Brad Lomenick has a recent blog post that scratches an itch I’ve heard and felt before. I remember reading that Steve Sample, chancellor of USC, found huge doors of opportunity opened up to him only after he turned 40. There’s something about age that brings credibility – something that instant-gratification generations like me don’t necessarily want to wait for. Brad explains how to build credibility.
I recently re-read Romans 12 for the first time. You know how that works, right? I swear that chapter wasn’t in my Bible the last time I read it; I think it stopped after verse 2.
If the entire chapter is not about leadership, then at least we can agree that it has a lot to say about leadership. Over the next few months, I’m going to spend some time meditating on its messages for leaders. Let’s start with the more familiar verses.
1 And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him….
3 Because of the privilege and authority God has given me, I give each of you this warning: Don’t think you are better than you really are. Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us….
You can’t study this passage without overlaying Philippians 2: consider others better than yourselves, having the same attitude as Christ, who chose sacrifice and service over ambition. In a sense, Philippians goes one step further than this passage, both in evaluation of yourself — consider others better — and in sacrifice — “Be like Christ.” I hate that one, because it’s so out of reach for most of us.
The unique thing about this reference to sacrifice is that, in the Bible, most sacrifices involve death. When I was growing up, I remember one of my pastors saying that it’s easier to die for Christ than to live for Christ, because dying for him means sucking up all your faith and courage one time… and then it’s over. Living for Christ means making those decisions over and over, and living with the consequences.
Leadership is all about sacrifice. Good leaders put their time, energy, blood, sweat and tears into their role. It’s a life of faith and courage over and over, dealing with the consequences long after a decision was made. The Bible says it’s a life of accountability, where teachers and leaders are held responsible for the way their followers turn out. And many times, it’s a thankless role, drawing criticism from every direction.
Lest you think I’ve lost perspective, let me throw in something Tony Blair said at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. One day when he had a particularly high number of barbs thrown at him, and they were getting to him, his wife offered these comforting words: “What are you complaining about? It’s a privilege to do the job!” Yes, leadership is a privilege, but it’s also a living sacrifice. I think that’s how Paul felt.
David Gergen said something interesting that resonated with a number of other speakers from Day 1 of The Leadership Summit:
Leadership doesn’t have to be lonely. The day of the Lone Ranger is over.
He said when leadership is more of a team thing, when you lead other leaders, when you see your job as bringing other people along, when you partner, collaborate and build things together, how could leadership be lonely? The only time leadership would get lonely would be in a choice to keep people at a distance, as Reagan apparently did.
In my experience, there are two sides to it. Yes, leadership is certainly very relational. I’m not sure it’s called leadership if people aren’t involved somewhere in the process. Don’t you need followers, for instance? But at the same time, there are things you carry that you can never share. For some, it’s personal baggage from their past, as Wess Stafford shared with us at the Summit. For others, it’s new struggles they can never share with others. I heard recently about a leader in Wycliffe whose wife had a lot of health issues and who got mugged in Africa during his tenure, and very few people ever knew about it at the time. For others, it’s confidential staff issues. I can’t imagine the burdens some of our HR leaders carry over time. With all those secrets, it feels very lonely.
So how can we develop methods to carry each others’ burdens at top levels of leadership? How can those who work with CEOs get beyond surface-level friendships? As busy as they are, CEOs need deep relationships, but they have to find a way to open up and give back in return. I’m convinced as relational a thing as leadership shouldn’t have to be lonely.
One more thread I heard from a couple of speakers: some challenging comments on failure. I’m not sure any leader enjoys failure. But it’s not only a necessary step on the way to success, it’s the best way to learn. So, what is the relationship between success and failure? Here are two theories.
Pastor Dave Gibbons: “Failure is success to God.”
Authors Chip and Dan Heath: “Failure is an early sign of success.”
Chip and Dan again: “In times of change, failure is a necessity.”
When I read back over my notes on Dave Gibbons’ talk, a lot of the things he said that resonated at the time simply don’t make apparent sense to me today. Either I didn’t take detailed-enough notes, or his session gave all the highlights, and you have to pick up his book for them to make sense. But let me try to unpack them here.
Dave followed his quote above by saying that failure is the way the world resonates with us. It’s seems like Christians market themselves to the world as moralists who always do the right thing. I think that’s the reason the world laughs hardest when they see self-righteous-ism fall into the traps of sin. It’s when we admit our struggles, sins and failures that the world finds common ground with us. Painful though it might be to detail our failures, we can now talk on the same level with those who tend to be more open about their struggles. When that happens, God can move in and do amazing things.
We already know that God’s power is strongest when we are weak. I’m looking forward to reading the book, Leading with a Limp, because it’s built around the idea that you can lead out of brokenness and weakness. Think of the incredible power Wess Stafford has had available to him as CEO of Compassion International because of the horrific abuse he suffered before age 10. The thing is that we’re all woefully inadequate and desperately insecure, and we need God to redeem our failures and turn them into success.
I think what the Heaths are getting at is that we are too quick to give up. When we get hit with failure after failure, we too quickly assume that failure is on the horizon as well. Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison are two frequently-cited examples of great men who could have given up but tried one more time. I think the Heaths would say that failure is part of the process that leads to success, and often, it can be the mark that you’re getting close. My problem with that statement is that it sounds like something you say when you’re failing to keep up your courage. How do you know which failure is going to be your last failure before you break through?
Dave, Chip and Dan didn’t explain their comments. Maybe I just need to buy their books.
The winner in this set of quotes is the last one. In times of discontinuous change, leaders should take courage. This is the time to innovate. This is the time to try new things and see what works. After all, in times of change, there are no templates. So, try and fail, but keep trying, because your breakthrough might become the new template on the other side.
On day 2 of Willow Creek, one theme that stood out: Big change is accomplished by little things.
Dan and Chip Heath and Bill Hybels both talked about a series of little things. The Heaths recommended shrinking the change you want to see. If you can get it down to little things that are attainable, you can do it. And it’s amazing what those little things can add up to over time. They gave examples of people who changed counties, communities and countries by doing small things.
If you feel optimism versus being more and more discouraged, you’ve shrunk the change enough.
That paraphrase of what Dan said rings true for me in my experiences. Big change and big projects can sure lead to feeling overwhelmed. But when you work on the list of tasks you know you need to do today, after a year or two, you look back and you’ve accomplished something remarkable.
Hybels followed up with a reminder of the story of Naaman, where his entourage called him on his failure to obey Elisha. His paraphrase: “You’re a great man and would have done it if it was a great request. Do the little things he asked you to do.” It’s a great reminder of how God works, and our propensity for efficiency: one big thing to solve the world’s problems rather than faithfulness with smaller loads.
I see two issues. My dad used to watch my brother and me unloading groceries from the car, with a dozen bags hanging on our arms. He called it a “lazy man’s load.” “Why don’t you just take a bunch of smaller loads?” he’d ask. I still like lazy man’s loads.
I think there’s one deeper element to Hybels comments, though. I think we think of ourselves as “great men” and believe the lie that great men do great things. We want to do that great thing that gets noticed and puts us on the map. It’s the SportsCenter approach, where athletes try to throw in a few moves in a game so they get on ESPN’s highlight show that night.
But God cares more about faithfulness and fruitfulness than our pride. As Dave Gibbons reminded us yesterday, God’s metrics are different. He’s not all that concerned that our graphs always move “up and to the right.” He evaluates things differently, and he has a different definition of success.
I’m chewing on my notes from the first day of the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, looking for patterns and the fingerprints of God. A couple of things jump out as I put the various threads from yesterday together.
1. Our current crises are opportunity. I knew that already, but it was good to hear Bill Hybels and Gary Hamel say it.
Hybels: How do gifted leaders react? With perverse excitement at the opportunities. These are perfect conditions for greatness to emerge.
Hamel: Should we wring our hands or thank God for the opportunity?
I think your reaction depends on whether you’re more concerned with defending the past or strategizing for the future. It also depends on how nimble you are. I think of Rudolph Guiliani on 9/11. He had a long-term plan for the city, though the average person in Orlando never heard about it or cared. That was the plan that no doubt led him to the meeting that happened to be right near the Trade Center that morning. But if Guiliani was anything, he was nimble as he reacted to the crisis, and greatness emerged.
2. Leadership in the future is going to look quite different. Gary Hamel and Jessica Jackley (founder of Kiva) both talked about a lack of hierarchy.
Hamel: It’s a challenge to build organizations that can survive without superhumans at the top. Leaders today are less concerned with control and more concerned with connecting, mobilizing and supporting. Their strategies are open and their hierarchy is flat.
Jackley: When you assume co-creation as a value from the beginning, top-down management doesn’t work.
If the hero leader is an old and failed model, as I’ve blogged about before, how do we move to the idea that a team can fill the impossibly long list of requirements for a CEO? Could you have different members of the team to cover the multiple roles of rousing public speaker, visionary leader, internal communicator, disciplined manager and caring, accessible, sympathetic boss? High-level leadership would sure look more attainable if we could find a way to lead in community.
3. Ideas need contribution. Gary Hamel had a couple of zingers, but one metaphor is going to stick with me:
Ideas shouldn’t develop like a pregnancy, where something happens in private and then a number of months later, out comes a nice package, but as a family picnic, out in the open where everyone contributes.
How do we get everyone — colleagues, clients, etc. — involved in our future? How can a large organization move to co-creation? Others have managed to reinvent themselves.
At lunch, one of our staff members pointed out that he’s been around long enough to see us move from bottom-up leadership to top-down leadership, and now we’re talking about bottom-up leadership again. I’m not sure we’re really back where we started. I think our world and our technology has evolved to the point that we now have the ability to co-create instead of individual brainstorming that has to be pulled together by an individual. It may have flavors of the old, but it feels new.
I blogged before about how David led where he was, long before he became king. I Chronicles 12 notes how he attracted followers at Ziklag and Hebron, many of them brave warriors who would serve with him long after he became king. But one group of men were singled out with a special gift: “men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.”
I think understanding the times is a rare and critical gift. If the leader himself doesn’t have that gift, he should add some men of Issachar to his leadership team. If we don’t understand the culture we’re working in and what our organization/church/business/country should do to take on the current and future realities, then we’re destined to extinction.
Mordecai was another biblical example who understood the times. He told Queen Esther, “who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this.” This passage is an excellent, well-worn principle for contextual leadership, but I recently heard a video blog from The Mission Exchange that gave it a new wrinkle.
In the face of today’s economic recession, Steve Moore suggests that understanding the times might mean a good, long look at merging with another organization or even closing down. As Steve says,
We often quote the phrase from the story of Esther, “for such a time as this.” Is it possible “this time” has come and gone for some organizations?
I wonder how many organizations or programs are still running on the fumes of a great vision that was perfect for the time it was created, but has since run its course. Part of understanding the times is to recognize when an old strategy doesn’t apply anymore. Men of Issachar know what needs to be done and what does NOT need to be done anymore. The next step after knowing it is to demonstrate the courage necessary to shut down an initiative or organization that is no longer relevant today.
I saw an announcement that a group of futurists was meeting in Chicago this past weekend to consider where the world is going in the near and longer-term future. The few things I read about it were a little troubling, because the experts were predicting the medical and ecological trends we face today continuing to their logical conclusions.
Here’s the problem: trends are never linear. Every trend has a shelf life. So the future is never more of today; often it’s a response to or rebellion against today. Let me give an example from Wycliffe. When we began to plan our new Orlando headquarters building almost ten years ago, leaders were asked to project staffing for the next ten years and request space to meet the needs of the future. Of course, we predicted growing numbers of office-bound staff, and the result is a facility with a lot of elbow room. We’re moving departments together to create larger sections that can be rented out to our partners.
As we look ahead, who’s to say that the future is more and more remote work? In ten or fifteen years, will people start gathering together to work again? I suspect not, but I wouldn’t rule out a confluence of forces such as a reaction against technology or a new economic or business model that suddenly revives the popularity of working in large facilities. What I can say with some confidence is that if that were to happen, it would look considerably different than our current setup. We can slap the “retro” label on it: an improved variation on something that was never as great as we all remember it.
I can’t wait for the retro commuting movement. It’s going to be so phat.
There’s something about casual Fridays that elicits intense emotion in our office among the younger crowd. I’d even go so far as to say that the older generations really don’t understand the passion. After all, it’s just clothes, right?
It’s not about the jeans. The more I think about it, I realize that it’s more about not putting on a front. It’s about being themselves. It seems every time I go to publish another post, there’s another politician or pastor who’s fallen from grace because they couldn’t take that mask off once they started wearing it. The best antidote is vulnerability. Young leaders know that they’re woefully inadequate jacked-up sinners in need of God’s grace, and most are willing to admit it. So, why dress up?
Okay, it’s also about the jeans. They’re just plain comfortable. Many young people have begun their job searches hoping for opportunities to work in their own setting and their own hours. It’s their preferred workstyle. Hotels are noticing; a few years ago they finally started putting electrical and internet hook-ups and other conveniences near the beds. Why? Because they know their clients sit in bed to prepare their presentations and make phone calls and work on email, shunning the traditional desk in every room. With a laptop and an iPhone, it doesn’t matter where you work. And if it doesn’t matter where you work, it doesn’t matter what you wear. If they get a choice, they’ll pick jeans or a T-shirt and shorts every time.
How do you recognize leadership gifts in someone? You may have read John Maxwell’s scale of leadership. I’m not sure how much I agree with the concept or his analysis of the scale, but it’s a useful device to make an observation from my own experience. If you’re a 7 on the leadership scale and you have an 8 working under you, they will likely be a thorn in your side.
How exactly will that manifest itself? They might be the one who critiques everything you do. They might take initiative on projects you didn’t want them working on. They might be the one who takes the inch and turns it into a mile. They might go around the system instead of working within the boundaries. There are leadership traits on display in every one of those abuses of the supervisory relationship.
There are three choices for the manager, then.
The third leads to broken trust, continued pain and crushed spirits. I’ve been in that position, and I suggest that there are really only two choices for a person like this.
Let me suggest one possible conclusion: look at them as a chance to work yourself out of a job. Grit your teeth and pour into this emerging leader for a year or two, refine their rough edges and then liberate them by stepping aside. After all, if you’re truly a 7 on the scale, the best thing you can do is recognize the time to step aside and let them shine. If you do it right, you can count their future success as your success.
the back row leader 