The truth is that we have far too many people who want the title, the position, and the privilege of being a leader but fail to lead effectively. It is frustrating for a pastor to have a teacher who does not lead his or her class, to have an elder who does not consistently engage the people for whom he is responsible, or to have the staff member who fails to train and equip workers to minister. Ultimately, as the pastor I am responsible for leading the leaders and developing them. As President Harry Truman reminded himself with a plaque on his desk, “The buck stops here!” If my leaders aren’t leading, then perhaps, I’m not doing my job.
The Gospel of John, chapter 10, verses 11 through 13 shows us three types of leaders who impact a flock. Jesus said,
11 "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 The hired hand is not the shepherd who owns the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. 13 The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. NIV
A shepherd, by definition, leads the sheep. Jesus said in verse 4 that the sheep will follow the shepherd because they know his voice. Three types of leadership models are found in this text. First, there is the good shepherd. This is a servant leader (or perhaps more definitively, a kenotic leader) who is prepared to give everything for the sheep. Five times in verses 11-18 Jesus refers to laying down His life. This leader is willing to place the welfare of the sheep ahead of his own life.
The second kind of leader is the hired hand. He may be a shepherd, but he has no investment in the flock. He is there for himself and for his own benefit. An example would be a bad Charismatic leader, or perhaps a transactional leader. If it benefits him to care for the flock he will, but if personal sacrifice is called for, it will not happen. He will abandon the flock to the wolf.
Finally, there is the wolf. Although not a leader in the parable, it is true that wolves often come into the flock wearing the mantle of a leader. Jesus refers to them as wolves in sheep’s clothing (Mat. 7:15). He is worse than a hired hand because he is interested only in himself and anticipates using the flock to feed on.
I’ve seen examples of all three of these types of leaders come into a church. I’ve sent the good shepherds who gave and sacrificed and who raised up other good shepherds as the flock grew. I’ve seen hired hands who were just passing through. They needed a church to start out in, but they made no real emotional or spiritual investment in the church. Finally, I’ve seen wolves in a shepherd's garb. They had the hairstyle and the clothing down, the pastoral mannerisms and even the right words, but it quickly became evident that their intention was to fleece the flock and move on. They drained the saving accounts, lived as extravagantly as they could for as long as they could, and then when there was nothing else to take, they moved on. Sadly, too many denominations allow this to happen without corrective action or punitive measures for the wolves.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Friday, June 02, 2006
Grandma's Leadership Paradigm
I grew up in West Virginia deep in the hills next to a creek. Most of the people who lived around us were family. Often when we would get together to address a situation or engage in a project the entire enterprise dissolved into yet another exercise in futility and family feuds. My grandmother (the matriarch of the family) would usually assess the situation by telling us there were too many chiefs and not enough Indians. I don’t suppose that was politically correct, but then again, I doubt that she ever heard of the concept of political correctness.
Her comment reflected a strongly held belief that someone (emphasize “one”) should be in control. Other phrases like “too many cooks in the kitchen” and “too many hands in the pot” illustrated the idea that there should be a clearly identified, communally recognized, and perhaps even officially certified leader in charge. The feeling was that if this delineation between leader and follower were not clearly defined and respected then nothing would “get done”.
My grandmother was born in 1906 and she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-nine. Obviously, she came from a different era, a time when great men like Ford, Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy lived. It was widely believed that a “great man” could lead a nation, a church, or a business forward in pursuit of success. This was held to be true from the local church on the dirt road of Elk Lick, West Virginia, to the nation’s capital, to the Ford Motor Company that transformed her world from dirt roads and horses, to automobiles and pavement.
By the time my grandmother passed much had changed. Great men had experienced great failures, dramatically affecting the national psyche and bringing about a significant change in the way we view leaders. After Nixon’s Watergate, Clinton’s Monicagate, and the Enron debacle at the hands of a CEO, leaders having singular control is no longer viewed favorably. Now we want more cooks in the kitchen, we want more chiefs in the camp, and we expect to see leadership shared among teams and not held by a few elites at the top of some imaginary hierarchical structure.
There has been a shift of focus in leadership studies from the singular impact of the leader, to the significant importance of the followers. Assumed, perhaps, is that a collective is more trustworthy than an individual is, or that power distributed in the hands of many is less dangerous than a concentration of power in the hands of the few, or the one. This is, after all, the premise of democracy.
More recent leadership literature, such as the massive work by Bernard Bass, Bass & Stogdills’ Handbook of Leadership, or Gary Yukl’s Leadership in Organizations, has relegated the Great Man theories to the dusty pages of history. Even the Charismatic Leader theories have been abandoned in favor of Transformational leadership models where the leader empowers, inspires, and partners with the followers. The charismatic leader, or the benevolent dictator, might inspire, but he or she failed to empower or to partner with the followers.
The philosophical shift from a top-down model to a more egalitarian approach is a movement that continues to evolve as the Servant Leadership model popularized by Charles Greenleaf has come into prominence.
My grandmother was a devoutly Christian woman whose view of leadership was shaped by the times and by her experiences. It was her experience that too many people trying to take the lead on one project was a failure waiting to happen. However, she readily embraced the cliché espoused by many a preacher that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross.” Furthermore, in our church we regularly observed the practice of feetwashing as a sacrament of our church. Each time we participated in this ordinance we were powerfully reminded of the night Jesus, the Lord and Master, took on the role of a servant. As such, the concept of Servant-Leader was not foreign to her theologically; it was just that she never thought of it as a general model for leadership. One leader in charge with the followers in line behind him was her paradigm. (As a widowed mother of eight children this probably made sense.)
It seems that the modern idealism of an evolution of science and society taking us toward a utopian “Camelot” future died with Kennedy. Skepticism and post-modernity were born with the Vietnam War and Watergate, were nurtured in Monicagate and Enron, and is coming into their own in the light of CIA misinformation leading us into a war on a quest to destroy weapons of mass destruction that apparently never existed.
As the war against terrorism wages on and as the level of gridlock, partisanship, and vitriol escalates among the nation’s political “leaders,” we can only imagine where the paradigm of leadership will be 54 years from now when I turn 99. The trend has been to take the leader off the throne, down from the pyramid and into the masses. In fact, the paradigmatic shift now seems to place the leader under the followers, lifting them up and encouraging them to achieve their full potential. So where does the leadership model go from here? Is there an ultimate model, one model that will stand as the logical end to a quest for the perfect model?
If social trends continue and if the leadership paradigm sift continues in the direction it has historically gone, then leadership in 2050 will be problematic at best. The level cynicism and relativism may be as epidemic as the Avian Bird Flue by then. The family, a time tested laboratory for leadership, will be redefined and religious relativism will every man or woman their own Messiah. Perhaps it will all be academic by then. Could it be that the anarchy looming on the horizon of the societal sunset is the very sea out of which a worldwide dictator will emerge? Is this the beginning of the end of leadership? And if leadership is cast into the abyss with the last worldwide dictator (Antichrist), will the world then be ready for a King (Jesus)?
Her comment reflected a strongly held belief that someone (emphasize “one”) should be in control. Other phrases like “too many cooks in the kitchen” and “too many hands in the pot” illustrated the idea that there should be a clearly identified, communally recognized, and perhaps even officially certified leader in charge. The feeling was that if this delineation between leader and follower were not clearly defined and respected then nothing would “get done”.
My grandmother was born in 1906 and she died in 2005 at the age of ninety-nine. Obviously, she came from a different era, a time when great men like Ford, Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy lived. It was widely believed that a “great man” could lead a nation, a church, or a business forward in pursuit of success. This was held to be true from the local church on the dirt road of Elk Lick, West Virginia, to the nation’s capital, to the Ford Motor Company that transformed her world from dirt roads and horses, to automobiles and pavement.
By the time my grandmother passed much had changed. Great men had experienced great failures, dramatically affecting the national psyche and bringing about a significant change in the way we view leaders. After Nixon’s Watergate, Clinton’s Monicagate, and the Enron debacle at the hands of a CEO, leaders having singular control is no longer viewed favorably. Now we want more cooks in the kitchen, we want more chiefs in the camp, and we expect to see leadership shared among teams and not held by a few elites at the top of some imaginary hierarchical structure.
There has been a shift of focus in leadership studies from the singular impact of the leader, to the significant importance of the followers. Assumed, perhaps, is that a collective is more trustworthy than an individual is, or that power distributed in the hands of many is less dangerous than a concentration of power in the hands of the few, or the one. This is, after all, the premise of democracy.
More recent leadership literature, such as the massive work by Bernard Bass, Bass & Stogdills’ Handbook of Leadership, or Gary Yukl’s Leadership in Organizations, has relegated the Great Man theories to the dusty pages of history. Even the Charismatic Leader theories have been abandoned in favor of Transformational leadership models where the leader empowers, inspires, and partners with the followers. The charismatic leader, or the benevolent dictator, might inspire, but he or she failed to empower or to partner with the followers.
The philosophical shift from a top-down model to a more egalitarian approach is a movement that continues to evolve as the Servant Leadership model popularized by Charles Greenleaf has come into prominence.
My grandmother was a devoutly Christian woman whose view of leadership was shaped by the times and by her experiences. It was her experience that too many people trying to take the lead on one project was a failure waiting to happen. However, she readily embraced the cliché espoused by many a preacher that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross.” Furthermore, in our church we regularly observed the practice of feetwashing as a sacrament of our church. Each time we participated in this ordinance we were powerfully reminded of the night Jesus, the Lord and Master, took on the role of a servant. As such, the concept of Servant-Leader was not foreign to her theologically; it was just that she never thought of it as a general model for leadership. One leader in charge with the followers in line behind him was her paradigm. (As a widowed mother of eight children this probably made sense.)
It seems that the modern idealism of an evolution of science and society taking us toward a utopian “Camelot” future died with Kennedy. Skepticism and post-modernity were born with the Vietnam War and Watergate, were nurtured in Monicagate and Enron, and is coming into their own in the light of CIA misinformation leading us into a war on a quest to destroy weapons of mass destruction that apparently never existed.
As the war against terrorism wages on and as the level of gridlock, partisanship, and vitriol escalates among the nation’s political “leaders,” we can only imagine where the paradigm of leadership will be 54 years from now when I turn 99. The trend has been to take the leader off the throne, down from the pyramid and into the masses. In fact, the paradigmatic shift now seems to place the leader under the followers, lifting them up and encouraging them to achieve their full potential. So where does the leadership model go from here? Is there an ultimate model, one model that will stand as the logical end to a quest for the perfect model?
If social trends continue and if the leadership paradigm sift continues in the direction it has historically gone, then leadership in 2050 will be problematic at best. The level cynicism and relativism may be as epidemic as the Avian Bird Flue by then. The family, a time tested laboratory for leadership, will be redefined and religious relativism will every man or woman their own Messiah. Perhaps it will all be academic by then. Could it be that the anarchy looming on the horizon of the societal sunset is the very sea out of which a worldwide dictator will emerge? Is this the beginning of the end of leadership? And if leadership is cast into the abyss with the last worldwide dictator (Antichrist), will the world then be ready for a King (Jesus)?
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