I have often found myself drawn to and flourishing in the role of second-in-command, the lieutenant rather than the figurehead. I have served in this position on a number of occasions and, depending on the main leader, these have been some of the most enjoyable and affirming periods of my ministry.
Before he left Bradford Cathedral in January, my working relationship with Andy Bowerman was one of the most satisfying I have known and I have missed him and that relationship very much over the last two months. We had a creative trust between us: room to think, to test, to challenge, to shape. With him I discovered that the work itself, whether Chapter business, strategic planning, or pastoral oversight, was more than the sum of our parts.
In preparation for his leaving, I read Consiglieri by Richard Hytner. It was recommended to me after a conversation with an Archdeacon about my vocation and leadership style. In that conversation, I found myself repeating a familiar refrain I have said over the years, “I’m just more of a Gordon Brown than a Tony Blair.” It is a generalisation that gestures towards a personal view of myself and my strengths and weaknesses. My natural habitat is not at the podium but in the room behind it, not in the delivery of the speech but in the shaping and phrasing of its argument.
My personality, both as I experience it and whenever I have been ‘profiled’, is one of behind the scenes as an advisor or consultant. I am an INTJ (Myers Briggs), ‘Executive’/‘Innovator’ (Belbin), Type 1 (Enneagram). Gallup Strength Finder identifies my particular strengths in: ‘Input’, ‘Strategic’, ‘Learner’, ‘Achiever’ and ‘Restorative’. Essentially I am best researching, gathering and processing data and information, learning new things and connecting them in creative ways with other ideas. I work independently but need others to feed me information and data in order that I can help the group achieve new things and get jobs done to the highest level.
Last month I shared some ministerial images (click here) that have continued to emerge as ‘narrative setters’: the watchman who surveys the horizon from the walls, alert to shifts and movements that others might overlook. It is the mountain goat, navigating difficult terrain that is inhospitable, not because the lush fields below are wrong or unworthy, but because the path above requires skill, attention, and courage. It is the pioneer, clearing space within inherited settlements so that new life can emerge without abandoning what has been entrusted.
Now, as I welcome a new Dean to Bradford Cathedral I am reflecting again on what this vocational shape looks like in a cathedral context as well as in the wider Church? What might this all mean for me personally and vocationally over the next five, ten, or twenty years? How can this particular instinct inform the design of roles, the formation of communities, and the cultivation of ecclesial attention?
Hytner’s account of the consiglieri rescues the adviser from caricature: the shadowy fixer or manipulator behind the throne. Instead, he presents a figure of judgment, discretion, and relational intelligence. The consiglieri stands close enough to influence, but far enough away not to be consumed by power or pressure. They observe, they test, they counsel; they can restrain without domination, guide without claiming. To use Tolkien language: this is Gandalf.
This resonates with my own sense of vocation. Those vocational images (watchman, mountain goat, and pioneer) are all about careful attention, deliberate navigation and courageous, often hidden, labour. Seeing patterns, holding tensions longer than others and shaping decisions without claiming them all feel profoundly aligned with the way I serve. Yet Hytner’s model assumes a single, clearly defined centre: the leader. Authority, even exercised with wisdom, is derivative. “I” is always in relation to someone else. In the Church, however, authority should rarely be reduced to a single individual. The bishop, priest, deacon, lay leader, etc. exercise particular responsibilities, yet all operate within a wider, relational economy of discernment. Power if done appropriately in the Church is dispersed, mediated by communal practice, and ultimately offered back to God. Leadership is never only a function of personality or office; it is a shared vocation.
Hytner presents the consiglieri as an individual. Reading him ecclesially, however, encourages a subtle shift: from role to rhythm, from individual person to shared practice. My question of Hytner’s assessment is: if the consiglieri’s function is so valuable in a single-leader context, what might happen when it is distributed across a community? What if the quality of spacious, patient attentiveness could be embedded into the culture of, say, a cathedral chapter, a diocese, or in any form of church leadership team? Could the Church itself cultivate the capacity to advise itself faithfully, rather than relying on the presence of a singular adviser to a singular leader?
This is where the various monastic traditions offer insight. Monastic rules have long grappled with the question of authority distributed across community life. Each tradition provides distinct approaches to forming leaders who can hold tension, offer counsel, and shape decisions without resorting to domination.
The Rule of St Benedict (probably the most well known of the monastic Rules) has as its second chapter ‘the qualities of the abbot’. That says something in itself: that after a prologue and a chapter on different types of monks and customs, Benedict decides to outline the role of abbot. What follows is not a job description but a theological vision of leadership as a form of accountable, relational and deeply attentive stewardship.
I have had the privilege of encountering several Benedictine abbots/abbesses in my time and they never strike me as CEOs or managerial leaders. They, in line with the tone and character of the Rule, “hold the place of Christ” in the monastery. They never hold the position as a claim to authority for its own sake but as, I would say, a profound burden of representation in which every decision is weighed not only for its efficiency but for its justice, its mercy, and its formative impact on the whole community.
Benedict insists that the abbot must adapt to the needs of each member of the community: firm with some, gentle with others, always attentive to the particularity of the person before them. Leadership is agile and adaptable; not flattened into uniformity but stretched across difference, held together by a kind of unifying attentiveness. The abbot is seen less as a controller of outcomes and more a cultivator of the shared life as an environment in which others can flourish.
Crucially, the abbot is bound into a web of accountability. They must listen to the counsel of the community, especially in matters of importance, as they will give an account before God for how they have exercised his care. Authority is reframed not as possession but as responsibility held in tension: decisive, yet porous; directive, yet listening. The abbot must lead, but they must also be led by the Rule, by the community, and ultimately by God.
What begins to emerge is a model of leadership that resonates deeply with the consiglieri instinct but relocates it within a communal and theological frame. The abbot remains the leader, bearing responsibility and, at times, making decisions that cannot be deferred, but does so as one continually shaped by the counsel of the community. They are not a solitary decision-maker but a leader formed within an advising body.
The attentiveness, discernment, and relational intelligence we might associate with the consiglieri are not concentrated in a single figure alongside him, either. Those qualities are diffused across the life of the monastery and drawn into its leadership through listening. In this sense, Benedict does not eliminate the consiglieri function so much as distributes it. Authority is exercised from within a shared discipline of attention.
It is important to note at this point that the abbot, in most monastic communities, is never permanently set apart from this dynamic. In time, they relinquish the office and return to the community as one among others. Leadership, then, is not an identity to be possessed but a role temporarily inhabited within a wider ecology of discernment. It is this ecology, rather than the individual office, that ultimately carries the wisdom of the community.
Alongside this, the Rule of St Augustine offers a slightly different but complementary vision. Where Benedict begins with the abbot, Augustine begins with the community itself. His Rule opens not with hierarchy, but with unity: “live together in harmony, being of one mind and one heart on the way to God.” Authority is not absent, but it is deliberately de-centred, embedded within a shared life ordered towards charity. The superior is present, but almost understated; what matters most is the cultivation of a common disposition: humility, mutual submission, and a willingness to place the good of the whole above the assertion of the individual will.
Leadership, in the Augustinian frame, emerges from attentiveness to relationship. Correction is to be exercised carefully, privately where possible, always with the aim of restoration rather than control. The Rule resists the temptation to formalise authority too tightly, instead trusting that a community formed in charity will generate its own patterns of accountability. To lead, in this context, is, primarily, about guarding unity: to notice when relationships begin to fracture, when speech becomes careless, when possession or status begins to distort the common life.
The Oratorian tradition, shaped by Philip Neri, introduces yet another inflection. Unlike the more formalised structures of the Benedictine or, to a lesser extent, the Augustinian life, the Oratory resists binding itself to a single, prescriptive rule. Instead, it develops a pattern of life grounded in prayer, conversation, preaching, and pastoral attentiveness, with leadership exercised in a markedly relational and improvisational manner.
Here, the superior holds authority, but it is softened by the ethos of fraternity and friendship. Decisions emerge through conversation, through sustained attentiveness to the movement of the Spirit within the community. Leadership remains responsive to people, to context, to the unexpected. Stability is not abandoned, but held lightly, allowing adaptation without loss of identity.
What is striking in each of these examples is the way the consiglieri instinct becomes almost ambient. It is not concentrated in a role but the community itself becomes a kind of living advisory body, capable of responding dynamically to new challenges without collapsing into either rigidity or chaos. Taken together, these traditions suggest that the same core qualities are being formed, but through more ecclesial grammars.
If the monastic traditions suggest that the consiglieri instinct can be distributed and diffused across a community, then The Undefended Leader by Simon Walker offers a practical framework for recognising how these dynamics take shape in lived leadership.
Leadership, Walker suggests, operates across two key axes: frontstage and backstage, and strength and weakness. The frontstage is the visible space of action, communication, and decision-making; the backstage is where reflection, processing, and relational work take place. Strength names the capacity to act, decide, and hold direction; weakness, in Walker’s reconfiguration, is not failure but a deliberate openness and an ability to listen, to receive, and to remain vulnerable to others and to God.
In addition, Walker names a third dimension to the four quadrants created by the key axes: expansion and consolidation. Some leaders are oriented towards growth, change, and new initiatives; others towards coherence, stability, and the careful integration of what already exists. Healthy leadership, he argues, requires movement across all of these spaces, rather than over-identification with one at the expense of the others. One should try to identify where their instincts lie so as to remain alert to stagnating in one area or to working too much in ‘natural spaces’.
My own instincts are to sit quite clearly within the frame of backstage rather than frontstage. I tend to prefer the work of consolidating rather than expanding but tend to find these are not opposites so much as interwoven movements, i.e. expanding by consolidating and consolidating by expanding. I also move between strength and a deliberate, attentive form of weakness.
Walker helps to make an important development to our reflections: the backstage is not simply a place one, individually, happens to occupy. It is a location in which particular kinds of work are done. It is where patterns are recognised, where tensions are held without premature resolution, where relationships are tended to, and (this is where it is important) it is where the conditions for faithful and effective frontstage action are formed.
Seen in this light, the “consiglieri instinct” is not merely about proximity to a leader, but about cultivating a capacity to hold and release: to gather insight, to weigh it carefully, and, when the moment comes, to allow it to inform action without needing to control it.
This begins to reframe the challenge for cathedral and Church leadership. The question is no longer simply who occupies which role, but how different modes of leadership are recognised and integrated. Backstage, consolidating leadership is not a lesser form; it is part of the ecology that allows the whole to function. Without it, frontstage leadership becomes reactive, isolated, and, ultimately, unsustainable.
What Hytner identifies in the individual, and the monastic traditions embed in community, Walker names as a pattern: leadership as a dynamic interplay of visibility and hiddenness, strength and receptivity, action and attentiveness.
Returning to the question I began with (what does it mean to have a consiglieri instinct in the Church) no longer feels like a question about role. It is a question of ecology and culture and how the Church learns to cultivate attentiveness, discernment, and relational intelligence not simply in individuals, but within its shared life.
I am not called, as I thought at the start of this year, simply to be a consiglieri. I am called to inhabit that instinct in a way that helps the Church itself become more more attentive, more patient, more able to hold tension without fragmentation or haste. That will mean continuing the work I recognise as my strengths: consolidation, pattern recognition, the careful holding together of people, ideas, and possibilities that do not easily cohere but it will also mean resisting the temptation to allow that work to remain hidden. If it is truly part of the Church’s life, it must, at times, be named, shaped, and even taught.
It may also mean contributing to the way we reimagine leadership in the Church of England more broadly: in cathedral chapters, diocesan teams, and national structures. Not by replacing existing models, but by deepening them and recovering a sense that leadership is not only about visibility or initiative, but about the disciplined work of attention.
Provisionally, but with increasing clarity, I find myself naming this as a vocation: to stand in the in-between spaces where authority is negotiated, unity is strained, and meaning is still emerging and to help hold those spaces open long enough for something faithful to take shape. If that sounds like the work of a consiglieri, it is; but no longer in Hytner’s sense of proximity to a single leader. It is closer to what the monastic traditions suggests as a participation in a shared discipline of discernment.
The watchman does not leave the city; he guards it.
The mountain goat does not abandon the flock; it finds the paths the flock may one day need.
The pioneer does not found a rival settlement; he clears space so that what already exists can breathe again.
In that sense, the vocation is not to stand behind the leader, but to help the Church itself become more fully what it already is: a body capable of attending, discerning, and acting together under God.
Cassock Alb: Is a white garment that goes over clothes. This symbolises a clothing of the wearer in heavenly glory. This is about identifying the role of the leader of worship and not the person wearing it. The leader of worship is an expression of the character of the whole company of worshippers; they are to be the spokesperson of the collective voice of the congregation. By draping them in white it is a draping of all the people in that resurrection glory.
Cassock: Is a black garment similar to that of the Cassock Alb. At the reformation the Cassock Alb was seen as a symbolism of the abuses of clericalism where the clergy and those ordained were seen as being elevated beyond the reach of the laity. The reformers were keen to bring the work of the Church to the people and so they removed the symbolism. This reformation was focussed on the words used in the Church, hence the translation of the Bible into the common tongue. The reformation replaced the priest with the scholar, those who could read and interpret the Scriptures and the Cassock hints at the origins of being like the university gowns or the preaching monks (of which Calvin and Luther were).
