Paradigm Shifts: What Today’s Jewish Leaders Need to Know
Leaders matter. A great leader can turn around an organization, spark a movement, and inspire a revolution. Great leaders set a vision and empower others to join them on the journey. When an organization is in trouble or doing well, we look to the leader for clues as to why.
Midway into the second decade of the 21st century, Jewish educational and community leaders must understand and embrace a number of paradigm shifts that have changed our community, our workplaces, and our lives.
| From 20th-Century Jewish Workplace Realities | To 21st-Century Jewish Workplace Realities |
|---|---|
| Few wedge issues in the Jewish community | Many wedge issues in the Jewish community (Israel, intermarriage, etc.) |
| Traditional hierarchy; command and control organizational structures | Flat, fluid, flexible organizational structures |
| Stay the course, work with little risk-taking | New challenges and opportunities for innovation (technology-driven) within work |
| Employees have 30-year career horizon, good salary, and retirement package (loyalty to organization) | Employees have three- to-five year tours of duty in roles, with focus on building new skills (loyalty to individual growth) |
| Employees move steadily up the corporate ladder (career ladder) | Employees move from one opportunity to another (career lattice) |
Perhaps the three shifts that are most critical for Jewish leaders to understand, appreciate, and embrace are the following:
- Shift from the career ladder to the career lattice
- Shift from single heroic leader to a leadership team
- Shift from the Information Age to the Purpose Age
Shift from the Career Ladder to the Career Lattice
In 2011, the management consulting company Deloitte sounded the death knell of the corporate ladder.[1] The ladder structure is predicated on a set of assumptions in the workplace that no longer represents current reality:
- Traditional family structure (i.e., Dad goes to work while Mom stays at home)
- Steep organizational hierarchies
- One-size-fits-all approach that assumes employees are more alike than different and want or need similar things to deliver results
The nature of the workplace and the worker has changed. The era of the company man starting a career at the bottom of an organization, working his way up the ladder for 30 years, and retiring with a pension is over. Organizations have evolved to become flatter, more fluid, and more flexible. Talent is more interested in a tour of duty, spending time in a meaningful role for a few years, than spending decades at one company.[2] According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker today stays at each of his/her jobs for approximately four years.[3] As Sheryl Sandberg put it, “The career jungle gym is better than the career ladder.”[4]
Jewish leaders who embrace this new reality and transform roles and structures within their organizations to adapt to it will thrive. Leaders can start by identifying where there might be room for growth for talented employees within the organization and then setting a course with individuals to ensure this growth. If there is not room for employee growth within the organization, then leaders can take the bold approach of supporting professional growth, maximizing their employees’ potential during their time in the organization, and then guiding them toward a better-suited role elsewhere.
Shift from Single Heroic Leader To A Leadership Team
Arguably the most lauded and analyzed biblical leader in our tradition, Moses required the partnership of his siblings, Aaron and Miriam, in order to successfully lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Each one of this trio brought different skills, strengths, and styles to his/her role. They were, perhaps, the original leadership team. And yet, Moses is the one who is interpreted as the single heroic leader, who, with God and against all odds, achieved incredible feats.
This concept of a single heroic leader has been the pervasive, yet flawed, wisdom that has existed in Jewish organizations for centuries. Yet this paradigm has shifted. We live in an increasingly complex world where a single person (or “atom”) cannot and should not be called upon to stand alone and shoulder the entire burden of adaptive challenges. Rather, what is needed is a leadership a team (a “molecule”) composed of different and symbiotic professional functions.[5]
How this paradigm might translate is a senior leadership team that has a distributive approach, similar to the cofounder model in tech companies. In this approach, one cofounder may be the chief executive officer while the other is the chief technology officer. One example of this model at play in the Jewish community is Mechon Hadar, which has experienced tremendous growth and success in the last decade under the leadership of three cofounders.
Despite this evidence to the contrary, search committees of Jewish organizations often look for one superhero leader who will do everything for an organization—raise money, manage teams, recruit talent, build systems, set vision, inspire stakeholders, etc.—thinking that one leader can save an organization. Rarely do such people exist. No one person can be an ace in everything. What we need from leaders today are complementary strengths and skills to support and round out deficiencies. The fact that Moses’s brother, Aaron, acted as Moses’s voice since Moses had a stutter is a prime example of such complementarity.
Shift From The Information Age To The Purpose Age
We are in the dawn of the Purpose Age. Each part of our world has gone through a radical transformation in the last few decades. We are now converging into a new set of processes to change the way society operates.[6] Increasingly more people, and the Millennial generation in particular, are making decisions and taking action that bring them more purpose in their lives.
Millennials (born roughly between 1981 and 2000) are more likely to take a job for meaning than money. This is a win-win for Jewish organizations, which have meaning and purpose at the core of their cultures and daily work. The Jewish community is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this post-Information Age / Purpose Age.
To dig a bit deeper into these themes, consider the following question: Are the Jewish community’s challenges to adapt to these paradigm shifts that different from other industries?
While the Jewish community faces many challenges, we are not that different from other areas of society. Perhaps the most interesting parallel may be found in the analogy to an orchestra. Orchestras struggle with many of the same pain points as the Jewish community:
- The orchestra-going public is getting older. The vast majority of Millennials don’t have much of an appetite to attend concerts in orchestra halls. Might we find parallels here to synagogues, JCCs, or family-service organizations that find dwindling participation from the emerging adult generation of today?
- Orchestra halls are expensive to maintain, sucking up resources from the annual budget. Are our brick and mortar facilities hampering our ability to innovate and thrive?
- Orchestras are hamstrung by numerous unions that may make a change strategy difficult to realize. One might find a number of unions, as well as numerous committees, in many longstanding Jewish organizations that may stand in our way to adapt and evolve.
- Finally, in terms of talent, the majority of conductors are men who stay in their roles for long periods of time. Further, there is a “pay your dues” mentality for musicians who are rising through the ranks.[7] There is a very similar gender and generational dynamic within Jewish organizations, which may no longer be a fit or sound strategy as we seek to attract the emerging talent of today.[8]
Great leaders know that a thriving and vibrant Jewish community needs many different players to make a rich, harmonious sound. Like an orchestra, they appreciate that the whole, truly, is greater than the sum of its parts.
Leaders matter. Those leaders who can adapt to today’s realities of a career lattice, a leadership team, and an emerging Purpose Age are more likely to see their Jewish educational and organizational dreams come true. These leaders are more likely to achieve the symphony of strengthening, empowering, and emboldening the Jewish community to meet the challenges and opportunities of today and tomorrow.
Gali Cooks is the inaugural executive director of Leading Edge, an organization formed in 2014 by foundations and federations to influence, inspire, and enable dramatic change in attracting, developing, and retaining top talent for Jewish organizations. Gali’s professional experience spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
Her career began as a speechwriter at the Embassy of Israel and a legislative assistant at AIPAC. She then joined the Harold Grinspoon Foundation as founding director of the PJ Library. From 2007 to 2013, Gali was executive director of the Rita J. & Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation. In the private sector, Gali was vice president of Operations at an education technology startup. Most recently, Gali was director of Business Operations in the Youth Division of Union for Reform Judaism.
Gali serves on the boards of Keshet and the Joshua Venture Group, and holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.
Learn more about The Davidson School
[1] Benko, Cathy; Anderson, Molly; and Vickberg, Suzanne. The Corporate Lattice: A Strategic Response to the Changing World of Work. Deloitte Review Issue 8, 2011.
[2] Hoffman, Reid; Casnocha, Ben; and Yeh, Chris. “The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.” Harvard Business Review Press (July 8, 2014). P. 28.
[3] Meister, Jeane. “Job Hopping Is the ‘New Normal’ for Millennials: Three Ways to Prevent a Human Resource Nightmare.” Forbes (Aug 14, 2012)
[4] Sandberg, Sheryl. Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Knopf, 2013.
[5] Flanholtz, Eric G. The Leadership Molecule Hypothesis: Implications for Entrepreneurial Organizations, International Review of Entrepreneurship 9(3); Senate Hall Academic Publishing, 2011.
[6] Hurst, Aaron. The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World. (Elevate, 2014). p. 22
[7] Thirteen graphs that show the alarming gender inequality in US orchestras today. Gender inequality in American Orchestras
[8] In the 1970’s there were blind auditions that led to some gender equity, but on a very small scale. How blind auditions help orchestras to eliminate gender bias.
