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As John Gardner put it, “Leaders must help people believe that they can be effective, that their goals are possible of accomplishment, that there is a better future that they can move toward through their own efforts.”
Jesus instructed his followers—including you and me—to be “the salt of the earth. Salt is often preached of as a preservative. But salt is also an agent of change.
You can succeed as a leader, in God’s eyes, only when you wholeheartedly embrace his call to pursue a vision he has entrusted to you, working in harmony with other leaders for purposes that transcend who you are and what you can hope to accomplish of your own accord. Knit together by a common purpose (his vision), a common model (Jesus), and a common resource (the Holy Spirit), leaders spark significant consequences in the world.
Strategy #1 – Somebody has to be the big fish.
Managing and organizing are not the same as leading.
Barna believes the notion that “Leadership is influence” is a myth. As he put it, you can have influence in a person’s life without leading him anywhere. To equate leadership with influence is to set the bar too low and to set people up for failure. It produces “leaders” who are simply motivators and informants. A true leader has a much deeper impact.
Another common misperception is that leadership is the same as management—getting important things done efficiently. Leaders do the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time. In fact, Barna’s research indicates because leaders are focused on doing the right thing, they are often inefficient in their work.
Leadership is also not about having control. Actually, it is more about releasing control to people who share a common vision of future and are united in their pursuit of that vision.
It was once said, “People don’t follow titles. They follow leaders. Provide them with compelling leadership and they will change the world.”
In essence, leadership is about helping people make sense and achieve purpose out of life.
What gets you most excited about the privilege of leading people? Take the right amount of time to ensure your understanding of:
- who you are (a leader called by God);
- the practice of leadership (providing specific individuals with motivation, direction, partners, and resources);
- what your leadership is about (transforming lives through the pursuit of a specific vision from God);
- what it will take to raise your personal leadership quotient to the higher level (personal changes that will result in changing the world); and
- how you will begin to implement your newfound insights (this is my plan for being the leader God called me to be in this time and place).
Strategy #2 – Everybody is a leader—sort of.
Recognize the difference between situational and habitual leadership.
Barna draws the following conclusions from two decades of leadership research:
- There are two types of leaders: those who are called and gifted by God to lead other people and cannot help but be a leader under pressure, and those who lead only because they need to do so in a given situation.
- Habitual leaders are born that way.
- Situational leaders who are placed in positions that require constant leadership will hurt themselves and many others by masquerading as leaders.
- Effectiveness in life (and leadership) comes from acceptance of how God “‘wired” you.
Strategy #3 – Leadership is a team sport.
Know the four types–directing, strategic, team-building, and operational—and how they work together.
God cautioned us about the “I must do it all” mentality. Moses was a bright, energetic, competent leader. Yet, in Numbers 18 we read about the horror that his father-in-law Jethro experienced watching Moses try to solve everyone’s problems. Jethro had stumbled onto a key leadership principle: No single individual, even when called and gifted by God to serve as a leader, has all of the resources and abilities required to satisfy the leadership needs of a group. (In January 2014, I blogged about Jethro—the world’s first management consultant!)
A Can-Do Attitude Can’t Do It All. Leaders, especially, struggle with this because their demeanor is built on self-confidence and a positive, can-do attitude.
Charles DeGaulle noted, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” Effective leaders overcome their weaknesses by combining forces with other leaders whose strengths compensate for those weaknesses, thereby creating a more complete and powerful mix of gifts and abilities.
Directing Leaders: When people think about leaders, the type of leader they usually bring to mind is directing leaders who excel at conveying a compelling vision. Their interest is in making good things happen—now!
Strategic Leaders: The classic strategic leader is one who shuns the limelight in favor of gathering and analyzing mountains of data with which to make the best possible choices. Strategic leaders are not vision conceivers and communicators as much as they are vision developers and shapers. Their focus on facts, figures, plans, and possibilities routinely leads others to portray them as insensitive, unemotional, or even robotic. Strategic leaders are usually deemed to be significant contributors to the team are often the “forgotten” member of the leadership team.
Team-Building Leaders: For unity and cooperation to occur, someone needs to identify and pursue the appropriate people, determine their gifts and abilities, knit them into complementary work units, and provide the emotional energy chat keeps them going. While directing and strategic leaders may burn out, team builders more often get burned.
Operational Leaders: Operational Leaders lead people by developing systems around the vision, resources, and opportunities available then creating new routines that maximize whatever they have to work with in light of where they want to go. An operational leader sometimes behaves more like a manager than a leader, championing the mechanics of a system rather than the purpose of those mechanics—in other words, to facilitate making the vision a reality.
If you are to lead people, you must do what it takes to get the job done as well as it can be done—which typically means teaming with other gifted leaders whose abilities complement yours.
Strategy #4 – What’s your point?
We don’t lack opportunities; we lack God’s vision for us.
Developing a clear, concise, and compelling vision is hard work. Developing your activity around such vision is a major challenge. But the alternative is to spin your wheels doing the predictable with limited influence and insignificant productivity.
From Barna’s twenty years of research, he found that there is a direct correlation between the impact of an individual or organization and the presence of God’s vision as the driving force behind the activity that brought such influence. Remarkably, fewer than 10% of all Protestant senior pastors in the nation can articulate God’s vision for their church!
Mission is the broad understanding and articulation of why you or your organization exist.
Can you succinctly articulate your vision and mission as a Christian individual?
Stephen Case from AOL Time Warner once pointed out that “A vision without the ability to execute is a hallucination.” A vision clarifies the uncommon purpose that a particular group has in common. Is your proposed outcome audacious—too big to accomplish by human power and wisdom alone? Does the magnitude of the vision make you uncomfortable?
Strategy #5 – It’s what’s inside that matters.
If you believe people support leaders because of their skills, think again; it’s character.
Warren Bennis, the dean of leadership analysts in America, said, “In the leadership arena, character counts. I’ve never seen a person derailed from leadership positions for lack of technical competence. But I’ve seen lots of people derailed for lack of judgment and character.”
What leaders say and do are a reflection of who they are at the most elementary level—the place where character resides. Character makes or breaks a leader.
James Kouzes points out, “We keep rediscovering that credibility is the foundation of leadership… People won’t believe the message if they don’t believe in the messenger. People don’t follow your technique. They follow you—your message and your embodiment of that message.”
From a national sample of adults, the attributes most important to an effective leader included integrity, courage, and compassion—critical components to a leader whom people would want to follow. It is through family ties that your character becomes most transparent and irrefutable. Paul wrote regarding those who seek to lead within the church, “If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?”
God defines character in the Bible and gives us all that we need to pursue it. You should always be involved in some type of intentional and focused study that is building up your leadership capacity.
Peter Drucker summarized it this way, “The effective leaders I have met, worked with, and observed behaved in much same way… They made sure that the person they saw in the mirror in the morning was the kind of person they wanted to be, respect, and believe in. They fortified themselves against the leader’s greatest temptations—to do things that are popular rather than and to do petty, mean, sleazy things.”
Strategy #6 – If you want good followers, create them.
It’s a leader’s job to train effective followers—and it must be a priority.
When all is said and done, the mark of great leaders is that they empowered others to live positive and meaningful lives. To accomplish that end, leaders do not do something to people but do something with them.
Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines said, “If you create an environment where people truly participate, you don’t need control. They know what needs to be done and then do it.”
Americans are among the most practical people on earth. A great vision will remain just somebody else’s idea until you show people how they fit into the picture of what you’re trying to produce. Jim Collins explains, “Executives…spend nowhere near enough time trying to align their organizations with the values and visions already in place.”
Strategy #7 – Conflict: The leader’s secret weapon
If you want to be popular, become an entertainer. If you want to lead, get used to choppy waters.
When you strip it all away, leaders do just two things: they create conflict and they resolve conflict. Leaders create conflict simply by pushing people to focus on God’s vision.
Failure to adequately deal with internal conflict can paralyze seriously impair the organization’s health, progress, and potential.
Strategy #8 – God first, leadership second
There is no such thing as an effective Christian leader who puts spiritual growth on the back burner.
We Americans are so caught up in being on the edge and achieving success that sometimes we lose sight of where the real edge is or what the ultimate goal is. Leadership is simply one expression of your Christian-ness.
Your calling and ability to lead are much less important to the God who created you than is your determination to know him deeply and love him every moment of your life.
This, then, is one of the paradoxes of Christian leadership: The excellence of your leadership depends more on the quality of your relationship with God than on the application of the gifts and resources he has given to you for success in leading people.
As Henry Blackaby put it, “Jesus has established the model for Christian leaders. It is not found in His ‘methodology.’ Rather, it is seen in His absolute obedience to the Father’s will.” God is seeking leaders who are desperate for intimacy with him.
Most Christians are not very committed to spiritual depth; just one it of five makes spiritual growth a top personal priority. You must get your eyes off of yourself and onto other people. Jesus’ leadership was a perfect model of this: His time and energy were spent on two elements—knowing God and serving people.
Evaluate yourself regularly and honestly in regard to the six pillars:
- Worship
- Spiritual knowledge and application
- Evangelism
- Stewardship
- Community Service
- Fellowship with believers
We should all intentionally pursue growth in each of those six areas.
Finally, J. Oswald Sanders said, “Other qualifications for spiritual leadership are desirable. To be Spirit-filled is indispensable.”
Strategy #9 – What got you here won’t get you where you need to go.
Understanding the life cycles of organizations and which leadership type best fits each stage will help you progress.
Organizations pass through six stages: conception, infancy, expansion, balance, stagnation, and disability. Gary Wills said, “It is one of the major disservices of the ‘Superman’ school of leadership that it suggests a leader can command all situations with the same basic gifts”
To be effective, an organization must take these three steps for continued health over the long haul:
- The organization must increase its development of additional leaders.
- Leaders must have access to reliable information about the state of the organization and the context in which it operates.
- Continued health is fostered by curve jumping. This is the practice of rebirthing or redirecting the organization as it nears fulfillment of the vision. If you were to graph the development of your organization over time, you would probably see a classic bell-shaped curve. The time represented by the slope of the curve flattening out—that is, at a point in time somewhat prior to when the organization peaks—is the prime moment to initiate a new strategic thrust.
Let your leadership be an act of worship to God, a service to people, and a source of joy within you. Learn from Mother Teresa, who had a plaque which read, “Obedience, Not success.”
What a wonderful honor we have in leading for the glory of God!