[Why I'm Talking About Leadership and Not Productivity Per Se]

When Bethlehem first contacted me about leading this seminar, they asked if I would talk about productivity in relation to short-term missions teams. My response, though, was to ask if I could talk about leadership instead. They said, that’s fine.

But here’s the question: when they asked me to talk about productivity, and I said let’s talk about leadership, was I taking things off in a totally different direction? Are you not going to learning anything about productivity as a result?

The answer is no. Here’s why.

Recently a friend of mine who pastors down in Iowa emailed me, asking for the top book on productivity I would recommend to a busy pastor. I responded to him with a book on leadership, not productivity. Here’s what I said in the email to him explaining why:

For a busy pastor, with just one book that I can recommend, I would actually recommend a book on leadership, because even if you get productivity down well, your efforts only scale widely through leadership. Personal productivity is necessary to make one’s leadership as effective as it should be, but personal productivity hits a dead end without leadership.

That’s why the title of this seminar is multiplying our productivity through biblical leadership. Productivity is important. But if you want to have the maximum impact, you need to not only be personally productive. You have to lead. Leadership multiplies your productivity.

[By the way, the book on leadership I recommended for him was The Next Generation Leader by Andy Stanley. Stanley “gets it” when it comes to leadership, and as a pastor he has a biblical point of view that explicitly informs his thinking. And, like everything else Andy Stanley writes, it’s an enjoyable read.]

Who Should Lead?

Now, the first question we need to ask is simple and basic, but the answer is not obvious. The question is: who can lead? Or, perhaps better, who should lead?

Mark Sanborn is another good leadership author that I’ve benefited from greatly. I like Mark’s work a lot because he emphasizes that the role of the leader is first of all to serve others, not advance himself or herself. He really underscores the point that the aim of leadership is to promote the good of others, which I think is radically biblical and central to the nature of not only good leadership, but effective leadership.

Now, Mark has a book called You Don’t Need a Title to be a Leader, and that’s the first point I want to make about who can lead.

The first and most important thing to know is that leadership is not first about your formal title or role. It’s not first about being told that you are charged with a formal position of leadership. Rather, you can lead from wherever you are. Further, not only can you lead from wherever you are; you should lead from wherever you are. This is because leadership is, first of all, influence. That needs to be nuanced a bit, and I will do so later in this seminar, but in the first place, leadership is positive influence, and we are all to be a positive influence for good.

If you take a formal leadership class, they will also talk about this. Standard leadership theory today points out that there are different types of authority. One such type is formal authority—the authority of your position. But this is not the only type of authority. In fact, it is actually the weakest type.

Don’t get me wrong: having a formal position of leadership is a good and important thing, and a critical responsibility to steward well. But it is not the only type of authority, it is not the only type of leadership. There is also authority that comes from your expertise, which can exist fully independent of any formal role, and the authority that comes from having made a positive difference in the lives of others.

There are other types of authority as well, but the point is: you don’t need a formal title to be a leader. Further, even if you do have a formal title, the essence of leadership is that people follow you because they want to, not because they have to. I would go so far as to say that you can actually have a formal title of “leader” and yet not be a leader if you aren’t stewarding your position well and if people are only following you because they have to—because they are afraid they will lose their jobs, for example, or suffer other consequences—rather than out of respect and esteem and confidence that you are leading and the right direction, seeking to do them good, and competent to do so.

So, regardless of your particular role or position, you can lead. You don’t need a title to be a leader.

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The title of the seminar is Multiplying Our Productivity Through Effective Biblical Leadership. There will be a special emphasis for those leading Short Term Mission trips this year.

Seminar Outline

1. Why we need to care—greatly—about leadership in the church
2. Can there even be a Christian view on leadership? Or, how do you keep from infecting the church with the “managerial model?”
3. What is the essence of effective biblical leadership? Or, what are the two core principles at the heart of good leadership?
4. How do you lead well? 8 things you can start doing right now
5. Leadership and global missions

Event Details

Location: Bethlehem Baptist Church, Downtown, Rm 203
Date & Time: Friday January 27 7:00–9:00pm, Saturday January 28 9:00am–Noon

All are welcome! If you plan to attend, you can RSVP to Tina Lowe at tina.lowe@hopeingod.org

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Patrick Lencioni’s latest book is available for pre-order, and it looks fantastic: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business. I’ve found everything Lencioni has written to be incredibly enlightening and, best of all, wise. Lencioni writes from a foundation of virtue and character — which is what sets his books apart from so many others.

Here’s the short description of The Advantage:

In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are, and more to do with how healthy they are.

And here’s the longer description from Amazon:

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.

Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified.  Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

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Humilitas

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All:

The greatest leaders we’ve studied throughout all our research cared as much about values as victory, as much about purpose as profit, as much about being useful as being successful.

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Rather, it’s the most important because of discipline-altering conversation it started and change it created.

The article is “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?,” (pdf) by Abraham Zaleznik. It was written back in 1977 and published in Harvard Business Review.

As HBR later summarized, Zaleznik argued that “the theoreticians of scientific management, with their organizational diagrams and time-and0motion studies, were missing half the picture — the half filled with inspiration, vision, and the full spectrum of human drives and desires. The study of leadership hasn’t been the same since.”

The conversation that Zaleznik’s article started, for example, is behind John Kotter’s classic 1990 article “What Leaders Really Do” (pdf) — which may take the title for the best article on leadership ever written.

Both articles remind me of Churchill’s point that “the hard part is not winning the war; it’s persuading them to let you win it.”

And, to be honest, the biggest obstacle to “winning the war” — whether that means accomplishing your mission as a ministry or non-profit, or transforming your industry and creating great products worth talking about as a for-profit — is often managers.

It just has to be said.

There is a paradox in my saying that. For I agree whole heartedly with Marcus Buckingham that the manager plays a critical, essential role in the modern organization. We need managers, and they are key to creating strong organizations.

But what we need, as Buckingham also shows (see his fantastic book on management, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently) is real managers. That is, managers who trust their people and don’t have an inflated sense of control and risk aversion.

The problem is not management, but management gone bad. Managers too often focus on obstacles and what can’t be done rather than what can be done and how to find creative ways around the obstacles.

We need good leaders, and we need good managers — managers who manage right. And the last I checked, a militant commitment to mediocrity was not part of the definition of management.

Perhaps understanding leadership a bit better will help us all become better leaders and managers. To that end, I offer both of these articles.

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But they are not the main thing. They are not what’s most important. And leadership should be diligent to never succumb to the temptation to let them usurp what is most important.

After a God-centered passion, two of the most important principles for any leader are respect and generosity.

Generosity — not efficiency. And respect — not efficiency.

Efficiency can, and often does, undermine both. That’s why you have to make it second, not first.

There are few (if any) promises in the Bible to prosper the “efficient” man or woman. But there is an abundance of promises to the generous person.

We know this from the Bible. But often we think that “business thinking” is different. That somehow the realm of running non-profits and businesses and other organizations plays by different rules.

But it doesn’t.

To be sure, people often think it does, and act like it does. That’s why we need to be careful about saying “non-profits need to be run more like businesses” and so forth — not because the principles for running an effective business are always different (though sometimes they are), but because there are many wrong business principles being used to run businesses, and we don’t want to let those infect the non-profit sector as well.

But the things that are ultimately required for running a business and non-profit well are ultimately the same things necessary for living a good life. And generosity and respect are two of those overarching principles.

And we aren’t left simply looking at the Bible to see this (though that should be enough). The best business and leadership thinkers have always acknowledged this.

Take Peter Drucker. At the end of his book The Effective Executive, he points out that his emphasis on making strengths productive “is fundamentally respect for the person — one’s own as well as others. It is a value system of action.” Drucker isn’t detaching executive effectiveness from the realm of morality and decency and sheer humanity. Rather, he sees them as utterly intertwined. A focus on strengths is ultimately a respect for the individual.

Likewise, he points out that the practice of “putting first things first” is not simply an issue of effectiveness, but character. “What is being developed here is not information, but chracter: foresight, self-reliance, courage. What is being developed here, in other words, is leadership — not the leadership of brilliance and genius, to be sure, but hte much more modest yet more enduring leadership of dedication, determination, and serious purpose.”

Drucker does not abstract effectiveness, even in large organizations, from character. They are utterly intertwined such that the core practices of effectiveness are actually manifestations of (and means of developing) character and respect for others.

Likewise, when I was at the Global Leadership Summit the year before this one, Jack Welch made a very significant comment. He said “Top people have a generosity of spirit. They get a kick out of giving bonuses, for example. They don’t have envy. They love helping people grow.” There’s character once again, and generosity. Top people are generous. Generosity is not just something for our personal lives and personal finances; we are to have a generosity of spirit in the way we go about our work. That is biblical, but what we see is that it is also borne out by the experience of the most effective business leaders and thinkers of our time.

So, how do you lead? Do you care first about generosity, or efficiency? About respect — and thus it’s corollary of positioning people according to their strengths — or efficiency?

I’m not playing these things off against efficiency, rightly understood. For ultimately, the best way to be efficient is to value generosity and respect before efficiency.

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Any good leader must develop a substantive base. No matter how talented your advisers and deputies, you have to attack challenges with as much of your own knowledge as possible. (Rudy Giuliani)

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A leader who distances himself from his staff at the first sign of trouble might save a few popularity points, but it’s shortsighted. Eventually, no one wants to work for someone like that.

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The most important thing worth noting here is that the leaders weren’t being authoritarian on purpose. That’s the thing about authoritarian leadership: it’s often a subtle thing that someone doesn’t even know they are doing. This doesn’t excuse it, but it shows us that we need to be careful to reflect on our own leadership styles. For we can fall into an authoritarian approach sometimes without even knowing it.

Here’s the example that Finzel relates from one of his students:

My organization was looking for a new regional leader. Those making the decision had somebody picked out. However, before finalizing it, they were going to meet with different people to receive feedback on the individual they had chosen.

I gave them my serious concerns and observations. Even though they took the time to listen to us, they really didn’t hear what we were saying. In the end, our input and feedback was rejected. And our predictions came to pass.

How did this whole situation make us feel? We concluded that the leaders at the top had already made up their minds regarding their choice, and that, almost as an afterthought, they had decided to talk to us “underlings” to try to get our rubberstamp approval.

It made me feel as if they didn’t really want or need my input. If they would have listened to us, we would have been spared the pain, misunderstanding, and hurt when it became obvious to everyone that this individual was the wrong choice for leadership.

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1. Preferred employers demonstrate a real commitment to continuous learning. No lip service. These companies invest in the development of their people through classes, training programs, off-site experiences, all sending the message that the organization is eager to facilitate a steady path to personal growth.
2. Preferred employers are meritocracies. Pay and promotions are tightly linked to performance. . . . People with brains, self-confidence, and competitive spirit are always attracted to such environments.
3. Preferred employers not only allow people to take risks but also celebrate those who do. And they don’t shoot those who try but fail. As with meritocracies, a culture of risk-taking attracts exactly the kind of creative, bold employees companies want and need in a global marketplace where innovation is the single best defense against unrelenting cost competition.
4. Preferred employers understand that what is good for society is also good for business.
5. Preferred employers keep their hiring standards tight.
6. Preferred companies are profitable and growing.

“The best thing about being a preferred employer is that it gets you good people, and this launches a virtuous cycle. The best team attracts the best team, and winning often leads to more winning.”

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Any well-functioning organization is neither centralized nor decentralized but a wonderful combination of both. Around most dimensions the best companies, then and now, are loose. They give people exceptional freedom to do things their own way.

At the same time, the great companies are highly centralized around a few crucial dimensions: the central values that make up their culture, one or two (no more) top strategic priorities, and a few key financial indicators.

Note: The key point is not simply that organizations need to be centralized in some areas and decentralized in others. If you say to yourself “great, the fact that every organization ought to have certain non-negotiable realities means I should micromanage my people and tell them what to do in whatever area I want,” you’ve missed it.

The key point is exactly where a company should (and should not) be centralized. It should be centralized in its core values — they are not up for grabs and are not negotiable. It should be decentralized in relation to letting people find their own way to accomplish the objectives of their roles.

In other words, precisely because the mission and core values of an organization are specific and tightly defined, employees are able to have great freedom in almost every other area.

I know of some organizations that get this backwards — they stray in relation to their core values, but are tightly controlled according to the leader’s wishes in almost every other area. That’s backwards. The key to a great company is unleashing your people, which is possible from making your mission and values clear — and meaning it.

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Here’s the first part:

One of the major themes about Christ in the book of Isaiah is that he cares a lot about justice. For example, Isaiah says that “he will bring forth justice to the nations” (42:1), that “he will faithfully bring forth justice” (42:3) and that “he will not grow faint or be discouraged until he has established justice in the earth” (42:4).

In his book Good News About Injustice, Gary Haugen points out that justice is “the right use of power.” To use power rightly means to skillfully exercise it in the service of others — especially those who are in need or in a situation where they are unable to help themselves. That’s why the Bible lays substantial emphasis on caring for the orphan and the widow: “Seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause” (Isaiah 1:17).

One implication of this that is rightly getting a lot of attention in the church today is that we should spend ourselves radically in the fight against global poverty, human trafficking, and other injustices. A concern for justice means a concern for addressing large global problems.

A concern for justice also implies a concern for something else that is sometimes overlooked–namely, leadership. For if justice is “the right use of power,” then good leadership is a form of justice. And, conversely, bad leadership — even if unintentionally so — is a subtle form of injustice.

Read the whole thing.

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How do you know if you are an authoritarian leader?

Aside from understanding basic leadership (see, for example, The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make — especially the first chapter, which is on authoritarian leadership), here’s one test:

Can you tolerate open inquiry? Do you let people ask questions? And do you let them do this not just one-on-one, but in public and in front of the whole staff?

Are you able to defend your views? Do you simply tell people what to do and expect them to do it because you said, or do you seek to show why it is a good idea?

Good leaders love open inquiry and can make a case for their views and the direction they are taking things.

This is probably one reason why, in the church, all elders — not just the main preaching pastor — must be “able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2). Without the ability to teach and show why you believe something and are doing something, there is little recourse other than to the unbiblical practice of domineering over those in your charge (1 Peter 5:3).

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What does this have to do with leadership?

It’s simple. Command and control leadership is an oppressive way to lead. Authoritarian leadership is a form of oppression. And this verse says “you shall not oppress your neighbor.” While the implications of this verse go far beyond leadership, they do pertain to leadership. If you lead in a way that oppresses your people, you are not leading in accord with this verse.

Am I being too extreme to call authoritarian leadership a form of oppression?

Obviously some forms of oppression are worse than others. I’m not classifying authoritarian leadership with slavery or other such things, which are clearly far more severe.

But as Christians we are to reject all forms of oppression. And authoritarian leadership is a subtle form of oppression because it does not seek the good of those being led. It views the leader as the one knowing all the answers, and the followers as existing to primarily carry out the will and desires of the leader. Instead of seeing his people as having initiative and ability to unleash, he sees them simply as tools. That is a failure to build people and serve them and, yes, it is a form of oppression.

I am not saying that clear, decisive leadership is a form of oppression. I’m not even saying that it is wrong for a leader to get in the details on things and seek to uphold high standards in how things are done.

Rather, we are primarily getting at a heart issue here. Is your aim in leading to serve and build others up in the accomplishment of the mission? Or do you see others merely as a tool to accomplish your aims?

There’s a big difference. That difference plays itself out in varying leadership styles, but at root and most important is your motive. Why are you even leading at all?

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