A few weeks ago I had the privilege of interviewing Brad Lomenick, president of Catalyst, on his book The Catalyst Leader: 8 Essentials for Becoming a Change Maker
Brad is a model of the leadership qualities he talks about and it was a lot of fun to talk to him.
And here is also an edited transcript of the interview, in order to provide a shorter summary for people who prefer to read. (Note that the transcript is really a paraphrase of both him and me, because that’s the easiest way for me to summarize things. For any who compare the two, you might have an enjoyable time of comparing what goes in to my head with how I actually understand it and restate it!)
Here’s the transcript:
Brad, tell us first of all what Catalyst is and what you do for Catalyst?
I’m the president of Catalyst. Sort of the key strategist and key visionary. We’re a really small team so I’m really involved in the program of the events we put on as well.
We do leadership conferences. If anyone is familiar with John Maxwell, John is the one who started Catalyst along with a number of other leaders. We really have a heartbeat for younger leaders — for those in the first half of their career life. We are a Christian leadership movement and conference. We have a heart for Christians who are in the marketplace as well as who are working in roles connected to the church.
We see our role as creating an opportunity to connect, inspire, equip, and then release the next generation of leaders who are in the first stage of their career. They are out of college, but still in the first half of their professional life. That’s our heartbeat, and we’ve been doing this now for almost 14 years.
Atlanta is our flagship gathering every October, where we will have 13,000 leaders gathered this year [note: next week!]. But we do many other conferences throughout the year as well, including Catalyst West, a Dallas event, and Catalyst One Day.
Why did you write this book?
That’s a great place to start. I just turned 40, so I felt like part of the stewardship of the role I’ve had for the past several years meant that it was time for me to pass on a lot of what I’ve learned. I wasn’t planning on doing this; at least for me, my perspective had been “I’m just the guy behind the scenes; I’m a practitioner, not a thought leader, not a voice.”
But I had some friends who really challenged me on that. They said “you do know some things and you do have some things to pass on to the next generation. You aren’t just the guy behind the scenes. You need to be a wise steward of the way God has given you the opportunity to be around so many great leaders and you need to pass on what you have learned.”
The ultimate reason for me, though, is that I’m looking around at a lot of my peers who are starting on the rocket ride and having influence very early in life, and are coming up against roadblocks in their leadership because they haven’t been fully equipped. With our generation, so many of us are stepping into leadership roles earlier than in prior generations, sometimes before we are ready. We are leading now, but we also need to lead well. And the way we finish well in life and in our leadership is to lead well now.
That’s the essence of this book. I want my generation to lead well now, and to be able to look back on things 40 years from now and say “we took the baton that was given to us, and we ran the race well.”
I resonate with that. I had a significant leadership role in my organization in my early twenties, and I didn’t even know I was a leader. It would have been very helpful to have something like your book that says “you are leading, and here’s what you need to do.” As it was, I had to learn a lot of things the hard way.
Yeah. The other thing related to this is that I call the generation behind me, the generation in their twenties, the “called but not equipped.” They are passionate and excited to change the world, but they just haven’t been equipped yet. I feel like we need to help them; we need to have a model that says “we are going to give the next generation opportunities to learn and become equipped.” This is our responsibility to do. We need to steward and hand off what we’ve been given. And we need to do that well. We can’t say “well, my parents or my boss didn’t hand it off well to us.” It doesn’t matter. We need to equip those who are coming up after us.
What do you mean by the term “catalyst leader”?
A catalyst leader is a change-maker. The eight essentials the book talks about are what make up a change maker.
These essentials aren’t the only 8 characteristics a leader needs. I just sought to focus on 8 to make it easier to absorb the content, and to choose them in such a way that they could be the larger buckets that a lot of other attributes could come under.
In the culture in general, you are seeing the term “change maker” used more and more for leaders. It’s an attractive term. Unfortunately, in some ways the term “leader” has taken on a negative connotation, because so many have violated people’s trust. So especially for a younger twenty-something, there can sometimes be this notion of “I’m not sure I want to know about this leadership thing.” But the concept of a change-maker seems to communicate more accurately.
Yeah, I think I sort of experienced that false impression about leadership in my twenties as well. I thought it was about doing cheesy team-building exercises like jumping out of trees to see if others can catch you and other strange stuff like that. I didn’t want to have much of a part of that. But that was a misunderstanding of leadership on my part.
Can you talk a bit more about where you think this stigma about leadership came from? Because I still see this in the church, this notion of “don’t learn about leadership, learn about spirituality.” Where does this come from?
I think we’ve watched a generation grow up around us in the church and in the culture in general where leadership sometimes meant that it was about me. That it was about my own thing, and you just need to come on board, follow me, and help me build my empire. And who gets excited about that?
The new generation says “it’s not about me, I don’t want it to be about me, and in fact if it’s about you, I don’t want to come work with you.” They’ll come work their hearts out for a vision that is bigger than all of us, but they aren’t interested in coming to help build a person’s own “kingdom.”
I think the other thing is that we’ve lost the “hero essence” of leaders around us. We tend to have a natural cynicism these days toward anyone who is in power. Our tendency is to not trust them because they are in charge, rather than saying “I do trust you because you are in charge.”
So we need to make it clear that leadership is about a bigger vision, that it’s not about building people’s individual kingdoms. It’s about the community, it’s about others getting transformed along with them. Even when you look at churches you see this. The churches that are attracting younger leaders are the ones where when you ask “what’s the vision here,” it’s something significant and bigger than all of them. It’s not “we’re trying to build the pastors name.”
This is a kingdom thing. At the end of the day, Jesus was the ultimate movement maker. And if you look at his leadership, it was all about others. I think we’re moving back even to a Jesus model.
In chapter 1, you talk about the importance of knowing our calling. Why is it so important for a leader to know their calling?
It’s crucial. I believe God has wired each of us with a very clear sense of design and purpose that ties in to us vocationally. There are two callings. There is the calling to Christ, and then a second calling — the calling to our role. What we do with our lives.
It used to be that people only thought that those who are engaged in church work were called. But in reality, all Christians have a calling. This sacred-secular divide is just not true; you don’t see it anywhere in Scripture. At Catalyst, we want to say to all Christians “your calling matters, and there’s something God has for you to do that you’ve been purposed for.”
This is also something that is really resonating with the next generation. Because they are saying “I want my life to holistically matter.” Whereas with my parents, and the generation that is sort of aging out, it wasn’t about that. When they thought about jobs and vocation, they might have done something for 40 years that they hated. It was seen just as a means to an end. If you said “are you called to that?” they would say “what are you talking about? I just do this so I can get a paycheck and then go live out my purpose in other areas.”
Today, I think there is a sense of “no, God has designed us in such a way that this should all work together.” Your calling is where your strengths and passions intersect. If you can find the place where those two things collide, that’s your calling.
I’ve talked to many leaders who say “Brad, I’m not there yet.” And I say, “that’s OK.” Not everyone is there yet, but what matters is that you seek to get there. At the end of the day, if at Catalyst we can release leaders who are truly living out their calling, I think we’d have a revolution of the church on our hands.
The church really needs to lead on this. I think pastors need to stand up in front of their congregations and say “For too long we have not given you a sense of freedom to pursue your calling. We want to do that as a congregation and as a church.” I think the people in the pews would say “thank you, finally.”
One of the other essentials you talk about is authenticity. What is authenticity and why is it so important?
Everyone I know wants to be around people they can trust, and people whom they know who they are. People they can see through and see that they are trustworthy and genuine.
With social media and all the ways we can create false personas, I know that when we look at the next wave of leaders, authenticity is essential to them. It is an obligation. If you are not authentic as a leader today, you will have a hard time having any credibility with any young leader.
This wasn’t always the case. It used to be leaders pretended to be perfect. But today, it’s just the opposite. Lead with your weaknesses. Acknowledge to your team that there are some things you’re not good at, and things you’re working on. If you do that as a leader, you will gain so much credibility and influence with your team.
There are too many of us who are hiding behind stuff and not willing to talk about things that we should, and which will give others around us permission to be vulnerable and real as well.
We have to lead with this in the church. The church should be the most authentic place in the world. We should be the most approachable, human, and honest of anyone. Yet too often we are seen as the hypocrites or fill in the blank. This ought not be.
You will have far more credibility as a leader if you lead with authenticity first.
You also have a chapter on excellence. Can the call to excellence and importance of authenticity ever be in tension with one another? And what do we do when that happens?
Definitely. Part of the thing with excellence is you feel this pressure that the standard you’ve set is the best in the world. Sometimes of course you fall short of this standard, and every time that occurs you have to wrestle with that. But I think what we have to start with is: we want to be real, we want to be honest and true to who we are, with this standard that says “every time we possibly can, we are going to shoot for being the best.”
Tell us a bit about the importance of humility in leadership.
I know a lot of leaders who aren’t humble. I don’t know any leader or any person who likes to work for a leader who is not humble. Yet, I know a lot of arrogant leaders.
Most of the time they aren’t arrogant because they set out to be arrogant. Rather, over time they’ve allowed it to creep. They’ve probably done something significant, have people around them that don’t tell them the truth, and have a system that protects them. All this stuff starts to creep in; nobody sets out to become arrogant.
This is a solvable issue really quick. The first thing is that if you sense either that you are not humble, or if people around you are struggling with being humble, is they need a reality check. The best reality checks come from people who are close to you. There are times in my life where I’ve felt I’ve had to go to a leader I’m working for and say “we have to talk about your humility, because it’s out of control on the wrong side.” I’ve also had people come to me and say that.
That’s one of the things I really like about your book, by the way. You share your own leadership struggles and mis-steps. I also enjoy seeing how you corrected them.
And I’m still making mistakes! The other day I told someone about some things I was not doing well as a leader, and they said “Dude, you wrote a leadership book.” But that doesn’t make me perfect. I’m still struggling just like everybody else to try to get better, and to work on the things I’m not good at.
If you are going to be arrogant as a leader, be arrogant about those around you. Let your ego leak. The way to grow in humility is to talk about those around you and build them up. Don’t talk about yourself. Talk about your team and brag on them. Focus on everybody except yourself.
Here’s a big tension we all face. Endless to-do lists, extreme deadlines, feeling like we’re under a pile. How do you in the midst of that still make sure you come up and connect with your team? How do you make sure to actually lead and not be distracted by all the overwhelming things to do?
It’s really hard. This is one of the greatest tensions of leadership. How much do you build in to others versus saying “I’ve got a super long to do list that needs to get done.” One of the things that helps with this is that our team at Catalyst, we like to do life together. If you can create that kind of environment, where you are friends with your team, it really helps. You don’t go ask Betty about her daughter because “that’s what a leader does,” but because she’s a friend and you truly care.
So try to hire and have people around you who are friends. Create a friendly environment that feels like family. I think this will also inspire you as a leader, even when your to-do list is super long, to hang out with your team and have fun with them.
This is also attractive to younger leaders. They don’t want to see segregation of work life, home life, spiritual life, social life. It’s all woven in together. It’s a much more attractive culture that doesn’t segregate things out. Let the environment and culture be inspiring as well, so everyone’s not just relying on the leader to be inspiring.
One final question. If you had just one final piece of leadership advice to give to the readers of this blog, what would it be?
That’s a great question. If I had to choose one, I’d say this: leadership is important, and there are all of these tools and tips and ways we can be better leaders. But so much of who you are as a leader is built out of your own personal relationship with Christ. That’s what it has to go back to.
We do conferences and leadership stuff, and want to inspire change makers. But if we don’t start here, with our own personal relationship with Jesus, and see that as the core, nothing else matters. You have to lead yourself first. If you don’t lead yourself first, then you can’t effectively lead anyone else. And leading yourself starts with your spiritual life and your relationship with God.
If you don’t remember anything else, remember that it starts internally with your own walk with God.