The 3% Road
Over the past few weeks I've been getting the same note from a handful of you. The articles are resonating, you say, and you want to know the obvious follow-up: what are the steps to making the necessary changes? It's a fair question. Answering it starts with the first lesson everything else depends on: awareness. And awareness is half the remedy. It is the half worth spending time on, because this awareness is both elusive and indispensable.
This awareness is both elusive and indispensable.
Most of us picture one road to growth and success. You start small, you work hard, and over time the same effort that built the early version of your Shlichus builds the bigger one.
But when you look at the numbers, this assumption really doesn't add up. Of the roughly 13,000 Jewish organizations tracked on causeiq.com, only 411, about 3%, have more than ten employees. More broadly, the same number holds for businesses in the United States.
It would be a stretch to suggest that 97% of people simply did not work hard enough, care enough, or push long enough.
Effort cannot be the variable. There must be an awareness underneath it, something deeper, that evades most.
Two Roads
Conventional wisdom would say that the operator's road eventually brings you a developed organization, that if you stay on it long enough, build enough, push hard enough, at some point you end up running a proper institution. It doesn't.
Why?
They are different roads, with different rules and different destinations. Both are work; both require discipline; both call for sacrifice. The difference is what the work adds up to. Working the operator's road harder or longer gets you a fuller version of that road. It does not, on its own, get you to a leader-led organization.
The leader-led organization sits on a different road, and that road has its own rules.
Drive, discipline, intelligence, and ambition are real virtues. They carry you to real success on the road you're on. What they won't do, on their own, is move you between roads.
So why not just learn how to lead and build a 3% organization?
Learning Music
In my second year of Kollel I took lessons with a teacher named Richard Samuel. He taught me to read music and play songs. Over the years I've worked through close to a hundred of them. I've developed enough skill to read the right notes and hit the right keys.
And yet I've never quite sounded like a real musician, and likely never will. The reason is that I learned to read music and play songs, and I never learned to be a musician. I stopped studying with Richard more than fifteen years ago when I moved out of Crown Heights, and I haven't advanced as a musician since. Learning a hundred songs the way a beginner learns them leaves you exactly that: a beginner who knows a hundred songs.
Leadership works the same way. Practice a hundred leadership moves like an operator, and you become an operator who can perform leadership moves. That isn't the same thing as becoming an institutional leader.
Why the Leadership Road Is Hard to Hold
The leadership road is hard to see, hard to learn, and hard to commit to. Even once you've glimpsed it and felt its pull, the operator world's multi-front forces draw you back, and it often does so while convincing you that you're already on your way.
What makes these forces so hard to resist is that every one of them is sensible, a rational response to a real incentive.
The first is the gravitational pull of everything you've already built. You have spent years on the relationships, the programs, the standing in the community. Focusing on a new road requires letting go of some of the details you've been holding tightly. Even when letting go is healthy, it feels risky. The instinct to hold on tighter is the instinct that built what you have.
The second is the appeal of the quick win. The operator's road delivers. An event runs, a program launches, a donor smiles, the calendar fills. Each win is gratifying, and each one does a good job at quieting any insecurities that come with carrying an institution on your shoulders. The leader's road, by contrast, builds slowly and yields its returns in quarters and years rather than days and weeks. In the moment-to-moment of running a Shlichus, the quick wins can feel emotionally indispensable.
The third is the culture you operate inside. A persisting operator-era culture measures success in operator-era terms: programs running, attendance counts, dollars raised, square feet added. That is the language of recognition; of conferences, of peer respect. When you turn toward the leader's road, you are turning away from the very metrics your environment knows how to applaud.
The fourth is the infrastructure that sits within that culture. The services, the consultants, the templates, the playbooks are all designed and built to help you run the operator's road better. There is a mature ecosystem for the road you're already on, and almost nothing for the road you'd be trying to reach.
The leadership road is hard to hold because everything around you is working, correctly, to pull you off it.
Without this awareness, you keep building on the operator's road, never reaching the leader-led organization the other road builds.
Seeing the leadership road and committing to it is the starting point
Seeing the leadership road and committing to it is the starting point, and if these pages do nothing more than that, they'll have done their job. To make it concrete, here is an exercise worth returning to from time to time.
The Seat Test
Imagine you are offered the job of running an organization that already exists and is fully operational: a ten-million-dollar operation with twenty-five staff, a leadership team, managers, front-line employees. (If it helps, picture something more aligned to what your own Shlichus looks like at full maturity.)
A real team. A real structure. Real expectations.
The role is to lead what is already there. Navigate complexity. Make difficult decisions. Earn the team's trust. Provide direction.
How would you actually do?
The exercise works because it strips out every variable you would normally reach for. The organization is already built and handed to you, fully formed. What is left is the only question that ever actually mattered: can you operate at that level?
The only question that ever actually mattered: can you operate at that level?
If you can't lead it once it's built, you won't be able to build it.
More importantly, if this exercise reveals a gap you never considered, you are on the wrong road altogether.
The Orchestra
I never sat as part of an orchestra, and likely never will. That is why I never had to become a real musician. Nothing is lost if I stay an amateur at the piano.
The Director of a Chabad institution might not have that luxury. The new era of Shlichus is asking us to develop and lead the orchestra, to be part of the 3% that do.
Whether we stay stuck in the 97% depends on whether we start seeing the leader's road, and choose it.
Keep integrating,
Yosef