It’s not about the jeans

Posted on July 17, 2009 by royeyre

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.

The thorn in your side

Posted on July 15, 2009 by royeyre

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.

You can either call it leadership and give them opportunities to grow their abilities in a healthy setting.
You can liberate them so they can move on to a job where they can better utilize their “gifts.”
Or you can suppress their initiative.

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.

Lead where you are

Posted on July 13, 2009 by royeyre

Leadership isn’t just something you’re going to when you grow up. It’s something anyone can do, right now. If you think you need a position to lead, you’re not really a leader.

Consider Jephthah in the Bible. Don’t know who he is? He’s worth looking up. Judges 11 says he was a great warrior but born into a broken family that left him an outcast, chased off by his half brothers. “Soon he had a band of worthless rebels following him.” You know you’re a leader when people follow you without any effort on your part. The thing I like about Jephthah’s story is that he didn’t mope or give up. He led where he was, and it was in the land of Tob that he sharpened his leadership skills. Sure enough, his family’s clan soon got into trouble and begged him to return and lead them, “Because we need you.” As you’d expect, he was very, very careful before he stepped into a greater position of authority, but he was ready, and he led Israel through 6 years of war.

Consider David. He also didn’t have the pedigree of a leader and was overlooked by his family. His resume was pretty thin when Samuel first put him on the succession plan. He was then put on hold for decades and had to flee for his life. After a series of escapes, including feigning insanity to avoid detention in Gath, he ended up in a cave. I Samuel 22 says, “Soon his brothers and all his other relatives joined him there. Then others began coming — men who were in trouble or in debt or who were just discontented — until David was the captain of about 400 men.” David honed his leadership skills in the wilderness and in exile. He didn’t choose his followers, but he was faithful to lead where he was, and his followers became fiercely loyal.

Leadership is something that happens independent of position or title. Leadership is more about who you are than where you are or what’s on your job description. As “a famous Gulf War general” puts it in The 52nd Floor: Thinking Deeply About Leadership,

[Leadership] is an intensely private affair. I say it is private because it all boils down to your inner experience of the context you are operating in. It’s private in that sense, but public in the sense that it is engaged with others out in the open for everyone to see and scrutinize.

David and Jephthah were by no means perfect. There’s plenty to question in their lives and leadership, but they didn’t wait for their dream positions. They learned their lessons, not in the classroom but in the wilderness. Long before they were “discovered,” they rolled up their sleeves and led where they were.

For more on this subject, check out my post on being developed versus being discovered.

Lending your influence

Posted on July 7, 2009 by royeyre

Those who have authority can bestow it on others.

There are a few verses that talk about this kind of loaned authority. In John 10:18, Jesus says he has the authority to lay down his life or pick it up again at will. In John 17:2, he points out that the Father has granted Jesus the authority to then give eternal life to anyone the Father has given him. In John 19, Pilate tells Jesus he has the power to release or crucify him. Jesus quietly responds that he wouldn’t have that power if God (Jesus) didn’t give it to him. So, who is the one really in charge of that situation?

Those who have power have the ability to give their power to others. The Roman Centurion certainly understood this. The reason he believed Jesus could heal with just a word was because of his own context and ability to exert authority over those subject to him. But the way he says it is not, “I too have great authority.” Instead, he says, “I myself am a man under authority.” In other words, being under authority gives you authority. Who you represent or speak for makes a difference. When I was a project manager for a senior VP a few years ago, I understood that I was a peon in a room full of VPs. But occasionally, I would enter that room with a message from the senior VP. I had huge authority at those times.

Established leaders have authority. With their position, experience and networks, established leaders have a great amount of power. But, with power comes great responsibility. I believe one of the primary responsibilities for established leaders is to use their authority on behalf of young, emerging leaders.

Consider the story of Jesus at a Pharisee’s dinner party. He’s interacting with a crowd of power brokers when suddenly a hysterical prostitute crashes the party. She debases herself, crying at Jesus’ feet and then using her hair to dry the tears and then anoint his feet with expensive perfume. The guests begin to murmur. At this point, Jesus has a choice. He can recognize her and give her status in the group. Or he can ignore her, protecting his own status. Of course, he chooses the former and even elevates her at the expense of his host. He lends her credibility.

Another example from my own life. I know my 3-year-old daughter’s personality very well. When we host a community group in our house, she’ll often break away from the kids in a back bedroom and run into the middle of our meeting, interrupting the discussion. As the leader of the group, I have the power to crush her by telling her to go away, in which she will become very shy and hurt. She’ll leave, but she’ll be inconsolable for ten minutes. Or I can look at her and acknowledge her, in which case she gets a big smile and runs to me. That’s what Jesus did. That’s loaned influence.

A reluctant leader is like my daughter. When she takes a careful step forward, established leaders have the ability to snuff out that flame or fan it by loaning their influence.

Earned authority

Posted on July 4, 2009 by royeyre

I’m reading a great new book by Jimmy Long, called The Leadership Jump. It’s an attempt to depict the leadership styles of the generations and then build bridges between the two. In other words, it’s the book I was going to write. There’s a great chapter on authority that got me thinking.

I’m sure you’ve heard the line from John Maxwell, “A leader without any followers is just taking a walk.” One of the best measures of whether a person-of-title is a leader is to ask whether anyone would be following them if they didn’t have the position. A leader will influence whether or not they have a title.

There are two types of nontraditional authority that mean everything to emerging leaders: moral authority and spiritual authority. These are the lenses ermerging leaders use to take the measure of established leaders.

My working definitions, inspired by a few web searches and conferences, are these:

Moral authority — the ability to influence others based on a leader’s character, wisdom or experience. Moral authority comes from such traits as integrity, vulnerability, consistency, persistence and willingness to guide and mentor others. Often we lend a huge amount of moral authority to someone who has personally gone to great lengths through great pain to accomplish something.

Spiritual authority — according to Steve Moore of The Mission Exchange, the right to influence given to a leader by his followers based on their perception of spirituality in the life of the leader. In churches and parachurch ministries, this power-base can be very powerful (consider Jim Jones, for instance). No wonder then that when a ministry leader is caught in duplicity or hypocrisy, the fall from power can be very sudden and complete.

Neither involves the use of force, title or position. These are types of power given from below. They are accumulated slowly and lost quickly. That’s why Long calls them “earned authority.”

Why reluctance part 4: different motivations

Posted on June 10, 2009 by royeyre

Back to my reflections on why leaders are reluctant to step out. This one has confounded many in the Boomer generation who are mesmerized by the trappings of leadership: power, title and a corner office. Young people with leadership gifts have different motivations and priorities. For instance, family, friends and other relationships are the higher priority in the lives of Millennials and Xers. That’s not to say they don’t value their jobs and their advancement opportunities, but they want both/and, not either/or.

I heard Andy Stanley speak at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit a couple of years ago about his decision to put family first and limit his work hours to 45 a week. This personal decision, which he deemed his toughest as a leader, has now revolutionized his church, which attracts high-caliber young leaders who have the same priority. As we took a break immediately afterwards, there was a buzz among my friends. We were all grateful that someone finally gave legitimacy in that kind of setting to what we all wanted to know: could you be a leader without becoming a workaholic?

Imagine our surprise when we came back from break and heard a Boomer follow Andy’s talk by making a point about the long hard hours necessary for moving ahead in leadership. Had he even heard Andy’s message? Setting parameters on work is certainly not a popular message in upper echelons, and that creates a barrier to young people who are watching and deciding for themselves whether leadership is worth pursuing.

Let me share a personal example that goes a step beyond work-life balance. A twentysomething young man came to work for me. He was a quick worker, extroverted and full of energy and confidence. I could see the leadership gifts oozing out of him, so within three months of his arrival in Orlando, I asked him to take on a greater level of responsibility. He agreed, and he did a fantastic job. He was efficient, a real people person, and he made some great advances in his department. He had an incredible sense of work-life balance, seldom leaving the office as late as 5:01pm and often arranging his schedule to leave earlier so he could coach his boys in baseball.

While I had no qualms about the job he was doing, I could tell he was dying on the vine. It wasn’t long before he told me he wanted to find another job. The meetings and process of management were killing him. He was a people person but removed from people. He wanted to go back to a “doing job” rather than an administrative position. A year later, I’ve concluded that I moved him up too fast, and I lost him. I think I could have supported him better and framed the job around his desire to be around people. But the fact he did such a great job suggests that it wasn’t necessarily the wrong job for him. Previous generations probably would have sucked it up and worked through it on their road to “reach the top” one day; not so with this generation.

Titles and power are simply not worth the cost in health, relationships and time for important things that fall outside of work responsibilities. Bottom line: young leaders’ motivations are different. Life is more than the job you do. Titles are usually crutches to defend positional or political authority. And power is not necessarily the end goal.

Why reluctance part 3: criticism is easier than leading

Posted on May 14, 2009 by royeyre

Another factor in leaders’ reluctance is that it’s easier to deconstruct than it is to construct. Postmodernity is at its heart a critical theory. As Sarah Arthur and others have said, it’s not really an –ism because it isn’t really a philosophy itself (at least, not yet). So young people today are great at pointing out what’s wrong, but they often don’t know what should take the place of what they’ve critiqued. That, of course, leads to great frustration by established leaders who are taking all the risks. It’s simply easier and more comfortable to sit in the back row and shoot at the leaders. So the challenge is to find ways to get young people to enter the dialog. It’s not that they don’t have ideas or suggestions; usually it’s quite the opposite, and they don’t think anyone in authority is willing to listen.

A thirty-something friend of mine, who had developed an unfortunate reputation as a back-row complainer, has recently felt called by God to step up to the front and lead. It’s a different role, and it comes with risks. In taking on a new position of responsibility, this friend is adjusting to a different role, with new influence but different options available to her to voice frustrations and ideas. As she told me the other day, “If nothing else, I have no problem being a front-row criticizer who’s in on the planning as well.”

Leadership has its privileges and responsibilities. You simply can’t do the same things as the back row critics. But it’s contagious. As a mentor told me early on in my career, “Once you’re in the game, it’s hard to leave it.” If you want to change the world, there’s no better alternative to earning a voice of influence that gives you the means to do something about an issue rather than just complain about it. I’m not talking about a desire for power, but a tipping point where the desire to be heard overcomes your fears of responsibility.

My suggestions? As an established leader, find a way to give voice to the rising, reluctant and potential leaders. You need to hear their critiques and ideas. And they need you to hear them. And challenge them to step up. I watched a situation where one of my direct reports had a great idea to completely revamp the way we do our short term trips. I admire my boss’s response when he heard the idea: he asked the young leader if he believed in the idea enough to make it happen. It was a challenge to step up and show his stuff.

Why reluctance part 2: the hero myth

Posted on May 11, 2009 by royeyre

Another major reason for reluctance is the hero myth. In their article Encouraging Reluctant Leaders, Reidy Associates describes this myth as:

the view that leadership is carried out by a person, “the Leader”, who possesses a particular skill set. Included among the skills thought of as constituting leadership are charisma, courage, decisiveness, ability to delegate, time management, and so on. It is not surprising that people often hold this view. Many cultural myths and messages promote a view of leadership based on the hero, the knight in shining armor. The leader/hero has courage, skill conviction, clarity and he (almost always he) holds the responsibility for rescuing the rest of us from whatever threat we face.

This view, of course, is reinforced by superstar pastors or superstar CEOs who seem to have no weaknesses. Of course they do! We just don’t see them, or they never admit them. I worry about people like that, because they seem to fall harder.

Leadership development is a tricky subject, because it always seems to boil down to a bullet list of characteristics needed in leadership. No one person can ever attain such a lofty list of traits. And therefore young people loaded with potential don’t try. How do we create an atmosphere that breaks down this paralyzing myth?

Here are a few thoughts. One, established leaders have to be vulnerable. Pull back the curtain and let us see your weaknesses, your fears and your failures. Admit when you are or were wrong. Unveil your coping mechanisms. Reluctant leaders might learn a few things from your brutal honesty and might love and respect you even more.

Two, let’s publicize the fact that no one person has all the qualifications for any one job. And no one type of leader is perfect for any one job. Different combinations of giftings can match a position perfectly. Or, to put it another way, different combinations of weaknesses can match a position perfectly.

Three, let’s remind ourselves that leaders are simply the right person for the right setting. Winston Churchill was a masterful leader of war but a poor leader of peace. You could say the same about Ulysses S. Grant on our side of the pond.

Reidy goes on:

We think, “I can’t be a leader because I’m deathly afraid of public speaking.” Or, “How can I exercise leadership when I don’t have the: (pick one) college degree, title, solution to the problem, right image?”

Let me suggest a different approach, taken by my sister-in-law, who keynoted a seminar in Atlanta this weekend. Here’s the bio she used:

Emily Bruso is a 28-year-old wife and mother of two young boys. She has a modest education, a messy house, and an imperfect life. She has no awards to her name, but she loves Jesus, loves the Word of God, has experienced the healing that comes from a Godly forgiveness, and wants you to experience it too!

Jeremiah’s reluctance

Posted on May 9, 2009 by royeyre

The following sounds like a typical conversation between a reluctant leader and God:

The Lord gave me this message:

“I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my ___________________.”

“O Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I can’t _____________________! I’m too _____________________!”

The Lord replied, “Don’t say, ‘I’m too ____________________,’ for you must go wherever I send you and say whatever I tell you. And don’t be afraid of _____________________, for I will be with you and protect you. I, the Lord, have spoken!”

— Jeremiah 1:4-9

the back row leader

thinking out loud about latent and reluctant leadership

Category Archives: generational