before age 30
does not mean that that person is mature, wise, generous, or grounded, as we are reminded daily in the
news about professional athletes' misbehavior. No, that person's development has simply become
more complex. But in the analogy, he or she still occupies a little sunfish of a sailboat and must find
the means to pay attention to sailing it.)

But at some point, inevitably, the trim little boat of our life begins to risk running out of open
water. The boat's hull is not deep, but it is still possible to run it aground. The bay is not infinitely
wide, and so the first real test of our sailing skill comes when we need to "come around," or to take a
different tack. This happens when what was working for us, helping us make headway, no longer is
working, and in fact is getting us into trouble. Often, the success we have experienced in this previous
tack now works to our disadvantage--we think we should be able to continue making progress
without major adjustment. Yet at this point, in order to make progress we must turn straight into the
wind and head back, 90º around from the direction we had been going. When this happens, a number
of other things happen: 1) we stop making any forward progress, 2) it looks like we are facing the wind
head on, 3) our sail flaps, momentarily useless while the boat is coming around, 4) we despair of ever
feeling that great feeling of progress again.

All this happens, indeed must happen, for progress up the bay toward the ocean to be possible.
This turn, however, is a jolt, and feels disorienting, even discouraging. The distant landmark we had
fixed in our sights as an indicator of our progress is no longer in our field of vision. If progress had
been equated with moving in a Northwesterly direction, then to begin to move in a Northeasterly
direction may seem like going squarely the wrong way.

But of course, if we were able to take a bird's eye view of our life's course and its tacks and
turns, we would see that this kind of zig-zag progress is, in fact, the only way to navigate the channel of
the bay to make it out into open water. But this kind of perspective is rare, and no GPS satellite service
exists for help navigating the turns of one's life. So, often we fail to take a new tack until the old one is
clearly no longer working, after we have run aground, lost all momentum, and are now confused about
how to make progress. This is called a crisis, whether of faith, or of midlife, or of psychological distress
due to scheduled or unscheduled life strains.2

In this model, life is a complex interplay between growth (steady progress in the same
direction) and development (involving some kind of crisis, insight or discontinuity, leading one to
decide to take a different tack). Levinson's theory of seasons of adulthood describes these broad

2 Helen L. Bee, Journey of Adulthood, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000), p50.

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seasons as characterized by longer periods of continuity of life structure interspersed between shorter
transition stages, at which point discontinuity often interrupts and new life structures emerge.3

Finally, in this picture of life, growth and development, the goal is to reach the ocean, the
ultimate in open water, which represents achieving one's life's purpose. It is the accomplishment of the
final stage of any theory of adult development--achiving wisdom, self-actualization, the discovery and
consummation of one's destiny. We all endeavor to steer our little crafts out into the ocean, but few
manage this feat. Most get run aground along the way or lose hope and cease the effort.

Personal Agents of Development
I identify three dichotomies, or axes, providing motive impulse for growth and development, dealing
fundamentally with God (or the Ultimate, however conceived), other people, and ourselves:
· God or Transcendent Reality: Whether or not there is an actual deity in the picture is, of course,
decidedly important to the individual, but I argue that even for the irreligious person these tacks
need to be negotiated somehow: faith and hope versus dissatisfaction and disillusionment.
Faith and Hope. Faith is quite obviously a force that produces growth and development. It can
lead people toward ethical behavior, discipline, generosity, sacrificial love. None of these
artifacts of maturity are inevitable, of course, by virtue of some intellectual embrace of a
religious system. But deep faith can provide the motivation and direction to produce discipline
and humility to develop and grow. Appendix 1 contains a model of stages of faith that is a
synthesis of several models, taken from Brian McLaren's postmodern apologetic, Finding
Faith.4
Dissatisfaction and Disillusionment. Without dissatisfaction, it is easy to become complacent and
for faith itself to become stagnant. Disillusionment occurs because, in fact, we have been
believing an illusion of some kind. (I say this as man who believes deeply--I have sincerely
believed many things over the course of my life that I no longer believe, but my faith is deeper
and my confidence in God more solid. It is just that I consider that I have had to discard
certain illusions along the way.) Disillusionment has a bad reputation in the world of faith. In
fact, disillusionment is a sign of growth because illusions aren't real. As we discard childish
simplifications of the world for models of greater nuance, disillusionment is often the pathway
to deeper faith. But it often doesn't feel like it at the time.


3 Ibid, p44.
4 Brian McLaren, Finding Faith: A Self-Discovery Guide for Your Spiritual Quest. (Zondervan, 1999), p66-70.

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· Others: The pathway to relational growth involves holding twin realities in tension: the experience
of community, commonality, and affiliation versus "the beloved," uniqueness and separation.
Community. Peer pressure is a force for development, whether in the academic life of a
graduate student in a lab, the social life of a fraternity pledge, or the competitive experience of
the new class of associate consultants in a firm. Loevinger talks about the conformist stage,
when group expectations become determinative for individual behavior.5[footnote] When I
was in 8th grade, I signed up to take a language class because my (academically inclined) friends
were doing it, with no prior interest in the language myself. Community can get us to study
French, travel out of our comfort zone, or apply ourselves to learning the skills that will help
the team. Community, first experienced in a healthy family but then in a peer group, is also the
place where the fundamentals of communication and relational health are learned: generosity
and hospitality, mutuality and grace. These experiences ideally prepare a young adult for the
later decisions that come regarding Ericson's stages of intimacy and generativity.
The Beloved. Yet at some point the many often must give way to the one--a group of friends is
traded for a special friend, and a group of housemates is traded for a partner, ideally for life.
Obviously, the decision to marry--with all the obligations and privileges that confers--can be
a tremendously developmental one. The choice to couple off can feel like a one-way move
away from peer friendships and community, but in fact the couple's relationship is stronger if
they can learn to move out of the separation of the oneness of marriage back into a
community of friends, in which their oneness is welcome.

· Self: Any model of development must take into account the individual's coming to terms with his
or her own sense of self, through both the discovery of giftedness and success as well as learning
to appropriately deal with limitations and failure.
Success. The upward climb of achievement through the disciplined honing of skills and
development of giftedness, with the success that that so often brings, is a powerful motive
force for adult development. The carrot of being recognized in your job, with attendant
bonuses and promotions, can often (though not always) produce the fortitude and impulse to
conquer addiction and squash distraction.
Failure. And yet, everything that goes up must come down, and human nature will out. So at
some point, our failures catch up with us. This is not like the announcement we hear when we
board a plane, "In the unlikely event of a water landing..." While that tragic event is

5 Bee, op.cit, p39.

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statistically remote, our failures and limitations catching up to us is inevitable. And thus begins
another tack in our journey, if we choose to accept it by accepting them: the pathway to
growth involves humility, laying down our defenses, being able to say to ourselves, "I may
never grow up to be a rock star," and being able to say to our detractors, "It's even worse than
you think!" John Maxwell turned his attention to the role of failure in the development of
leaders in his recent Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success. "The difference
between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. Nothing else has
the same kind of impact on people's ability to achieve and to accomplish whatever their minds
and hearts desire."6

Each of these pairs describe points on an axis from open-ended and abundant to closed-ended
and narrow: faith is open-ended, an upward look, while disillusionment is a shrinking and narrowing.
Community and affiliation is open-ended--the more the merrier. The choice of a single "beloved" is
not open-ended; in fact, it is a closing off of options: "Forsaking all others, till we are parted by death."
And development of skills and talents seems like a hopeful, open-ended process, securing success all
the way along. But embracing limitations and facing failure is, well, so limiting. Each of these upward
paths is matched by a downward move. Or back in my model, the left-ward tacks of faith, community,
and success are correlated with rightward tacks of disillusionment, separation, and failure. But progress
is not made unless both tacks are used in a back and forth fashion.

These three axes or pairs of agents interact, in my model, in the following way: as a young
adult pulls into the bay from the mouth of the river, this young woman takes a leftward tack (just for
simplicity's sake) toward the more open-ended of each of these three axes: she tacks toward faith,
community, and success. But at some point, she runs aground, and the combination of things she used
before no longer works. Perhaps she is disillusioned because her pastor, from whom she had received
her childhood faith, had an affair with the church organist. Or she hears from her friend from home
that she is sleeping with her boyfriend and wondering why that could be so wrong. She then begins to
tack back across the bay toward the other side--this new strategy, disillusionment in this case, begins
to force her to ask questions of her faith she has never bothered to ask. While this is a painful process
for her mother to watch (if she's even allowed to see it) it is actually part of the growth process for this
young woman.
The danger for the young woman is that she could now easily run aground on the opposite
side of the bay. Disillusionment is deceptively toxic--it can provoke growth in faith, but it can also
derail it. So in my model, there are dangerous shoals on either side of the channel of the bay, upon

6 John Maxwell, Failing Forward (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000), p2, emphasis his.

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which the little boat of our lives may easily run aground and be damaged if we aren't careful to come
about at the proper time. Table 1 describes the crises associated with each tack of the boat of life,
assuming that the boat is not brought around out of the way of danger in a timely fashion.

Table 1. Navigational Crises in Adult Life
Tack
Dangerous shoals if we go too far:
1a) Faith and hope
Stagnant and/or immature faith
1b) Dissatisfaction and
Cynicism and despair
disillusionment
2a) Community and
Inability to forge depth; fear of intimacy and/or commitment
affiliation
2b) The Beloved and
Stifling and clingy relationship; co-dependency, isolation
separation
3a) Development of
"I am what I do"; a fear of failure and death; rejection of suffering,
giftedness and success
inability to come to terms with loss and grief; meaninglessness and
shallowness
3b) Embracing limitations Poor self-image and self-pity; purposelessness.
and facing failure


Faith is a developmental pathway, but if taken too far, without a corrective tack, it can lead to
stagnation and immaturity. Disillusionment is also a developmental pathway, but if taken too far, it can
lead to cynicism and despair. Community is a tool for development, but if made an absolute value, can
lead to an inability to embrace intimacy and commitment. Marriage is also a pathway for development,
but can lead to a stifling, stultifying and retrograde relationship (or series of similar failed relationships),
if not tempered with a tack back toward community and affiliation. Development of giftedness is
clearly a pathway toward growth and development, both professional and personal, but if not
tempered with a realistic appraisal of one's own limitations and failures, it can lead to an inordinate fear
of failure, or of being found out as a failure. And finally, embracing limitations and facing failure can
also yield developmental fruit, but if the reverse tack of gift development and experiencing some
recognizable success is not taken, then the person will wallow in self-pity and may come to feel like life
has no real purpose. Figure 1 illustrates this model graphically.


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Figure 1. Navigational Model for Adult Development


For further illustration of the model, let me expand with more examples of lives run aground on the
rocky shoals:
A "cocooning" process that never ends. The intimate relationship or even the family never comes out of
its relational home base enough to develop friendships, community and support. Relational growth
is stifled--ultimately the central relationship may be doomed either to stagnation or worse. In the
community in which I live, some people have big houses, housing lots of stuff, but the children
spend their days on their computer or other electronic games, material needs sated but starved for
relationship.
Single women on IVCF staff. The community value is so high, and the other open-ended tacks (faith,
skills and success) run so long, that at a certain age these women look around them and realize
they haven't paid enough attention to the desire they feel to be married one day. With their
weekends scheduled for ministry, not romance, they just simply aren't available to someone who
might even be interested. At some point, they begin to face the fact that they may have unwittingly
chosen a celibate life. This can then cause a larger crisis of faith and disillusionment.

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The successful narcissist. This person has never faced his or her own failure or limitations, and has an
abiding sense of personal power and importance. While experiencing success in some areas of life,
the narcissist is in a larger sense a failure, having run aground on the shores of insecurity and fear
of failure.
"Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to
validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom
from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his
individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by
seeing his `grandiose self" reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those
who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror."7
This model synthesizes the stages models (in a sequential process) with the non-stage crises
model: crises are defined as a time when what was working for us no longer does--we need to take a
different tack. In Levinson this is reflected in the transition stages: early adult, age 30, mid-life, late
adult transitions. Perhaps it would be fair to acknowledge that a single tack may not generate a crisis,
but the conflation of two or more tacks (turns necessitated by the approach of dangerous shoals)
would likely measure as a crisis: a failure in marriage could produce alienation and a move toward
community, disillusionment in faith prompting a turn to God, and coming to terms with limitations
and failures. Of course, the crisis could instead produce stagnation, a grounding of the boat in the
shallows.

I think the model of life in a boat, navigable but also subject to the vicissitudes of wind and
weather, is a pretty accurate description of how life goes. M. Scott Peck says it this way:
"Life is difficult.
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this
truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult--once we truly understand and
accept it--then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is
difficult no longer matters." 8
Peck goes on to state, "Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. Without
discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With
total discipline we can solve all problems."9 It perhaps seems a little simplistic to equate all of life to a
problem set assignment; indeed life is not fair and some things that happen to us (say the early death of
a beloved son) can not be neatly summed up as a "problem." The developmental theories talk about
stresses and crises in life and the developmental potential (for good or ill) in these events. While it may
be possible to weather a tragedy like the death of a child, it seems simplistic to talk about it as a

7 Kets de Vries, Leaders, Fools and Impostors, (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1993), p21: epigraph from Christopher
Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979).
8 M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p15.
9 Ibid, p16.

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problem needing to be solved. It is more like a storm needing to be survived. It is survivable, but not
without impact. It may even produce growth and development, but surely not gladly chosen. Yet
Peck's insight, the seminal insight of his bestseller, The Road Less Traveled, is crucial for anyone
attempting to understand adult development in general or their own developmental path in particular.

Organizational Agents of Influence
In this model I also define three organizational agents of influence affecting human growth and
development. These three agents are like the personal agents, in that they represent contrasting values
held in tension. In the model, the boat is an individual's life. The developmental organization doesn't
take different tacks at different times, but it creates an environment whereby the individual employees
of the organization are encouraged and empowered to take the appropriate tacks at appropriate
times--therefore both values, or their organizational manifestations, need to be held in tension.
Ultimately,
the
organizational culture is the place where the developmental organization will
be established. Certain supervisors or co-workers can have deep impact in the lives of people around
them. "Effective managers manage themselves and the people they work with so that both the
organization and the people profit from their presence."10 However, unless developmental
management is coherent with the organizational culture, that impact will be anomalous and short-lived.

· Transcendent Purpose: The company has a stated mission or purpose statement that is
coherently applied and validated throughout the organization. This generates employee loyalty and
a willingness to offer loyal critique, which the organization embraces because of its higher
commitment to its purpose. This agent correlates to the first of the three personal agents: literally
it is having an organization you can believe in.
Open-ended value: Integrity. The integrity of an organization is, in part, the coherence between
what it says is important and what, by measure of its practices, it actually demonstrates to be
of importance. A company lacking such integrity produces cynics out of even the most naïve
and hopeful of new employees. Without a credible claim to the loyalty and heart-felt
commitment of its employees, a company will tend toward a policy-rich management of its
employees' baser motivations, churning out rule after rule to try to get employees to do what
they would only do with a shared, internalized motivational framework. On the other hand, a
company with demonstrated integrated commitment to its worthy transcendent purpose will
find its employees full of faith in its leadership and able to summon up supernatural effort

10 Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager (New York: William Morrow, 1982), p15.

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toward the fulfillment of its destiny, enriching the company's employees and other
stakeholders.
Closed-ended value: loyal critique and rigorous self-evaluation. The company one can believe in must
not be above critique, but must actively seek out loyal evaluative feedback from its employees,
as well as being willing to listen to others in its ecology (shareholders, customers, regulatory
agencies, NGOs). Supervisors seek out feedback from subordinates regarding their own and
their unit's performance, and there is no tendency to shoot the messenger of bad tidings.

· Relational Health: The organization neither undermines self-initiative through enforced
conformity nor isolates people through competition and jealousy. Stephen Covey tells the story of
the manager who wanted to encourage teamwork in his organization but motivated aggressive
sales through a competitive race for one of his managers to win a trip to Bermuda. Pointing out
the inconsistency of message, Covey summarizes, "One manager's success meant failure for the
other managers." Covey's public victory disciplines serve the relational dimension of the
organizational agents of development: Think Win/Win; Seek First to Understand, then to be
Understood; and Synergize.11 This provides the organizational support for the second axis of
personal agents of development, that of relationship with others.
Open-ended value: Teamwork. A team is a group of people who must work together to accomplish
a common purpose. Often people are grouped into "teams" when they either 1) have no need
to work together, or 2) have no common purpose. But a developmental organization doesn't
simply have Thursday evening volleyball or off-site creative brainstorming sessions, but gives
people real experiences where their perspectives are valued and their contributions are
recognized as critical to the overall success of the project. This is the enactment of Covey's
sixth habit, Synergize. This will require honest communication about process breakdowns, and
reconciliation and forgiveness (even perhaps using that word!) between colleagues and
teammates.
Closed-ended value: Submission and servanthood. Not all team experiences involve ready consensus
and every team member's full self-actualization through a harmonious synergy of creative
talent and impulses. "We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with
the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They're either speaking or
preparing to speak. They're filtering everything through their own paradigms..."12

11 Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1989).
12 Ibid, p239.

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Servanthood in a team setting begins with what Covey calls "empathic listening," where the
goal isn't to win the argument but to deeply understand others on the team. Submission
continues when, at the end of the brainstorming session, decisions get made and not everyone
gets their way. In a developmental organization, teammates don't leave the room uncommitted
to the decisions that went contrary to their preferences. Rather, they submit to the team's
agreed-upon process and serve the purposes of the team. With relational health as an
organizational culture asset, tendencies toward passive aggression or resistance from below
can be addressed quickly, either bringing the effected employee back into alignment or, if
necessary, removing that person from the team. In the developmental organization, an
employee readily acknowledges the many benefits he or she receives from participation on the
team, so it is possible to guide this employee back to productive ways of relating to the team
because the employee is so motivated to remain.

· Authentic Competence: The firm expects from its employees excellence and supports it. Yet the
firm also demands and models authentic facing up to weakness and respects it when this happens.
This is the institutional support for the third axis, that of the self. The organization provides arenas
and opportunities for employees to grow and develop, while expecting that people will make
mistakes and own up to them. In Bringing Out the Best in People, Alan Loy McGinnis writes his
management rules for helping others excel: "Rule 3: Establish High Standards for Excellence."
"Rule 4: Create an Environment where failure is not fatal."13
Open-ended value: Excellence and Initiative. In a competitive culture, with high costs of failure, an
organization can motivate deceit, cover-ups, overstatements of success and a disregard for the
hard facts of failure. This is fatal to an organization let alone its developmental culture. (Hence
the notorious and massively costly corporate-finance scandals of the past few years.) Even
well-meaning and basically honest employees will not develop in such an environment; in fact
they probably won't have the political skills to survive in the organization. But when an
organization values excellence, trains for it, expects it, but doesn't penalize failure arbitrarily
(knowing that failure brings a certain amount of unavoidable, intrinsic disincentive), then
people can develop and be seen to be developing (i.e., growing in some professional way in
which they obviously hadn't already achieved excellence).
Closed-ended value: Humility. Every capable young employee, well along on his or her first long
"skill and success" tack, will eventually come to the end of that first wonderful ride. If that
person, faced with a personal or professional disappointment, can look up and into the

13 Alan Loy McGinnis, Bringing Out the Best in People (Minneapolis: Augsberg, 1985), p56, p71.

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organization and see people who themselves have failed, have learned from it, and can tell the
story without being trite or dismissive (i.e., tell it vulnerably yet without maudlin self-pity),
then that young and capable employee might very well embrace his or her own "limitation and
failure" tack with confidence that, in the end, fundamental life lessons are ripe for the picking.
With models of humility (people who are truly models and yet who are remarkably humble),
and an organization that doesn't shy away from honoring them, the developing young
employee will be better able to navigate his or her own craft away from the rocky shore of the
fear of failure and the self-deception and duplicity that that fear fosters.

Each of these organizational values maps elegantly onto the appropriate personal agent value
from the previous list. Organizational integrity correlates to faith, while openness to critique correlates to
disillusionment and dissatisfaction. An organization that has both integrity and is not brittle in the face of
critique can actually foster an environment where one's faith development is no threat to
organizational participation, and vice versa. (In other words, it would be easy to imagine an
organization in which a lack of integrity produced cynicism that made personal integrity, let alone faith,
more difficult for the employee, while at the same time made organizational critique costly to the
employee. This would not be a developmental context or a hopeful place to remain for the employee.)
Likewise, teamwork correlates to community and each mutually supports the characteristics needed to
thrive and grow--organizational forms of teamwork develop skills that can deepen personal
experiences of community, and vice versa. Submission and servanthood correlate to the unique relationship
with the Beloved--as the choice will need to be made, repeatedly and unendingly, to submit one's own
preferences and wishes for the sake of one's beloved. And, quite obviously, excellence and initiative and
humility correspond with success and failure, and the fostering of the one in organizational life will lead to
an achievement and an acceptance of the other in personal life, and vice versa.
Let us consider a few examples of organizational agents of development working properly or
breaking down.
· Often an apparent conflict emerges between employee development and concern for the bottom
line: employee development is more costly in the short term, and perhaps developed employees
will no longer be satisfied in the positions in which they have served. This can, of course, serve the
larger organization, but individual managers may need to find replacements as people develop
skills that create dissatisfaction in their current positions. But in organizations where, despite lofty
mission statements, the most important value is quarterly income (i.e., short-term profit), the long-
term development of staff is simply not seen as profitable. This line of thinking was debunked in a
recent Harvard Business Review article:

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"Managers are always claiming, `People are our most important asset.' But deep down, they
can't shake the feeling that employees are costs. Big costs. And they treat them that way.
Quarterly earnings off? Cut the perks, rein in training, and downsize. This strategy may
increase earnings in the short term, but it's myopic. Recent studies suggest that layoffs actually
destroy shareholder value. And our research shows that treating employees like the assets they
are--by investing in development--boosts returns over the long term."14
In an organization with more deeply held transcendent goals, employee development is
consistent with these goals, and it becomes normative, with a payoff for employees and for
shareholders alike.
· In Hal Rosenbluth's iconoclastic The Customer Comes Second, he tells the story of his travel agency in
which employees, not customers, were his top priority. Employees were required to attend
"mandatory" training sessions, but there was no need for an enforcement mechanism, because
these were highly popular. His company grew to have one of the highest customer satisfaction
ratings in the industry, not, as he says, by putting the customer first, but by emphasizing the
importance of an excellent and developing workforce. "Only when people know what it feels like
to be first in someone else's eyes can they sincerely share that feeling with others. We're not saying
choose your people over your customers. We're saying focus on your people because of your
customers. That way everybody wins."15
· When stated higher goals and unstated operational priorities do not align, the organization
develops a dysfunctional system that makes truth, organizational or personal, an endangered
species. Ironically, this is the more powerful when the organization has a lofty mission, as is the
case with non-profit organizations in general and Christian ministries in particular.
"The organization becomes the addictive substance for its employees when the employees
become hooked on the promise of the mission and choose not to look at how the system is
really operating. The organization becomes an addictive substance when its actions are
excused because it has a lofty mission. We have found an inverse correlation between the
loftiness of the mission and the congruence between stated and unstated goals. When this lack
of congruence exists, it is more probable that the organization will enter in to a rigid denial
system with concomitant grandiosity."16
One of the most painful organizational experiences of my life in IVCF has to do with precisely
such an addiction, which was destructive in the lives of a several dozen employees with whom I
had supervisory oversight. I didn't quickly see the destructive nature, though I too was caught in
its web of deception, perpetrated over several years by a direct supervisee of my own.

14 Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer, "Human Capital: How's Your Return on People?" Harvard Business Review,
March 2004, p18.
15 Hal Rosenbluth, The Customer Comes Second, (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p25.
16 Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel, The Addictive Organization, (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p123.

13

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· Many books have been written on the organizational value and practice of teamwork. In one of
the recent best, a simple fable exploring team life, Patrick Lencioni writes of the five dysfunctions
of a team: 1) absence of trust, leading to invulnerability; 2) fear of conflict, leading to artificial
harmony; 3) lack of commitment, leading to ambiguity; 4) avoidance of accountability, leading to
low standards; and 5) inattention to results, leading to a focus on status and ego.17 The first two of
these are addressed by the open-ended value of teamwork in my model, while the next two
(commitment and accountability) are addressed by the alternate values of submission and
servanthood. One of the most egregious ways these dysfunctions manifest is when a team
supposedly comes to consensus but the team members fail to live by it because, essentially, they
personally disagreed with the decision. Another way is that team members fail to press for
consensus because none of them can commit to an alternative that they personally don't favor. An
organization in which employees operate with the discipline of functioning teams, including a
willingness to submit to the choice of colleagues and peers, will likely perform well in the
marketplace as well as contribute to a developmental outcome for individual employees.
· In their book detailing the results of in-depth interviews by the Gallup organization of over 80,000
managers in over 400 companies, Buckingham and Coffman talk about the "revolutionary" insight
from their study of "the world's greatest managers".
"Conventional wisdom encourages you to think [that] anyone can be anything they want to be
if they just try hard enough. Indeed, as a manager it is your duty to direct those changes.
Devise rules and policies to control your employees' unruly inclinations. Teach them skills and
competencies to fill in the traits they lack... Great managers reject this out of hand. They
remember ... that each individual is true to his unique nature. They recognize that each person
is motivated differently, that each person has his own way of thinking and his own style of
relating to others.... But they don't bemoan these differences and try to grind them down.
Instead they capitalize on them. They try to help each person become more and more of who he
already is."18
Developmental managers focus on the positive, on the areas of strength and giftedness,
encouraging supervisees to grow and develop excellence in those areas, rather than simply
focusing on weaknesses and grinding away at the need to improve in areas that may never become
strengths.
· Finally, in another recent blockbuster, Good to Great, Jim Collins speaks of a "Level 5 Leader" who
seems to break the mold of the larger-than-life CEO who by dint of ego and aggressive
forcefulness is able to get their companies to perform well. Collins studied companies that

17 Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), p188-190.
18 Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, First, Break al the Rules (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), p56-
57. Ironically, this is the same insight that forms the foundation of other bestsellers that long pre-date the Gallup
organization results, for example The One Minute Manager (1982) and Bringing Out the Best in People (1985): managers
should "Help people reach their full potential [by] catching them doing something right"[Blanchard].

14

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experienced an inflection point in their upward trajectory in the market, making the transition
from "good to great". One of the central ingredients in such a transformation was having a "level
5 leader" at the helm.
"Level 5 Executive: Builds enduing greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility
and professional will... Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into
the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-
interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious--but their ambition is first and foremost for the
institution, not themselves."19

Stages of Development
At this point I will address the question of stages of development in a human life. I have already
outlined three different stages in my simple model: childhood, characterized by a gentle drift down a
benign stream; most of adulthood, characterized by the need to actively navigate the wind, water, and
shoreline out of the bay toward the ocean; and finally culmination, self-actualization or wisdom,
conceived of as the (relatively rare) emergence of the boat out into the open waters of a fulfilled life.

However, it must be obvious to the reader that the second stage is the one that captivates my
interest for the purposes of this paper and my current position with IVCF. I take the position,
consonant with the perspective of the instructors of the class, that Erickson's Theory of Psychosocial
Development is largely accurate. I am not at all trying to displace that theory or its rich and relevant
insights. I am, however, trying to build a pragmatic model that might yield implications for self-
knowledge and guidance of others in this process. I have identified, in Table 2 below, these broad
navigational challenges with the most advanced of Erickson's stages: Erickson's industry and identity
stages (IV and V) map to the success/failure growth in understanding of the self; intimacy and
generativity stages (VI and VII) map to the relational components of community and intimacy; and
wisdom stage (VIII) maps to the issue of faith and hope. These, of course, do not perfectly line up.
Indeed, I think some of each navigational challenge (God, Others, Myself) can be found at each stage
throughout Erickson's model.

One implication of these broad identifications would be to extend the model to a timeline and
a staged sense of chronological priority. Erickson's model, therefore, would imply that the navigational
challenges would roughly follow this pattern: Myself (stages IV and V), then Others (stages VI and

19 Jim Collins, Good to Great (NY: HarperCollins, 2001), p20-21. The first four levels, in Collin's framework, are
"Level 1: Highly Capable Individual: Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good
work habits. Level 2: Contributing Team Member: Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group
objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting. Level 3: Competent Manager: Organizes people and
resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives. Level 4: Effective Leader: Catalyzes
commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher performance
standards."

15

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VII), then God (stage VIII). Yet I do not see this in my experience, either in my own life or in the lives
of students and staff with whom I have worked. Rather, I'd like to make a few observations, based on
my reflection on the interviews taken as well as my own experience.
Table 2. The Navigational Model of Adult Development
View of
God
Others
Myself
Tack to the left:
Faith and hope
Community,
Gift development and
open-ended
commonality,
success
abundance and
affiliation
Tack to the right:
Dissatisfaction and
Belovedness and
Limitations, failure and
closed-ended
disillusionment
chosenness; uniqueness suffering
and separation
The dangerous left Stagnant and/or
Inability to forge depth; "I am what I do"; fear of
bank
immature faith
fear of intimacy
failure (death); rejection
of suffering;
meaninglessness,
shallowness
The dangerous
Cynicism and despair
Stifling and clingy
Poor self-image, self-pity.
right bank
relationship; co-
Purposelessness
dependency, isolation.
Vector Soul
Emotions Will
Theological virtue Faith
Love
Hope
Erikson's stages
Wisdom
Intimacy, generativity
Industry, identity
Organizational
Transcendent Purpose
Relational Health
Authentic Competence
Values
Open-ended
Integrity
Teamwork
Excellence and Initiative
values
Closed-ended
Loyal critique and self-
Servanthood and
Humility
values
evaluation
submission
Organizational
Listening skills,
Conflict management & Skills training and talent
leadership
empowerment
reconciliation
management
disciplines

1. Instead of sequential stages, or discrete enumerable crises, this model views six distinct tacks, as
detailed earlier in Table 1, none of which need trigger a crisis, though any or all of which may
provoke crises that result in major life structure change. As well, any of these successful and stable
tacks may be altered by a crisis of scheduled or unscheduled life events such as marriage, becoming
a parent, a job change or geographic move, or any stressful unchosen life change such as death of
a family member, divorce or job loss. The power of this model, then, is its flexibility. I don't have
any theoretical or experiential basis to give more structure to these six tacks than that I have
already given, other than what follows. For example, I don't theorize that these tacks proceed in a
person's life in some normative order--indeed I suspect that each person's life course back and
forth across the bay is more like a fingerprint than an Olympics downhill slalom course: unique for

16

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everyone. But while providing flexibility, this model still offers some guidance to the one who
recognizes that they need to make, or are already in the process of making, a disruptive course
change, a tack back to the other side of the bay: 1) Don't panic--that change that you view as a
detour away from your life's progress was inevitable. If it didn't happen now it would need to
happen soon. Welcome it (thank God for it), and learn what you need to learn in the midst of it.
You will soon see that indeed this new tack involves making progress as well. 2) Don't give up or
be tempted to regain what was lost by turning back. Eventually, this tack will end, but if you end it
prematurely, you will find yourself back on this tack again soon anyway. 3) Give yourself to
navigating this tack as well as you are able. Find a new horizon point, a point newly in the distance
on which you can focus your energies, toward which you can steer your craft.
2. I theorize that the open-ended tack of each pair of axes, in most cases, needs to be taken first, for
successful navigation of life's challenges.
For example, people will have a better, healthier relational history if they develop in the area of
community before they try to negotiate the potentially treacherous path of intimacy. Ideally, an
emerging adult has his or her experience of a healthy family dynamic on which to build further
experiences of community. (And biologically, the experience of the community of the family
precedes the experience of coupling.) However, in IVCF ministry to college students, we often
find that students' home experiences are far from ideal. IVCF staff often must encourage
students to postpone their natural tendency to want to pursue their "beloved" for the sake of
building or rebuilding healthy relational patterns and resources through community. These
resources are necessary for success negotiating the more intricate challenge of intimacy.
Likewise, I believe it is necessary to experience success before failure. As one of my senior
staff interviewees said, "For the sake of growth, failure cannot be beat. But without success,
people cannot keep going."20 Admittedly failure offers great developmental opportunities. Yet
failure without tacks and turns back into success can easily rob one of the belief in one's own
ability to navigate into the headwinds of adulthood, and can cause the individual to become
discouraged to the point of abandonment of the little craft--suicide, dropout, or escape. As an
example, one of the costs of aggressive affirmative action is that it places some students who
are not prepared for success into academic environments that will not easily afford them what
they need to keep at it. The result--predictably enough--is a much higher dropout rate
among such students.

20 Actually, this was the comment that, together with my reflection on several other interview narratives that
supported the observation, sparked the seminal insight of this paper. Hence it is worth noting more completely:
Jason Jensen, Director of the Pacific Region, said this after reflecting on his own experience and that of some of
his younger staff.

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Finally, I believe that a move toward faith is natural and developmental for people starting out
in life. If parents encourage children, they naturally find a comfortable faith and the hope that
that faith affords. Eventually, this "childlike" faith will be challenged, repeatedly, but that first
initial move toward faith makes the other efforts of development possible. I have observed
that many children of deeply believing parents who have become young adults rejecting faith
have struggled to make progress in relational and vocational areas of their lives as well. At
some point, they veered from the early faith of their families and didn't easily negotiate that
first disillusionment. This seems to have inhibited development in other areas of their lives. A
recent study noted in the Washington Post puts it this way:
"Late last year, a commission convened by Dartmouth Medical School, among others,
studied years of research on kids, including brain-imaging studies, and concluded that
young people who are religious are better off in significant ways than their secular
peers. They are less likely than nonbelievers to smoke and drink and more likely to eat
well; less likely to commit crimes and more likely to wear seat belts; less likely to be
depressed and more likely to be satisfied with their families and school. `Religion has a
unique net effect on adolescents above and beyond factors like race, parental
education and family income,' says Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist
and panel member. Poor children who are religious will do better than poor children
who are not religious, he adds--and in some cases better than nonreligious middle-
class children."21
While the focus of this study is on adult development, it seems clear that a legacy of faith and
not cynicism coming out of the teen years is going to provide a much stronger foundation for
development in all areas of life. The surprising part of this study is the extent to which faith
swamps other factors such as socioeconomic background as a predictor of success in life.
3. As an employee in a ministry organization such as IVCF, it can be very threatening to deal with a
tack in one's faith, coming up against some disillusionment or disappointment that makes it
difficult to feel that one is a leader, a model, an appropriate representative of a life of faith. I
mentioned the tendency, when sailing one's little craft, to measure progress by approach to some
distant landmark on the shore. That landmark might be a person, idealized in the mind of the
individual staffworker, by whose mental simplification this landmark person is conceived of in
unapproachable terms. Of course, the little boat will eventually need to tack back across the bay,
moving away from this ideal. Yet, unless the staff person is able to recognize that this model was
deficient in some way (and therefore did not represent an ultimate goal), growth and development
for the staff person can feel like a repudiation of the values and ideals previously embraced,
resulting in confusion and shame.

21 Laura Sessions Stepp, "An Inspired Strategy: Is Religion a Tonic for Kids? You Better Believe It, Say Teens
and Scholars" Washington Post, Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page D01

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4. Resources in one area (theological, relational or personal) can engender successful turns in
another: faith and community can make failure more instructive and less likely to derail. The
inverse is postulated as a corollary: failure to successfully navigate the turn and new tack in one
area can rob resources from other areas and make a major life crisis more likely.
Challenges for InterVarsity

At this point I consider that I have amply satisfied the requirements of the assignment of this paper,
and I turn to further analysis of the research I undertook to fulfill my personal objective in this class. I
was able to interview eight men22 at roughly the same stage of life and leadership development in the
organization: all of them now serve as either regional directors or national field directors in IVCF. I
sent out via email a set of four questions and asked them to consider these questions and let me
interview them over the phone. Here were the four questions:
1) Can you give me a brief timeline of your job assignments, starting with coming on staff?
2) Can you talk about a time when you had to make a decision about whether or not to stay in IVCF? Was
there a crisis? An alternate opportunity? How might it have gone differently? What went right? What
went wrong?
3) Can you talk about a time when you were asked to take an opportunity in the organization that you
eventually said "no" to, or when you were offered a promotion or challenge to which you initially said
"no"?
4) Were there one or two people in your IVCF staff career that you could identify as being peers of theirs
at an earlier stage of their career, but who left the organization? How do you understand your peer's
decision? Was there something IVCF did or didn't do that made it harder for them to stay?

I ended up with about ten pages of notes with many direct quotes from these interviews. In my
analysis, I mostly looked at the answers to questions 2 and 3. The answers to these questions, and my
reflections on them, directly contributed to the insights I have brought together with this little
"navigational model" of adult development, and hence I am grateful for the interviewees and their
willingness to tell me their stories, at some length. I would like to do further research in a number of
directions, but one would be to consider all the names in question 4 and contact as many as possible,
for further interviews on the answers to these questions. Still, I felt that the answers people gave me
were probably indicative, if not conclusive, of some trends in that direction as well. Table 3
summarizes some of the common factors in the narrative interviews, listing in decreasing order the
number of people about whom each line of commentary reflects their description of their history and
process. I left out factors that didn't show up more than once.


22 I decided to interview men in part because my sample size was limited by my time availability. It would be
instructive to do a similar study with senior women in the movement: there are fewer, but certainly enough to do
a study and draw a few conclusions. But with an admittedly tiny sample size of eight, I wanted to aggregate the
data as much as possible. I suppose it was not irrelevant to my considerations, however, that I am innately
curious about the developmental process of men in IVCF.

19

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Table 3. Common factors in the narrative interviews
6 very helpful supervisor or mentor kept him in the game
6 sense of calling key to keeping in
5 considered leaving for another ministry opportunity
5 never turned down a promotion oppty that came up
4 major geographic move as a developmental oppty
3 crisis on team challenged sense of calling
Took a job promotion and then backed away with sense of
2 failure
2 considered leaving because of financial considerations
2 didn't seriously consider leaving
2 saw own devel oppty and hence decided to stay

Of the eight men, all senior leaders and all but one older than me, only two of them never seriously
considered leaving IVCF. Of the others, five of the six considered leaving for another specific ministry
opportunity that presented itself, though not necessarily as a firm job offer. Two of the six considered
leaving for financial reasons, while 3 of them considered it because crisis and conflict on the team that
they led caused them to question their own sense of calling to this work.

All of them said that one or both of the following were crucial to keeping them in ministry
with IVCF: 1) a very helpful supervisor or mentor who encouraged them to stay in the game, and
2) their own deep sense of calling kept them more able to stay when external circumstances were far
less than ideal. Only two of them said that they saw their own developmental opportunities before
them and hence were able to decide to stay.
Some of the implications of these data and the rest of the interviews:
For better or worse, most people are weak at identifying their own developmental opportunities,
especially the negative or closed ended tacks of disillusionment and failure. It is easier to be
discouraged by the frustrating state of things in the present rather than to perform an out-of-body
maneuver and identify that the tacks you have taken have enabled you to make progress toward
your goal, or to identify that the next tack is not in fact a detour, but an opportunity for
development unhelpfully disguised.23
Hence the role of a key supervisor or mentor. The words "supervisor" and "overseer" literally
mean the same thing: someone who is able to see over, to get a vantage point from a height and is
able to plot out a safe and fruitful developmental pathway. This is perhaps the key role for a
supervisor, to be thinking about the next developmental tack ahead for the supervisee. One

23 Jim Collins, in Good to Great, called the ability to do this the "Stockdale paradox", named after Jim Stockdale,
imprisoned as a POW by the Vietnamese for eight years. Stockdale survived his ordeal, as he says, because he
never lost faith that he would indeed do so, and indeed knew at the time that the ordeal would turn out to be a
character defining experience for himself. He saw the end from deep in the middle. Collin's summarizes the
Stockdale Paradox as "Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time
confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be." (p86)

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interviewee said it this way, "I've gone further than I thought I would. Even when I got a first RD
SIMA match24, I didn't see myself going that far. The organization has pushed me ahead when I
might have been reluctant. My sabbatical year wasn't something I sought--my supervisor paved
the way for me to do it." Specifically on the notion of a sabbatical, I think supervisors should be
held accountable to helping their supervisees take productive sabbaticals. I have met so many
senior staff in IVCF who have not had a sabbatical in 20-25 years, but I am quite sure they never
turned one down when credibly offered by their thoughtful supervisors.
I am pretty sure that failure is not as highly valued or sought in the organization as my model
would indicate it should be. Several interviewees spoke of their own sense of failure in a prior job,
but it wasn't clear to them that that failure was a key part of the telling of the narrative that, at least
so far, would have to be viewed as a success story. For some of our most capable people, perhaps
we need to build into their ministry and leadership experience indelible failures. We could provide
a safety net so that they don't break anything, but so they are offered the chance to learn from
their limitations--perhaps even to learn finally what their limitations are. Two people remarked
that they were probably made AD too early, and they both said that they took the jobs because of
their own ambition. At the same time, I cannot help but sit back and hear how that short-term
experience of failure was a key developmental fulcrum for their early years in ministry.
On the same theme of failure, it seems that our staff failures should travel with us like merit
badges, rather than like a scarlet letter. One of the interviewees spoke of the tendency for failure
not to be quickly forgotten, "With 25 years in the organization, you can be put in a box. The
institutional memory is long." I am not sure if the institutional memory being long is the problem,
but at least in this case his previous failure had branded him as a particular type of leader, almost
as if he couldn't be expected to have developed over 25 years in the movement, at least by those
who know him the best.
Just as I don't think we as an organization fully appreciate failure, I don't think we give enough
value for excellence. Because IVCF was founded by Pietists for whom the chief virtue was
humility, I think this has been an organizational weakness from day one. We have always been
better at encouraging faithful, beleaguered remnants than coming alongside of flashy, powerful
speakers and teachers. There is room in the movement for the wide range of pretty good, but the
three-standard-deviations-above-the-mean excellence is sometimes hard to take. One of the
interviewees told of a peer who left the movement, having succeeded in extraordinary ways, in part

24 The SIMA (System for Identifying Motivated Abilities) acts as a consultative guide to hiring practice within
IVCF. A SIMA match tells the person making the decision whether or not the individual being considered is a
good match for the position. These matches, while not determinative, are significantly probative in the hiring and
approval process for any job higher than entry level.

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because he was being increasingly micromanaged, even while he was increasingly successful.
Eventually, a regional director job opened up, and he was invited to apply, but without any sense
of being actively recruited for the job. This was the final straw, and the person left. One of the
interviewees said it this way, "There have always been times that I have been unclear whether
IVCF really values what I bring, that it appreciates my kind of personality and directness."
In at least one important way, IVCF is doing something right that it didn't use to get right. Until
just a few years ago, no formal training for the AD role existed. The New Area Director
Orientation involves gathering the same group of new ADs three times over the course of their
first year--a successful example of cohort training in IVCF. Regarding his entry into the AD job,
one interviewee said, "The organization failed me... Looking back, I was in over my head. My
responsibilities were greater than my skills. Up to that point, I was not used to asking people for
help. I didn't realize I was in trouble."
I believe I have stumbled upon a model that has much to recommend itself, both as a
reconceptualization of familiar insights from the discipline of adult development, as well as a new
paradigm that offers fresh clarity and perspective. As IVCF staff and staff supervisors, we work with
young adults who are beginning to orient themselves to the nature of the complexity of the
developmental tasks they face. We have much to offer them, and IVCF has a long established
reputation as a developmental organization, whether one's involvement in it is as student or employee.
Yet current consensus in the movement has emerged that we must do more than we have done, and
that at least some of that technology for adult development remains outside of our organizational
grasp. I suggest that further consideration of these themes will provide another piece of the larger
puzzle.

Questions for Further Study
1. I assume that what I have outlined here is a first draft of a model. I need help to tighten up
the contrasts and comparisons in Tables 1 and 2, and to extend these comparisons in helpful
ways. I also would be grateful for any pushback regarding weaknesses or lack of parallel
structure in the model.
2. I also am not very familiar with the literature of adult development (other than the course
readings--mostly secondary sources). I would be grateful for any pointers to primary sources
that could either extend and bolster my thinking or demonstrate its flaws and vulnerabilities.
3. I am sure there are many more implications of the model than I have spelled out here, though
not for lack of spending time thinking about it. (In fact, it has been difficult the last few days
to think about much of anything else.)

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4. I would love any help and suggestions regarding a methodology that will test the model, for
example interview questions and/or a questionnaire design.
5. I include in this study, in Appendix 1, work I have done with the termination and employment
data from IVCF. The preliminary results confirm the value of this line of inquiry, at least, but
not any specific aspect of the model. I hope to do more analysis of these data, as well as
further narrative interview work with those who have left IVCF employment in a later stage in
their career and development.

23

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Appendix 1. Quantitative Analysis of the IVCF Workforce

Nearly 50% of the employees of IVCF are age 30 or younger, and 76% are under age 38. (See Chart 1.)
While it seems clear that the workforce is aging, it is doing so slowly, and because of the rate of hiring
the developmental issues of those in their 20s and 30s will predominate the concerns of managers,
most of whom are themselves in their 30s and 40s. I have had a number of conversations with staff
supervisors in the last few years about the less developed work ethic of recent hires compared to the
"good ole days" when we ourselves were campus staff. These younger staff members seem motivated
by different developmental challenges, often having to do with getting settled, pursuing romance and
establishing a family earlier than in the recent past (and probably more typical of the broader historical
trend).

Chart 1. Age Histogram for All Field Staff
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
22
26
30
34
38
42
46
50
54
58
62
66


The staff team has grown substantially in the last ten years, growing from __ field employees to ____
today. As the "baby staff boom" works its way through the fellowship, one challenge will be to
recognize and honor the expertise and experience of a growing number of older staff. Specialist roles,
such as International student ministry or Graduate Student and Faculty ministry or missions training
specialists, will become an increasingly important place where staff can continue to develop their gifts
and skills without needing to enter management. Yet there remains some resistance in some places to a
migration of staff into these types of roles.

Chart 2 represents the distribution of ages at hiring date for the current field workforce, as of
early March, 2004. Over 84% of staff are hired in their 20s, while less than 5% are hired after age 40.
Of course, this has probably always been true. (Table 4 reconstructs some of these data--I don't have
the data on all those who were hired in previous decades, only those who remain on staff today. But
the numbers aren't vastly different than what would be expected. They do show a slight trend toward
hiring younger employees.) So as an organization, we need to become very adept at helping staff
navigate the early turns in the channel: dealing with that first experience of failure as an adult, moving
from community to intimacy and back to community, and experiencing disillusionment in the context
of an organization all about faith.


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Chart 2. Age at Hire for Field Staff
400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
22
24
26
28
30
32
34
36
38
40
42
44
46
48
50 ore
M
Age



Table 4. Hiring Age over Time
Hired
in
Ave Hire Age Med Hire Age
count
1960s 27.0
26.8 4
1970s 25.9
24.9 25
1980s 27.5
25.5 97
1990s 26.7
24.7 341
2000s 26.2
24.2 413

I know as a manager I rarely hired people who I thought would only serve on staff for a year or two.
There were exceptions--hiring an intern while he or she is in seminary, when you know that long-term
staff was not a likely option. But most staff are hired with an expectation that they will serve three to
five years, at least after their intern year is successfully completed. (And most hope it will be.) With the
trend toward hiring younger staff comes a slight but noticeable correlation: the younger the staff, the
shorter the likely term of employment (with a 15% correlation--not strong enough to make it an
accurate predictor of individual staff, but enough to make a difference when a class of 100 new staff
are being hired every year). I have myself been a big fan of hiring younger staff, ideally after a volunteer
year or two right out of college. Indeed, this may be the best strategy in terms of quantity of staff
recruits. But our hopes for staff hires will, more often than we'd like to expect, be reduced by their
short tenure of employment.


25

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Chart 3. Staff Longevity
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1
3
5
7
9
11
13
15
17
19
21
23
25
27
29
31
33
35
Years Employed


Chart 3 depicts staff longevity for those who are currently employed by IVCF. Over 55% of staff have
served for less than 5 years, and 70% for less than 8 years. I have served on staff for 20 years, making
me senior to all but 7% of the IVCF workforce. One of the easily forgotten products of our ministry is
the swelling number of former IVCF staff. These folks leave the organization having received much
training and many developmental opportunities, yielding for them personal, professional and spiritual
growth. Yet nearly half of them leave disappointed and frustrated because the ministry that they
intended did not come to completion, since most of them were hired with hopes of four years at least
but 48% of those terminated in the last three years were employed for less than 3 years, including the
15% who terminated with less than one year of staff employment, and another 17% with between 1
and 2 years of employment. When you consider the high cost of raising funds initially, this trend is not
only a HR/staff morale problem, it is a public relations (PR) catastrophe waiting to happen. We need
to figure out how we can hire more able staff, those more likely to stay with us for four years or more.

Chart 4. Years on Staff at Termination
90
80
70
y 60
nc 50
ue 40
e
q
30
Fr 20
10
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Years



26

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Chart 4 shows the distribution of years on staff at the point of termination, for all field staff leaving
since July 1, 2001. (All the termination data begin at that date, because of a new HR database installed
at that time. Older data is more difficult to recover.) Of the people who have left field staff
employment with IVCF in the last three years, nearly 48% of them left within three years. Most of
these would have joined the organization expecting to stay on staff at least four or five years, as that is
a typical expectation for a new campus staff. In a direct gender comparison, the median years on staff
for men leaving staff during this time was 3.3 years, while for women the figure was 3.1 years. (The
averages were 5.4 and 4.3 respectively, skewed a little more for men because of the larger number of
men staying on staff longer.)

Table 5. Reasons for Leaving Employment, By Gender
Reason for leaving employment
Men
Women
Total
% of total
Employment-Christian Ministry 50 19 69 15.0%
Employment-Secular Organization
67
53
120
26.1%
Family Responsibilities

0
16
16
3.5%
Lack of Funds

11
14
25
5.4%
Other-see notes25
33
68
101
22.0%
Personal Reasons

1
15
16
3.5%
Return to School

34
45
79
17.2%
Unsatisfactory performance
2
1
3
0.7%
Miscellaneous
12
19
31
6.7%
Total

210
250
460
100.0%

Table 5 shows reasons for leaving employment, compared by gender. Note that "Family
responsibilities" essentially means, motherhood. Further note that far more men than women leave
employment with IVCF to enter another Christian ministry vocation, regrettably so but not
surprisingly. These data, with the differentials by gender statistically significant in several areas, have
much to recommend further analysis and study. (Note that one reason given, "lack of funds" is
essentially equally likely for women as for men, and a fairly small percentage of the total. However, I
suspect that funding was a significant issue for as many as one half or more of all people leaving
employment with IVCF.)


25 This "other, see notes" indication is from the check box on the termination form. Since the notes section
wasn't included in the data that I received for study, I cannot actually see notes. Any significant study of these
termination data would need to include a by-hand accounting of these notes. I would expect that significant
features of the contours of our departing staff cadre are wrapped up in these notes, awaiting further exploration
and analysis.

27

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Chart 5. Staff Years of Experience
120.0%
100.0%
a
l
80.0%
Tot
60.0%
t
of
40.0%
e
r
c
e
n
P
20.0%
0.0%
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Women
Years on Staff
Men


Chart 5, the last gender comparison in this small study, shows the differential in retention rate between
men and women. After about year 8, the two graphs are almost identical, but between years 2 and 7
women drop out of the workforce much more rapidly than men do, to the point that after 4 years,
nearly 55% of women have dropped off of staff, while it takes another 32 months of employment for
the same percentage of men to have dropped off staff (6 year, 8 months). Some of this retention loss is
biological (as noted from the Table 5, but yet that reason was assigned to only a small fraction of
women leaving staff), but we could look harder at the causes of higher attrition in women staff.

Table 6. Regional Comparisons of Retiring Staff and Current Staff teams, by years on staff
Ave
Med
Young
Ave Yrs Med Yrs Retiring
Yrs
Yrs
Hires
retiring/
hires/
retiring
retiring
since
Current
Current
Since
Staff
Retiring/
total
total
Region
staff
staff
7/1/01
Staff
Staff
7/1/99
Count
hires
staff
staff
Blue Ridge
4.8
3.8
30
5.7
3.5
54
65
56%
46%
83%
Central 4.0
3.9
23
7.1
5.6 17 25 135% 92% 68%
GLE 7.2
5.1
16
7.1
4.8
36
61
44%
26%
59%
GLW 5.5
3.7
35
7.1
4.5
83
147
42%
24%
56%
MidAtlantic 6.8
5.0
19
8.4
5.1
30
61
63%
31%
49%
New England
5.8
3.9
39
6.6
4.1
43
53
91%
74%
81%
New York/NJ
5.6
1.9
22
6.3
4.3
34
47
65%
47%
72%
North Central
3.1
2.2
11
8.3 5.5 18 25 61% 44% 72%
NorthWest 5.2
3.7
13
6.7
4.3
27
39
48%
33%
69%
Pacific 7.0
6.0
18
7.4
5.5
33
64
55%
28%
52%
Red River
7.1
5.7
21
4.4
3.5
27
33
78%
64%
82%
Rocky Mountains
4.0
4.6
15
5.7
3.5
26
44
58%
34%
59%
Southeast 5.4
4.7
18
5.8
3.4
42
58
43%
31%
72%
Southern California
5.9 5.2 39 5.8 4.4 71 102 55% 38%
70%
All Regions
4.8
3.2
319
6.9 4.5 541 824 59% 39% 66%
(not including the Grad/Faculty Regions)








I include Table 6 in this study because I made these comparisons and the results were interesting to
me. It is beyond the intended scope of this study to do much more with these data other than to make
a few observations:

28

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1. The regions that have seen the departure of the most staff, as a percentage of their hiring or
current staff teams, Central Region and New England, are also the two regions that have gone
without a regional director the longest, nearly four and nearly three years, respectively. This is
just one more way to measure the cost of slow leadership transitions at the top of the field
organization.
2. The regions in the country vary considerably regarding staff longevity, staff team stability, and
average tenure of departing staff. It would be worth considering factors that contribute to
these differences and address regional weakness in this area by transregional analysis and
reflection.

If you are still reading, thanks for slogging your way through all this.

Rich Lamb, April 2, 2004




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Appendix 2. Stages of Faith

Summarized from Finding Faith: A Self-Discovery Guide for Your Spiritual Quest, by Brian D. McLaren (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999).

Stage
1: Simplicity
2: Complexity
3: Perplexity
4: Humility
Focus
Right or Wrong? Being right,
Effective or ineffective?
Honest or dishonest? Authentic or
Wise or unwise? Fulfilling
belonging to the right group
Accomplishing, learning, technique,
inauthentic? Understanding, seeing
potential. Making the most of
winning.
through appearances and illusions to
life.
reality.
Motive
Pleasing authority figures, being an
Reaching goals; be effective.
Being honest, authentic.
Making the best of opportunities.
"insider."
Serve, contribute, make a
difference.
Beliefs
All truth is known or knowable. There Almost anything is doable. Different All is questionable. Nothing is really
There are a few basic absolute or
are easy answers to every question.
people have different methods,
certain, except uncertainty. Everything universal truths, many relative
The right authority figures know the
beliefs, approaches--the key is
is relative.
matters, and much mystery.
answers.
finding the best ones.
There are enough basics to live
by.
Perception
Dualistic, in terms of right v. wrong,
Pragmatic--looking for the useful,
Relativistic.
Integrated, synthesizing the
good v. bad.
practical.
dualism, pragmatism, and
relativism of earlier stages.
Mottoes
You're either for us or against us; it's
There's more than one way to do
Everyone's opinion is equally valid and I'll focus on a few grand
all or nothing.
things--find whatever works best
equally questionable. Who knows who essentials. In essentials, unity; in
for you.
really is right?
non-essentials, diversity; in all
things, charity.
Authorities
Godlike. God's representatives, with
Coaches. They help you grow.
Demonic. They're dishonest controllers, They're people like you and me--
divine right. They help you know.
trying to impose easy answers on
imperfect, doing their best,
complex realities.
sometimes admirable and
dependable, sometimes
untrustworthy and despicable,
sometimes sincerely misguided.
Like/Dislike
We like bold, clear, assertive,
We like people who give clear
We like other questioners, free spirits,
We like people who combine
confident people who know the
instructions and let us know what
and non-conformists. We dislike
thoughtfulness with
answers. We dislike tentative,
they expect of us. We like people
people in stages 1 and 2.
accomplishment.
qualifying, timid or unsure people who who motivate us and make us feel
say, "I don't know."
like doing things. We dislike people
who are too dogmatic (stage 1) or
mystical (stage 3).
Life is:
A war.
A complex game. You have to learn
A joke or a mystery or a search.
A mixture; what you make it;
the rules.
what it is.

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Strategy
Learn the answers. Learn what to
Learn the technique. Play the game.
Ask hard questions. Be ruthlessly
Learn all the answers and
think. Learn to identify and avoid "the Find what people want and give it to honest.
techniques you can (Stages 1 and
enemy."
them.
2), ask all the questions you can
(stage 3), and try to fulfill your
potential, admitting how little you
really know.
Strengths
Highly committed, willing to sacrifice
Enthusiasm, idealism, action.
Depth, honesty, often humor or
May exhibit strengths of earlier
and suffer for the cause.
artistic sensitivity.
stages, plus stability, endurance,
wisdom, and humility.
Weaknesses
Also willing to kill or inflict suffering
Superficial, naïve.
Cynical, uncommitted, withdrawn,
May display weaknesses of earlier
for the cause. Arrogant. Simplistic.
depressed, or elitist.
stages.
Combative. Judgmental. Intolerant.
Incapable of distinguishing major
from minor issues, since every issue is
part of the system that has embraced
all or nothing.
Identity
I find my identity in my leader or
I find my identity in a cause or
I find my identity in solitude or a small I find my identity in my
group.
achievement.
circle of similarly alienated friends.
relationship to the whole, or to
God.
Relationships Dependent or codependent.
Increasingly independent.
Counter-dependent.
Interdependent.
God is:
The Ultimate Authority Figure
The Ultimate Guide or Coach.
Either a mythic authority figure I've
Knowable in part, yet mysterious;
and./or ultimate friend.
outgrown, an opiate of the masses, or
present, yet transcendent; just, yet
a mystery I'm seeking.
merciful. (Able to hold dynamic
tensions about God.)
Transition:
As Stage 1 people encounter diversity
Three problems push people out of
One of the key struggles in perplexity
That this is the last stage in our
in their ranks, or are disillusioned
stage 2. First, the prevalence of
is the battle between arrogance
schema doesn't suggest that one
because of fallen leaders or internal
Stage 1 people always claiming to
("Those simpletons in stages 1 and 2
lives happily ever after! At this
squabbles in the group from which
have all the answers prohibits Stage
don't see how shallow and primitive
stage of integration, one now
they derive their identity, or are
2 people from escaping questions
they are!") and humility. And there is
faces all the weaknesses of the
unsettled by the multiplicity of
about truth. Second, the failure of
much in this stage to humble a person. previous stages. Whenever one
viewpoints, they tend to swing from a
"foolproof" techniques and projects Notably, one has to get on with life,
enters a new context (a new
desire for internal knowledge and
leaves them disillusioned and
and life requires one to make
career, a new religion, a new
certainty to a desire for external
perplexed--prime characteristics of
commitments, and commitments grow social network), he or she may
accomplishment and success, thus
Stage 3. Third, Stage 2 people
out of values and beliefs, so one is not well recapitulate the stages
moving on to Stage 2. The world isn't
survive by fragmenting complex and left with the option of staying in
repeatedly. After all, humility, like
simple anymore, so the task changes-- apparently contradictory religious
limbo. One has to make choices. One
maturity, is obviously not a
to make life work in this complex
truth into categories (scientific,
can't blindly accept a group's or
destination, but rather a journey
environment.
religious, social, etc). Eventually, a
authority figure's agenda anymore, but in itself.
desire for unity and integration
one has to take responsibility for living
causes them to be dissatisfied with
life and proceed--chastened and more
their fragmented approach.
realistic, often disillusioned and less
idealistic--in short, humbled.

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32

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