It's the Wind Above the Wings by Michael L. Cooper-White

In a popular song recorded by Bette Midler and other artists, the refrain echoes over and over, "You are the wind beneath my wings." Undoubtedly, millions of dollars have been made from this musical piece which expresses lovely sentiments about a supportive friend or partner. Unfortunately, however, the song is aerodynamically incorrect, or at least incomplete. More than the wind beneath the wings, it's actually the wind flowing above the wing of any craft or creature that creates lift and causes it to fly.

Way back in the 18th century, a Swiss mathematician named Daniel Bernoulli discovered the basic principle that governs fluids and gases in motion. A faster flowing stream has lower pressure than a comparable stream moving more slowly. As Orville and Wilbur Wright, two sons of a protestant minister, discovered while studying their model planes in a wind tunnel, a slight curvature on the top side of a wing causes the air above to move slightly faster than the air stream flowing straight beneath the wing. It is this slight interruption in the airflow caused by curvature on the leading (front) edge and upper surface of a wing that stands at the heart of aerodynamics.

My observation is that leadership in any arena occurs as the leader causes a series of modest redirections of the energy flow in a system or community. There are many, many definitions of leadership — some simple, others complex. At its rudimentary level, I believe that leadership means enabling change to occur by influencing others to do things they otherwise would not do on their own. As the leader stands in the airflow of another person or a group of individuals and creates a series of slight redirections of their energies and momentum, lift is created. The individuals and groups so influenced by the leader rise to higher levels of performance. They are lifted up to see their situation from a different vantage point, enabling problems previously thought insurmountable to be solved, helping visions considered unattainable to be realized.

How is the airflow redirected?

There are as many ways of exerting influence and leadership as there are leaders. No two of us do it quite the same. The same leader exerts her or his influence differently in varying situations. As the president of a seminary, I lead in ways quite different from how I carried out leadership as a parish pastor, a bishop's assistant, or as a denominational executive. A teacher who moves from teaching at an elementary school approaches pedagogy quite differently in a high school or college setting. Yet, there are a couple of general principles that may be applicable in most contexts:

1. To redirect the energies, the leader must he in the airflow. In other words, it takes hard work, persistence, and in most instances, relatively long-term presence in a situation to exert leadership. Leaders who attempt to stay aloof, out of the pressures of the flow of energies in an organization or system, generally will not have major lasting influence in positive directions.

2. To have significant impact, the leader must he connected in an interdependent system. An independent, unattached wing will generate lift for only a brief time before it spins out of control and flutters to a high-speed crash with the ground. So too, a leader, whether in business or commerce, public service, the military, or within a church or other faith-based organization, must be connected, attached to others and likely to a whole community engaged in redirecting energy flows. Individuals who try to go it alone, believing that there is one leader rather than a leadership team, sooner or later do damage to themselves and their entire organization.

Every person who seeks to exert leadership must analyze and understand the "system" in which s/he operates, along with its currents and flows, and above all the people with their hopes and aspirations, their fears and anxieties. By joining with others in an ever-expanding web of interdependent relationships, an aspiring leader soon begins to notice small and subtle changes. The combination of hundreds and thousands of interrelated miniscule airflow redirections soon begins to lift the entire organization to a new place.

Stall avoidance: Not biting off too much

Upon hearing the word "stall," most persons unfamiliar with aircraft and aviation assume it refers to the engine stalling out and quitting. In actuality, a stall occurs and the aircraft begins either to settle downward gently or rapidly fall earthward when the wings stop generating lift. This happens when the pitch angle or angle of the wing relative to the onrushing airflow becomes too great. Generally, though not always, a stalling aircraft is in an unusual nose-high condition just before the stall occurs. This can happen on takeoff if an inattentive pilot pulls the nose too high. Close to the ground, the stall may be unrecoverable, resulting in a fiery, deadly crash. Fortunately, unintentional stalls are relatively rare and almost nonexistent in airlines with two-pilot crews, stallwarning alarms, and other preventive devices.

In a stall situation, the wing is in essence "taking too big a bite," causing a disruption in the smooth flow of air over the upper curved portion of the wing. When this interruption occurs, the wing loses its lift-generating capacity and stalls or begins to fall. Leaders who get into difficulty and either never establish or at some point lose their effectiveness, often do so because they attempt to take too big a bite, usually at an early and vulnerable stage of their leadership.

A new minister who had just graduated from a seminary presented at his first meeting with the church council a blueprint for how this 80-year-old congregation could get off the downward membership spiral it had experienced over the past two decades. This bright, energetic pastor went on to describe no fewer than six new programmatic ideas, then laid out his staff and committee reorganization plan, and capped his excited presentation with a rough sketch of how the church's sanctuary could be redesigned to accommodate his plans for a radically revised new contemporary worship service. In less than a year, driven by a flurry of complaints regarding their new minister, the church council reluctantly asked him to resign. This well-meaning, creative, visionary pastor had simply stalled shortly after takeoff. He bit off too big a bite. The congregation's airflow was disrupted to the degree it could no longer lift members' sights. Rather than being inspired to reach attainable goals, members were overwhelmed and stopped trying to expand their mission.

In the world of business, entire corporations stall and are forced into bankruptcy or go out of business because they take too big a bite and find themselves overwhelmed. Those of my generation can look back over the past three decades and name the major airlines that once flew the skies of our nation or the world, but are now only memories — Eastern, Western, Republic, People Express, Pacific Southwest, Pan American, Braniff, Frontier, Allegheny, and on and on. With air travel expanding year after year, why have all these air carriers gone out of existence? The reasons are complex, to be sure, but in many cases overextension and attempts to expand too rapidly created debt loads and operating deficits that were unsustainable. Many other examples can be cited of small businesses and giant corporations that, at critical points, tried to take too big a bite of the future and found themselves stalling and falling into extinction.

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From On a Wing and a Prayer: Faithful Leadership in the 21st Century, by Michael L. Cooper-White, copyright © 2003 Augsburg Fortress. Used by permission.

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Michael L. Cooper-White is president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg and an avid pilot.