Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

The jokes posted near offices’ water fountains often provide honest warnings about employee morale. When an opening arose for a new city editor at a daily newspaper where I worked in the 1980s, an office wag posted a cartoon of several men lined up on their hands and knees, each burying his face in the posterior in front of him. The anonymous jokester added a hand-scrawled caption—”City editor applicants”—that prompted widespread chuckles. Butt-kissing was not part of the written job description, of course, but many of my colleagues agreed that independent thinking was not an essential trait in the next city editor.

When I first went to work at that newspaper, as a lowly newsroom typist, becoming a full-time reporter was my life’s goal. I could not imagine anything more glamorous or rewarding. Twenty years later, that company is my gold standard of occupational misery, the measure of just how terrible a job can become, even in my cherished field of journalism. The executive editor was a vulgar bully and bitter atheist whose idea of humor was to walk through the newsroom and hiss, “Faster, faster.” I feared this man, but could never fabricate any respect for him.

Apart from his rage, he had few tools for leading his staff. His sense of office etiquette favored image over substance: he insisted that men wear ties to the job, but he sexually exploited a succession of women editors and reporters. He haunted my nightmares a few times each year until his recent death.

I think back to my newspaper days because they provided such a vivid sense of what I do not seek in a leader. Because I’m an introvert, a Christian, a Southerner, and the son of a Cajun who yelled with some frequency during my early childhood, I usually respect authority figures, unless they are venal or cowardly. My few attempts at being a manager have been so disastrous that I could write a series of essays on how not to hire or supervise anyone. But from where I work, as a writer who is happier being led than trying to lead, I think I know good leadership when I see it. At least I know what inspires me to do my best work.

A first glance at a book like George Barna’s A Fish Out of Water could leave the cynical among us thinking that leadership is the latest flavor of the month in the self-help genre. That the publishing houses of the evangelical subculture would be part of this trend is no surprise. Evangelical publishers have shown an unhampered enthusiasm for self-help themes for a few decades now, and if a theme can be used to convey the gospel to readers, so much the better. How else might we reach the hordes of middle managers who devour Who Moved My Cheese? as if it were holy writ and who display Successories posters without a trace of irony?

The formats of both A Fish Out of Water and Katherine Harris’s Center of the Storm may leave readers expecting thin gruel. Some publishers assume that readers will not persist through a few hundred pages of text without what journalists refer to as callouts or pull quotes: passages from an article that designers use to break up an otherwise gray page. We use callouts frequently in journalism, but they work best when bearing some resemblance to what the author has written. In these two books, callouts serve mostly as fillers, and sometimes non sequitur fillers at that. So, for instance, a callout from Florence Nightingale appears in the middle of Harris’s reflections on the heroism of Jan Hus and Martin Luther. Barna offers callouts from a broad array of quotable figures—George Bernard Shaw, Garry Wills, Dale Carnegie, Richard Nixon (“If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything”), and Steve Case (“A vision without the ability to execute it is a hallucination”), among others. Just in case readers are left bored or overly challenged even by a page with a callout, Barna’s publishers repeatedly include the cover image of what seems to be a large-mouth bass. It’s enough to give readers nightmares of being devoured by one of those animated Big Mouth Billy Bass wall plaques that sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Nevertheless, both Barna and Harris deliver some substance amid the many familiar quotations. The primary appeal of Harris’ book is hearing her side of the battle, as Florida’s former Secretary of State, regarding ballots cast by Floridians in the presidential election of 2000. At the time, Democratic consultant Paul Begala compared Harris to Cruella de Vil, the puppy-hating, fur-clad harridan of 101 Dalmatians. Anyone who can drive Begala into rhetorical overdrive must be doing something right.

Harris’ narrative is mostly free of malice, but she does settle a few scores. She responds vigorously to the majority report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which blamed Harris and Florida Governor Jeb Bush for the state’s electoral mess. Most jarringly, in a section on forgiving people, Harris quotes cbs anchor Dan Rather’s remarks about her certification of Florida’s election results, then quotes herself making fun of Rather at an event sponsored by the Media Research Center. “I am honored to certify that Dan Rather has won this award,” Harris told fellow conservatives gathered for the banquet. “But, perhaps Mr. Rather will request additional recounts before he believes me!” I imagine Harris had her sympathetic audience doubled over, but it’s a more apt illustration of light payback than of forgiveness.

Harris does, however, show a willingness to laugh at herself. When a clerk at a neighborhood store loudly asked if she was the Katherine Harris, she responded, “Yet, but I only have one layer of makeup on tonight. I am traveling incognito.” On a more naughty note, she tells of receiving a call from CNN’s Larry King. “I teased Mr. King, saying that my husband did not wish for me to appear on his program because the night before, David Letterman had said I was in the middle of my fifteen minutes of fame,” she writes. Harris paraphrases Letterman as saying her celebrity arc would consist of “annihilation by the media;” “the beauty makeover (for which I am still waiting),” though her cover photo suggests otherwise; posing for Playboy; and becoming “the fifth Mrs. Larry King.” Imagining King’s wincing face makes the story worthwhile.

Harris once studied at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship, and she expresses her faith throughout Center of the Storm. Readers who remain convinced that Al Gore was robbed of the presidency may find her book more tedious than convincing, but it’s refreshing to see Harris in a more complex light than she enjoyed in the rubble of the 2000 presidential campaign. Center of the Storm will not become a classic text on leadership, but it’s reasonably informative reading as a personal narrative of recent history.

In A Fish Out of Water, Barna is more explicit than Harris about his Christian faith. It fairly saturates every page. Barna defines leadership as conveying God’s vision for a group of people, whether in a church or in an auto-parts company. “Christian leaders must keep in mind that when we lead, the focus of our efforts is not us; we lead because we have been called by God to lead by rallying people around a God-given vision,” Barna writes:

Contrary to what the motivational speakers suggest, none of us has all the skills, energy, ability, and resources to successfully enable God’s people to bring his vision to fruition. Instead, be motivated and energized by the realization that you do not have to be all things to all people; you just need to be the powerful, limited, and focused leader whom God created you to be.

Barna makes helpful distinctions between habitual leaders (one in eight people, by his estimate) and situational leaders (who “give directions because circumstances demand it”). His brief chapter on how leaders must sometimes introduce “strategic conflict” as a last resort shows a creative approach to group dynamics. One of the best touches in the book is including a list of “Uncomfortable Questions” at the end of each chapter. They’re truly demanding: “Make a list of the activities you carried out today in your leadership position. Which ones relate to motivating people to pursue God’s vision? Which ones relate to how you mobilized people around the vision? Which were designed to amass the resources required to make the vision real?”

Barna devotes one callout to Bill Hybels, and respects him as a fellow thinker on creating unconventional churches. In Courageous Leadership, Hybels writes with evident passion for the local church, repeatedly calling it the hope of the world:

What keeps me pumped up as a leader? It’s watching an attorney leave his lucrative practice to lead a small-groups revolution here at Willow and around the world. It’s watching a tool-and-die maker scale back his company involvement to help revitalize the church in Germany. It’s watching a young Harvard business school grad give his life to renewing the church worldwide through leading the Willow Creek Association.

The flip side of his passion is an occasional managerial heavy-handedness. After acknowledging Jesus’ warnings about power, Hybels writes of a day when he told his staff, “I’m not asking for your begrudging participation in this alignment [of Willow Creek’s vision]. I’m asking for your one hundred percent commitment to pray and work and serve toward the realization of this plan. It’s one-hundred-percent time. If you can’t give it, or won’t give it, it’s time for you to go. We need everybody’s participation to reach our full potential as a church.”

Then again, Hybels also writes of maintaining this list of self-critical questions: “Why did I say that? Why did I power up over that person? Why did I acquiesce in that situation when firmness was required? It’s my responsibility to sort these things out with a friend, a spiritual director, or a Christian counselor. Self-leadership demands that I do.”

One point that unites Barna and Hybels is the importance of character in a leader. It tops the list of “three Cs” that Hybels seeks in staff members of Willow Creek (followed by competence, then by chemistry with other staff members).

While former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York City does not reject the importance of character—he writes about his own at length in Leadership—he sounds somewhat Clintonian when alluding to his open estrangement from his wife and his taking up with a new companion, pharmaceuticals saleswoman Judith Nathan, before his divorce went through. The dissolution of his marriage “had nothing to do with my public performance and never affected it in any way,” he writes. “There’s little enough private life left for public figures. It may be a counsel of perfection, but if we as a nation expect to attract real people to public life, we have to do what we can not to intrude on matters that don’t affect a public figure’s duties and performance.”

Granted that Giuliani’s marital troubles had no evident effect on the greatness of his leadership during and after the terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center. Before then, pundits were tweaking him for hypocrisy when he withdrew city funding from a provocative show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, even while dating Nathan publicly. As I recall, Saturday Night Live joked that Giuliani withdrew the funding because the show offended his mistress.

Giuliani bookends his leadership lessons with a chapter describing his frightening experiences on 9/11 and a closing chapter called “Recovery.” Those chapters alone would make Giuliani’s book worth the price, but with the help of writer Ken Kurson, Giuliani keeps the tone mostly crisp throughout. He sometimes lapses into too many acronyms, but promptly pokes fun at how readily New York City’s government generates those acronyms.

Giuliani is keen on accountability meetings. He goes into glowing detail about Compstat, a process for holding police leaders accountable through evaluating the crime statistics in their districts. Compstat leads to TEAMS (which evaluated the city’s corrections officials), which leads to more programs still, including JobStat and CapStat. One almost expects Giuliani to announce a program called HomeStat, which would involve a weekly accountability meeting with his ex-wife, his children, and Judith Nathan. Giuliani acknowledges that the Compstat concept may not translate well into a small Midwestern town with few capital crimes, but he loves meetings nonetheless. While mayor, he required a daily morning meeting of up to 90 minutes with 15 to 20 of his top assistants. Somehow he makes these meetings sound lively and productive. Maybe New Yorkers’ famous verbal directness and boisterous sense of humor make the difference.

Giuliani gives solid advice, such as erring on the side of disclosure when there’s any doubt about releasing damaging facts, or the importance of being direct and unfiltered in public remarks. “I became a much better political speaker when I went back to what I used to do in court: master the material, organize it, then throw the text away and just talk,” he writes. “It now actually annoys me when people read their speeches. I want to hear who they really are, how they sound when they speak from the heart.”

One of Giuliani’s most charming qualities is his skepticism about the jargon of corporate America. All of these books indulge in their share of words like facilitate, impact, and necessitate (to which Barna adds perseverate). Giuliani showed a remarkable gut instinct when TWA’s top executive used one too many junk words after TWA 800 crashed on July 17, 1986, killing all the people aboard. “I sensed that something was up when about four A.M. I received a call from the CEO of the airline, Jeffrey Erickson, from a plane heading for Kennedy. I told him that I needed the [passenger] manifest. He replied that we would talk about it when he got to New York, that he wanted to ‘liaise’ with me. It was such a solemn occasion that I suppressed what I wanted to say, but from the moment I heard the word ‘liaise,’ I suspected he was not my kind of guy. I don’t agree to ‘liaise’ with people I haven’t met.”

Giuliani writes that Erickson spoke for less than a minute when he met surviving families and reporters at Kennedy Airport, and that he refused to take any questions. Giuliani took after Erickson and twa on his weekly radio show, and within three months Erickson had resigned. More important, Giuliani writes, other airlines responded with greater sensitivity after subsequent tragedies.

What has changed in my own thinking about what makes an effective leader? Not much. All four books offer certain helpful pointers to their respective audiences. Giuliani’s book probably will be of the broadest interest because of his response to the terror strikes. Evangelical leaders will show their usual enthusiasm for the work of Barna and Hybels, and Harris probably will find a responsive audience at least through the Conservative Book Club.

I’ll strip my own list of leadership qualities down to a simple collection of bulleted points:

• Be forthright with those who work for you.
• Offer clear, consistent direction—but introduce change often enough to stretch us.
• Be more generous with earned praise than with criticism.
• If meetings must last more than an hour, conduct them like Rudolph Giuliani.
• Remember that character matters more than a necktie.

Douglas LeBlanc is an associate editor of Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.