We must learn common leadership principles, but power is released as we become true to our God-given personalities.
Harold Myra
Every leader is unique — magnificently unique. We humans made in God’s image are each a distinct universe, and though there may be general principles of leadership we can apply, we all must develop our individual, personal mosaics.
The leaders interviewed in this book are in some ways studies in contrasts. I think back to our discussions in a suburban living room with Fred Smith for Leadership’s first interview. The memory of his darting wit contrasts with, say, that of Richard Halverson’s open earnestness in an O’Hare Airport room … or Howard Hendricks’s lively but professorial interaction in a Dallas coffee shop … or Eugene Peterson’s low-key yet penetrating blend of pastoral insight and literary allusion in CTi’s conference room.
I looked up the introduction for that first Leadership interview and found this description of Fred: “He possesses not only the fastest but the most fitting quip for every occasion. His humor is always sneaking up on you from the most unlikely angles. But Fred’s is never surface humor — it’s lightning-crisp communication. He answers questions with stories and elliptical insights that blow open preconceived ideas. Fred often speaks on two or three levels of humor at the same time, and you have to be watching his eyes for the twinkle and his face for the precise expression to punctuate his meaning.”
Fred is unique, and humor and depth of insight are only part of his individuality. Each of the leaders interviewed in this book showed commonalities such as intense commitment to Christ and deep ministry insights. But there’s a rich diversity in their personalities; they have played to their strengths and flourished as individuals.
The task is to learn from them without becoming mimics. How can we develop, as they have, our unique personalities in response to God’s call?
Observing the human response to leadership needs, I’m increasingly convinced diversity is the way God runs not only his universe but his church. God didn’t make giraffes at all like hummingbirds, except they both eat, breathe, and beautifully glorify him. Ocelots and beavers, hawks and ptarmigans — what amazing diversity in God’s creation! In the same sense, this brilliantly creative Creator has made personalities, and therefore leadership styles, as diverse as giraffes and hummingbirds. We must learn common principles, but a certain power is released as we become true to our God-given personalities.
Recently in a phone conversation, Fred mentioned he was reading a book titled What Works for Me, written by a number of top corporate executives. Fred described the book with some enthusiasm, but what appealed to me most was the title itself. It didn’t promise too much. It simply said, “This approach works for me; maybe it will work for you.”
Here is the spirit with which one might read this book, and any similar one. Every insight and concept should be sifted through a personal, scripturally informed screen.
Over the years, a number of principles have emerged for me as I’ve attempted to sift concepts. Those that follow are nuggets that have helped me in creating a personal mosaic — one that balances individuality and God’s sovereignty.
The Beginning Point Is Obvious
How trite to say that it all starts with prayer. Yet how thoroughly true. Again and again in our leadership we come to the point of realizing how fully helpless we are. Jesus said he could do “nothing without the Father,” yet we so frequently forget we are surely no more powerful than he!
As you read the interview with Henri Nouwen and Richard Foster, I hope you catch some of the power there. After the hours of dialogue you see boiled down to print, I drove home, full of a sense of prayer at work. I walked the streets near my home for two hours, lifted in an unusual way, joyous with the certainty that God was in charge of this world, despite the Gulag and Beirut, despite children molested, women humiliated, fathers imprisoned.
I frequently do not feel that way. It is only through prayer that life on this planet begins to make any sense at all. The truth is, we are going to change things relatively little; the necessity is to “see through God’s glasses.” Only then can we possibly begin to give genuinely Christian leadership.
Prayer becomes the center. Luther tells us that as it is the business of cobblers to make shoes, so it’s our business as Christians to pray. This sort of statement, our surveys in Leadership Journal tell us, causes considerable guilt among Christian leaders. Yet it is in actuality an affirmation of a powerful priority that puts all else in perspective and makes genuinely spiritual work possible. Work without prayer is a terrible danger. In fact, our Christian work can quickly become an enemy.
About twenty years ago I read the statement, “A man with a burning purpose draws others to himself, who help him to fulfill it.” That had a powerful effect on me; it penetrated to the heart of my perception of my task and future and helped me become effective. Yet I also sensed how utterly critical it was that the burning purpose be centered in prayer, for such intensity can become the Devil’s furnace. Despite our constant belief to the contrary, no words are more ultimately true than, “Without me, ye can do nothing.”
Leaders Must Be Realists
Our perception of the Christian life often draws on the scriptural analogies of seeds and harvest, and visions of well-ordered gardens with rows of well-pruned trees heavy with fruit. However, the scene that bursts into my mind is that of a sprawling, sweaty, unpredictable ranch. It’s full of life all right, but not at all well ordered. Calves bawl in terror, a jackass kicks the milk pail into the manure, and a teenager laments it’s his turn to clean out the barn. Bloody birth and bitter death and the exuberant kicks and leaps of a newborn foal all combine to make life bittersweet.
Ehud’s dagger in a fat belly and King Saul’s selfishness typify the realism of Scripture. Last week I stood in the kitchen of a retreat center talking to a young woman dramatically impacted by the failures of leaders. The president of the Christian college she had attended and who had spoken so eloquently of following Christ had deserted his wife for another woman. In addition, the college dean, her spiritual mentor, also got a divorce. Subsequent events in her own family were equally devastating.
As we talked in the kitchen, we agreed life is a great deal more tragic than we are led to expect in Sunday school. It is not only more tragic in the sense of leukemia, hurricanes, and auto crashes. It is tragic in the sense of people struggling to follow Christ and do right but ending up making terrible botches of their lives.
For instance, how many leaders have experienced betrayal, not from hostile enemies but from those who have labored beside them, often in top positions in the church? Not that great numbers of fellow Christians are Judases, but our egos and radically different perceptions and agendas make such wrenching experiences seem nearly inevitable. Our surveys included in the Winter 1981 Leadership article on betrayal convinced me “righteous people” are frequently dumbfounded at the actions of equally righteous individuals who see it differently. More than half of those surveyed had experienced “traumatic events extemely difficult to accept.”
The leader is an earthy farmer. Whether the analogy is putting manure around roots or pouring medicine down a cow’s throat, leaders must expect many nasty moments and unpleasant surprises.
Applicable Truths Lurk Everywhere
Leaders must aggressively seek out adaptable insights. In reading the pages of this book, we should not be dismayed if the settings and approaches at times seem alien to our situations. Applicable truths are often found in settings totally different from our own.
I was disturbed to read a study that indicated the vast majority of people simply cannot transfer principles from one discipline to another. Most people need someone else to point out how, say, a sociologist’s book on Eskimos might apply to teaching math. In the study, researchers found most people in one discipline could apply data and concepts only within their own fields. They could not take the needed creative leaps from one field to another. No wonder we need an army of instructors in colleges and seminaries ladling out specialty packages of general truths!
In reality, the creative process presents all the world as a vast picking ground for applicable truth. It should be thoroughly natural to apply a principle found, say, in a Fortune magazine article on chicken farming to, perhaps, sermon preparation (no humor intended!). What the study suggests to me is that the few who can make these constant and creative transfers and applications from disparate sources — literature, sports, travel, leisure, whatever — are the few who can conceptualize and adapt and therefore lead within their unique settings. Shaping our personal mosaics involves transfer and integration from a vast variety of sources.
Sorting Starts with Gratitude for Ourselves
Because of the nearly infinite number of sources, the only way one might even begin to choose and integrate insights is marked by what may seem an odd starting point. It is this: First, we must accept ourselves. Without the grid of our own personalities and gifts as a basis with which to work, how can we begin the process of sorting?
The simple maxim of accepting ourselves is oft repeated, but just as frequently denied. Again and again we hear speakers say they feel writers are the persons with deeper, more lasting worth. Writers are intimidated by speakers, administrators wish they could sing, and soloists feel like manipulated commodities. It may be trite to say we must all be parts of an orchestra. Yet this vision often told to children eludes most adults.
Effective leadership calls for glorying in our distinct contributions, whatever their nature or limitations.
I was startled one day by a casual observation made by Billy Graham. He said he felt his “real gift” was writing his fundraising letters. The statement caught me off guard. What did he mean? He wasn’t denigrating his preaching, although it’s well known that he refers to himself as a simple gospel preacher. He was simply sensing the importance of a personal gift easily undervalued. He cares deeply about those letters that carry his name and share his heart and concerns with his supporters. That’s a vital part of his leadership, as is his voluminous personal correspondence, which may often feel to him like a mundane burden.
We all get involved with menial functions, correspondence among them. Yet the sense of God’s call and the drama of our gifts being used can give even correspondence and tedious desk work a value that goes beyond our feelings and perceptions.
Again, we must be realists. Yesterday I talked for some time with a CTi editor about the tension between all the bland things that must be done year after year and the tasks and opportunities that stretch us. Most of us face mountains of work that gets the job done but makes us, if not bored, somewhat dissatisfied. Our strongest gifts are no guarantee that God will use them. Today, there is a great deal of emphasis on finding our gifts and using them. Well and good. At CTi we work very, very hard to get people into just the right “harnesses.” Yet in a broken world, many gifts will go unused, and for the Christian, God’s direct leadership frequently overrules our logic.
I’ve been impressed by the example of Oswald Chambers, who has greatly enriched my life with spiritual insights. As a young man, he believed his gifts would be directed toward the arts. He wrote in 1895, “My lifework as I see it, my eternal work, is, in the almighty strength of God, to strike for the redemption of the aesthetic kingdom of the soul of man — music and art and poetry, or rather, the proving of Christ’s redemption of it.… An ambition, a longing, has seized me, seized me so powerfully that it has convinced me of the need. The Spirit of God seems to cry, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?'”
Despite this conviction that not only his gifts but his call lay in the arts, subsequent events indicated otherwise. He kept stifling the idea of entering the ministry. Yet his art goals were constantly thwarted, and eventually, his determination to follow Christ led him to say this: “Brighter, clearer, and more exquisite is the spiritual within becoming, and my whole being is ablaze and passionately on fire to preach Christ. It is the almighty love of God that constrains me, and in the midst of a keen consciousness of a complete unworthiness, my soul cries out within me, ‘Here am I, send me.'” How delightfully ironic, in the sovereignty of God, that Chambers’s poetic and artistic abilities shine like rubies and sapphires in his recorded sermons and books, which have enriched the Christian world.
C. S. Lewis comments that “the lion must roar,” and we need to be true to our deepest creative drives whenever possible. But a mysterious alchemy is at work between God, man, and environment.
Fill the Box!
Joe Bayly for many years was fond of challenging people with the fact that all of us find ourselves in a box. It may be a big box or a small one. It may have an odd shape or be reasonably symmetrical. But we all find ourselves in a box of limitations and opportunities. Our task is not to bemoan the limitations or strut because of the size of the box. If we’ve committed ourselves to the situation, we try to understand the box and fill it — every corner and cranny — with all the creativity and energy possible.
As we fill the box, we may find it expanding to make room for the new realities. Or we may find ourselves moving on to a different box (not necessarily a larger one). Or we may find the box changing shapes in fascinating, enriching, perhaps discouraging ways. Whatever the changes, every human being is in a series of boxes, many of them bordering on the outrageous, all through life. We are called to understand the limitations but press them for all they’re worth.
A decade ago I found myself in a Washington, D.C. coffee shop early in the morning eating a sweet roll and asking myself, What in the world am I doing here? The job I had just taken with Christianity Today was full of ridiculous situations that seemed not only unresolvable but downright silly. The tacky coffee shop seemed to reflect precisely the box I found myself in.
Yet as I sat drinking coffee and talking to the Lord, almost as if the words were written across the beige wall in front of me, this phrase struck home: “For this cause were ye brought to the kingdom.” The verse may have been out of context, but it struck in me like a clapper striking a bell. No matter how absurd, tacky, or infuriating, this was precisely what I had been prepared for, precisely the battle to be waged. The phrase lifted me into that day and to the commitments ahead.
“For this cause were ye brought to the kingdom.” Time and again at Christianity Today, when my emotions said the circumstances were beneath contempt, unworthy of my energies — when the vocabulary the Marine Corps once acquainted me with seemed most appropriate — that phrase has jolted me back to the sense of purpose within limitations. This cause. This moment. This box, no matter how discouraging, or perhaps humiliating.
An Effective Sorting Process
So we accept ourselves and we accept the sometimes brutal, sometimes banal realities of life as we search for adaptable information through a scriptural grid. We keep a sense of expectancy that clues will appear as we use a tough-minded sorting process. Since leadership requires a large volume and high quality of information wisely applied, we use a great variety of sources.
It helps me to think of oranges, waves and waves of oranges rolling into vast bins to be sorted. A certain size hole accepts only a certain size orange. Ideas and concepts come at us in high volume, and picking out the ones that apply to us and our situations can be an invigorating process.
This includes both rejecting and/or modifying good ideas and advice. For instance, after three years at my first job, I learned that my mentor and supervisor, Ron Wilson, had decided to leave for other challenges. I was to take on many of his responsibilities, so I asked him, “If there is one thing you would advise me to do, one word of counsel, what would it be?”
He thought a moment and replied, “I would travel. A journalist needs to get out and see what’s going on. Broaden your understanding.”
Not long after that I read a less enthusiastic assessment of travel in The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker: “Professor C. Northcote Parkinson has pointed out in one of his delightful satires that the quickest way to get rid of an inconvenient superior is to make a world traveler out of him. The jet plane is indeed overrated as a management tool. A great many trips have to be made; but a junior can make most of them.”
As I recently reread The Effective Executive, that quote reverberated in me: “Aha! That’s where I got that perception twenty years ago.” I had sensed that my task was journalistic management and that for me, limited travel would work best. The point is not that Wilson was wrong and Drucker right. Both statements were valid. But my strengths and goals concerned being a catalyst, journalist, and manager.
Actually, limiting travel meant bucking the norm a bit among my jetting peers. One must, however, set his own course. I loved reading not long ago a startling fact about Ray Bradbury. One of the most recognized writers of science fiction, author of The Martian Chronicles, he has never gotten on an airplane! He says he never will, this man who has written so eloquently about riding in interplanetary rockets. Can you imagine how often people must accuse him of being parochial and insulated? Or give him a hundred legitimate and pressing reasons for a quick trip to the East Coast?
The fact he will not himself leave the earth for the “friendly skies” I find not only ironic but oddly comforting. The article I read gave no reasons for his not flying. I prefer to think of his stance as a perfect picture of someone majoring on what works for him — of stubbornly running the oranges through his own sort.
Another item from The Effective Executive that strongly influenced me was an anecdote related to pruning back every possible task that can be handed off to others. Drucker explained that “there is not much risk that an executive will cut back too much. We usually tend to overrate rather than underrate our importance and to conclude that far too many things can be done only by ourselves. Even very effective executives still do a great many unnecessary, unproductive things.
“But the best proof that the danger of overpruning is a bugaboo is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely ill or severely handicapped people.
“A good example was Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was a torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, ‘Lord Heart of the Matter’ and acomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington.”
I cannot count the number of times that illustration has come into my mind at critical moments. I determined to ruthlessly cut away whatever was not crucial to the task, asking myself repeatedly, If I had two hours per day or ten hours per week to do this job, what specific things would I do and what would I not do? As Drucker indicates in many places, no matter how much wise pruning one does, the information worker will always have much more to do than he can possibly get to. As much as possible must be delegated to others.
Why all this autobiographical material? Simply as one illustration of the process of sorting through input from many sources, some of which seem unrelated. For instance, when I was editing Campus Life Magazine, I read A Business and Its Beliefs, the story of IBM by Thomas Watson, Jr. What did that have to do with editing a youth magazine? I found its three basic principles for working with and serving people highly relevant. At the same time insights from sources as disparate as Dostoyevsky, Paul Tournier, and the Reader’s Digest were equally important.
This past summer a group of Christian leaders met with Peter Drucker in Colorado. We “sat at his feet,” sorting through the wisdom of this Renaissance man. To me, it was highly significant that when asked the many questions we had relating to the church and ministry, he would as often dip back to illustrations from medieval history or Japanese culture as use contemporary illustrations. His net was spread from pre-Christian cultures to his boyhood days in Vienna. He drew out principles from events and human activity like a man hooking swordfish and marlin from the sea.
At the Colorado meeting, Drucker talked about people being divided into readers and listeners, those who primarily get their information from the eye or the ear. Generally, each of us leans one way or the other. He described Eisenhower’s effectiveness at reading reports and press queries during the war in Europe. Ike handled the press brilliantly, reviewing each question on paper ahead of time. However, when he became president and started answering questions from the floor without being able to literally see them, he was caught off guard and didn’t respond as deftly. The press then portrayed him as much less brilliant.
Drucker indicated it would be wise to let people, especially those we work closest with, know whether we are primarily readers or listeners. I’ve found it very helpful to understand about myself that something on paper has a much greater impact on me than a verbal presentation.
Drucker obviously has developed his own personal effectiveness from this wide range of insights. With all he has accomplished and currently achieves (some have called him the most influential thinker of the century), we were astounded to learn that he has no secretary and he answers his own phone. This for a man who writes constantly for the nation’s major publications, teaches in a university, and is a leading expert on Japanese art.
How might he have arrived at this concept? He somehow applied his broad scope of insight and made part of his personal mosaic not managing anyone, perfect in its simplicity for what he wishes to accomplish — perhaps like Ray Bradbury staying off those jets.
As you read the rest of the chapters in this book, you might remember the image of Peter Drucker hooking insights from every source, or your own hands running oranges through a very personal sorting bin, or Chambers finding his first notions of a call and a career only a first step. It is indeed a strange alchemy between God and man and environment, and each one of us called to any sort of leadership will find it full of enigmas, surprises, and enormous opportunity.
Copyright ©1987 Christianity Today
