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Why Christians Should Learn About Leadership From Both Secular and Christian Thinkers

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Bill Hybels is talking now, and just said (slightly paraphrasing): “This conference is unapologetically Christian. Yet, when it comes to who we invite to teach, we seek to learn from everybody — people in the church, people in the business world, people leading in all walks of life.” (The first interesting paradox, by the way, is why Christians don’t just act and do, but also worship — see the previous post.)

I think he’s reflecting here something true and essential for Christian leadership. First, if we are Christians, we need to lead as Christians. We need to think about leadership from a Christian perspective and lead for the good of others and glory of God.

Second, we need to be willing to learn about leadership from all people, not just Christians. There is some really solid and helpful and true teaching on leadership outside the church. Christians should not neglect that. It is a matter of humility to say “I’m going to learn what I need to learn from any source that is speaking truth and making helpful, winsome, solid observations.” And the speakers that are invited to the Summit reflect some of the best of this thinking, both inside and outside the church.

Some might be skeptical about the value of Christians learning about leadership from non-Christians. But let me just list three theological reasons that it is right and necessary and helpful to learn about leadership from non-Christians as well as Christians:

  1. The doctrine of vocation affirms the validity and helpfulness of the insight and work of people in all areas of life, both Christian and non-Christian. The issue is whether something is true.
  2. The doctrine of common grace affirms that there is truth in creation that is accessible and discernable to believers as well as unbelievers. To deny that Christians can learn about leadership from non-Christians is to unwittingly deny the doctrine of common grace.
  3. The Summit isn’t inviting non-Christians to teach theology. I’m not saying we should look to non-Christians to teach the Bible. But, in accord with the doctrines of vocation and common grace, there is value in learning from non-Christians about life and the world, and this includes leadership. We need to think through everything from a biblical point of view, but we shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy by rejecting something just because the person who came up with the idea or made the observation is not a Christian.

Andy Stanley on Leadership from Catalyst Dallas

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Here’s a very helpful three-minute clip on leadership from Andy Stanley:

Two especially good points:

“It is a fallacy that great leaders are great at everything.”

And:

“Your fully exploited strengths are always of far greater value to your organization than your marginally improved weaknesses.”

Why You Can't Buy Creativity

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A great article from the 99%. Here’s how it starts:

“The work had better be good, I’m paying them enough.”

Over the years I’ve heard this statement — or versions of it — from many different managers charged with getting creative work out of their teams.

From a conventional management perspective, it probably sounds like common sense. But to anyone who understands the nature of creativity and what motivates creative people, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Guest Blogging the Global Leadership Summit This Thursday and Friday

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On Thursday and Friday of this week (August 11-12) I am looking forward to being one of the guest bloggers for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit.

Speakers this year include Seth Godin, Steven Furtick, Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), Bill Hybels, and lots of others. It looks like about over 50,000 are registered so far to attend on-site and at the extension sites. I think that afterwards the speakers are translated into several different languages and the Summit is made available to thousands more Christians internationally, which is especially exciting.

Here’s the purpose of the Summit: “The Global Leadership Summit exists to transform Christian leaders around the world with an injection of vision, skill development, and inspiration for the sake of the local church.”

And here’s an excerpt from the website on why they started and host the Summit:

“Why We Host The Global Leadership Summit”
Over the years we’ve come to appreciate just how critical leadership is to church vitality. We have observed that a church’s effectiveness in pursing it’s God-given mission is largely dependent on the character, devotion, and skill of its leadership core. This is why WCA’s focus is to elevate the quality of leadership within the church.

That leadership could be formal or informal, staff or volunteer, full-time or bi-vocational, clergy or laity. It doesn’t matter where the leadership comes from; it just matters that it is present.

WCA recognizes that the leadership core of any church includes leaders from the business, education, government and social sectors. The Global Leadership Summit welcomes leaders from all these sectors and fully believes that the maximum influence and impact of the Church is felt when all of its Christ-centered leaders are at the forefront of establishing and growing well led local churches, companies, schools, governments and social enterprises. This is the Church at its best! This is when God’s love and care inevitably spills out into our neighborhoods, towns and cities through acts of love, justice, mercy, service and restoration. Each year, we do our best to provide a world-class leadership training event that challenges, inspires and serves the leadership core of every church.

I’ve attended the Summit twice before and have always found it fantastically helpful. One of the reasons I find it so important is because I believe that, as Bill Hybels has said, local churches need to be both well taught and well led. Too often, our churches are either one or the other (or, worse, neither!). We either care about theology to the exclusion of leadership (thinking good leadership will just “take care of itself” and happen automatically — which it doesn’t), or we focus on leadership without a sufficient theological foundation. Let’s not fall for that dichotomy and help our churches be both well taught and well led, and continually growing in both. The Summit is a key resource that can help this happen.

The Global Leadership Summit telecasts live from the campus of Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, reaching more than 185 host sites across the United States. To attend one of the host sites you can find a location on the website.

To follow the guest blogging, go to the Willow Creek Association blog on Thursday and Friday (as well as this blog here, where I’ll also be posting).

The Right Kind of Individualism

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Sometimes it is suggested that attention to our gifts and unique interests is just “American individualism,” rather than a feature of biblical Christianity.

This is wrong-headed. There is a wrong kind of individualism, to be sure. But there is also a right, biblical kind of individualism that, while affirming the uniqueness and importance of each individual, also affirms this in relation to the value of community.

In fact, I would argue that “American individualism” actually arises from biblical values. Sometimes these values are perverted into a narcissistic, wrong kind of individualism. But they don’t have to be.

The biblical notion of individualism is best captured in the doctrine of vocation, which was a major emphasis of the Reformation. Here’s how Gene Veith summarizes it in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life:

The doctrine of vocation looms behind many of the Protestant influences on culture, though these are often misunderstood. If Protestantism resulted in an increase in individualism, this was not because the theology turned the individual into the supreme authority.

Rather, the doctrine of vocation encourages attention to each individual’s uniqueness, talents, and personality. These are valued as gifts of God, who creates and equips each person in a different way for the calling He has in mind for that person’s life.

The doctrine of vocation undermines conformity, recognizes the unique value of each person, and celebrates human differences; but it sets these individuals into a community with other individuals, avoiding the privatizing, self-centered narcissism of secular individualism.

What Should I Contribute?

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Drucker:

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question.

What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself as it was for the peasant or artisan — or by a master or a mistress — as it was for domestic servants. And until very recently, it was taken for granted that most people were subordinates who did as they were told. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, the new knowledge workers (the so- called organization men) looked to their company’s personnel department to plan their careers.

Then in the late 1960s, no one wanted to be told what to do any longer. Young men and women began to ask. What do / want to do? And what they heard was that the way to contribute was to “do your own thing.” But this solution was as wrong as the organization men’s had been. Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfilment, and success achieved any of the three.

But still, there is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Consider the experience of a newly appointed hospital administrator. The hospital was big and prestigious, but it had been coasting on its reputation for 30 years. The new administrator decided that his contribution should be to establish a standard of excellence in one important area within two years. He chose to focus on the emergency room, which was big, visible, and sloppy. He decided that every patient who came into the ER had to be seen by a qualified nurse within 60 seconds. Within 12 months, the hospital’s emergency room had become a model for all hospitals in the United States, and within another two years, the whole hospital had been trans- formed.

As this example suggests, it is rarely possible — or even particularly fruitful — to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be. Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The answer must balance several things. First, the results should be hard to achieve — they should require “stretching,” to use the current buzzword.

But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved — or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances — is not being ambitious; it is being foolish. Second, the results should be meaningful.

They should make a difference. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable. From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.

Does God Require Faithfulness or Fruitfulness?

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This is actually a very fascinating question. I have a lot I’d like to say on this, but here are just a few thoughts for now.

Sometimes you hear it said that “God requires faithfulness, not fruitfulness.” But the reality is that God requires both. God requires both faithfulness and fruitfulness.

However, the point behind the statement and what most people actually mean when they say that is true and critically important. Here are four reasons for that which, I hope, also flesh things out a bit more accurately.

First, faithfulness is the path to fruitfulness. So the wording of the question itself is slightly off. It implies that faithfulness and fruitfulness are somehow disconnected; that we are of course to be faithful, but that somehow being fruitful happens by some other means.

This would be a radical misunderstanding. For it implies that faithfulness is not enough for fruitfulness. And if faithfulness is not enough, then what else is there? Only unfaithfulness, which would be horrible. Fruitfulness comes through the path of faithfulness, and no other way. In this sense, we truly can say “God requires faithfulness only.” We can say that, not because fruitfulness is optional, but because faithfulness necessarily results in fruitfulness. Which leads to the second point.

Second, faithfulness always results in fruitfulness. It is not only that faithfulness is the path to fruitfulness. Rather, it is that faithfulness always and inevitably results in fruitfulness. Always.

The NT has no categories for the unfruitful Christian. The unfruitful Christian simply does not exist. Notice, for example, how Jesus talks in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23). There are four categories of people. All of them ultimately prove to be unbelievers, except the last: the good soil. And in relation to the good soil, Jesus says “This is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23).

The issue is not whether the good soil bears fruit or not. It is simply how much. Everyone who is good soil — who truly understands and accepts the Word — bears fruit: either thirty, or sixty, or a hundred.

Likewise, in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14 – 30), every servant was fruitful — except the last one, who was an unbeliever. One made five talents more and another two talents more. The last person, who received one talent, hid the talent and did nothing with it. He is not an example of an unfruitful Christian, but an unbeliever (vv. 26 – 30).

God does require fruitfulness. But that fruitfulness is certain to follow if we are faithful.

This is, of course, simply the traditional doctrine of justification and good works. We are not justified by our works, but those who have been justified by faith will inevitably and always live a life of good works (Ephesians 2:8-10; etc.). To say that God requires fruitfulness, not just faithfulness, is simply another statement of this truth.

Which of course leads to the question: What, then, is fruitfulness? Perhaps another reason people say “God requires faithfulness, not fruitfulness,” is to guard against wrong concepts of fruitfulness being used as the measure of what God requires. That’s an important issue, which leads to our next point.

Third, faithfulness is a form of fruitfulness.

This points out another issue in the way the original question is worded: It implies that faithfulness and fruitfulness are necessarily two different things. I think they can be distinguished in some ways (as we will see next), but it is also important to realize that faithfulness itself is a form of real fruitfulness. Faithfulness is one of the “fruits” that God produces in us and requires of us. Faithfulness is a form of fruitfulness. This is an important point that is not to be overlooked.

Related to this, another component of our fruitfulness is our character and just plain the godly responses to the situations we are in, whatever they may be. This is a form of fruit that is not necessarily broadly visible, but it matters and is even more important than the often more visible ministry “results” of walking faithfully.

Finally, though, fruitfulness does also include the results of our faithfulness — the effects in the world of following Christ and trusting him and loving him and obeying him. If you look at John 15, for example, where Jesus discusses our bearing much fruit, the fruit includes things like answers to prayer (John 15:7-8) and loving others (John 15:10, 12, etc.). And in the Parable of the Talents, the “fruit” in view seems to naturally include the results of our obedience and work in the Lord, as well as the faithfulness itself.

But here again there is a critically important truth that is safeguarded by those who say “God requires faithfulness, not fruitfulness.” We should of course seek to be as fruitful as we can possibly be. But notice that in the Parable of the Sower, there is not a hint of judgment or disappointment regarding those who bear thirty-fold or sixty-fold fruit rather than a hundred-fold. Jesus simply says “He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23). All of these yields are considered good and significant. The one who bears thirty-fold is not judged or looked down upon for not bearing one-hundred fold.

So also in the Parable of the Talents, Jesus doesn’t say to the one who gained two talents “Well, you should have gained five talents, but I guess this is good enough.” Not at all. He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your Master” (Matthew 25:23).

So the other key intention behind the statement that “God requires faithfulness, not fruitfulness” that is fantastically, critically true is: You aren’t more accepted by God for producing more fruit or less loved by him for producing less. If you are faithful, the fruit that results from your faithfulness is good and acceptable to him. If you are faithful, you shouldn’t worry about the “amount” of fruit you see or don’t see. As long as you are faithful and doing what God requires, you shouldn’t ever feel that you just aren’t “fruitful enough.” We don’t have control over the results; our responsibility is to be faithful to do what God has said.

Related to this is the fact that we are simply not in a position to judge our fruitfulness. It is reported that Billy Graham once said to his staff at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that “many of you will have greater reward in heaven than me.” Many looked skeptical when he said this; some of the people there were responsible for stuffing envelops and other such tasks. How could they be rewarded more than Billy Graham? So he reiterated his point and said: “I mean that. The reason is that God rewards faithfulness, not fruitfulness.”

I think he meant that statement in the right way, the way we are unpacking it here. And his main point was: God decides what our reward is. The way things look now are not necessarily indications of how God views things. Someone who is stuffing envelops in faith may indeed be rewarded far beyond someone whose visible results, right now, appear to be greater. For it is faith that makes our works good, and God may be doing incredible things through our seemingly mundane efforts that we simply will not see until we get to heaven.

So, another critical thing underscored by the statement that “God requires faithfulness, not fruitfulness,” is that we are not in a position here to judge our fruitfulness and feel that our fruitfulness is low simply because the visible results don’t seem to be large at this time.

Now, if there is all this good behind the statement that “God requires faithfulness, not fruitfulness,” what’s the problem with talking that way at all? I think in general, that phrase can obscure some of the four things we have just seen, especially the fact that faithfulness always results in fruitfulness of some form and to some degree, and that faithfulness is the path to fruitfulness, and that we should take courage from knowing that we will always see some degree of fruit.

But there is one other thing that statement can obscure. What should we do when we aren’t seeing fruit?

The first thing to say is that there will be times when we seem to experience a visible lack of fruitfulness. There can even be times when Christians seem to be going backwards in their obedience and seem to be flagging in the fruitfulness of faithfulness itself. But God will always keep his children faithful and persevering to the end. So I don’t want the reality that true fruitfulness will always follow faithfulness to be taken to mean that there are never times of little fruitfulness in the life of a Christian.

But the other thing to say here is that one way faithfulness responds to an apparent lack of fruitfulness is by saying “do I need to change how I’m doing anything here?”

God’s commands are unchanging, and so that I’m not talking about changing at the level of obedience. But at the level of application, there are ways to do things that may be more helpful to people or less helpful; more edifying or less edifying; more likely to help people come to see the truth of the gospel or less likely.

We shouldn’t let the essential call to focus on faithfulness rather than fruitfulness become a call to ignore the need to make legitimate changes that are likely to help us do better in our lives and ministries.

Which is the last point: One thing that faithfulness does is have a view to it’s fruitfulness. Many times our fruitfulness is out of our hands; the results are God’s alone. Sometimes, though, there are things we can adapt or improve in order to do better, and the result will be more fruit. Faithfulness keeps alert to ways to adapt and improve in order to serve others more effectively, and thus more fruitfully.

What Every Leader in an Organization Needs to Do

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Drucker:

Wherever knowledge workers perform well in large organizations, senior executives take time out, on a regular schedule, to sit down with them, sometimes all the way down to the green juniors, and ask:

  • “What should we at the head of this organization know about your work?
  • What do you want to tell me regarding the organization?
  • Where do you see opportunities we do not exploit?
  • Where do you see dangers to which we are still blind?
  • And, all together, what do you want to know from me about this organization?”

Update: I think it’s important to add one more thing, and I hope it’s not too blunt.

If the employees in an organization don’t feel that they can be honest with those at the top about genuine problems in the organization, then I suggest the organization has the wrong leaders.

I don’t think leaders should be second-guessing themselves all the time. But the truth is that there are some people in leadership, either by accident or who knows what, that simply shouldn’t be there.

One outcome of this exercise may be that the leaders realize they are the wrong people to head the organization. This would be the rare instance (or should be rare!), but if the leaders simply assume they are competent and somehow “appointed” to lead, despite lacking actual competence and having failed to create a work environment that truly builds people up and treats them with respect and unleashes their talents for good and makes them excited about their work and the organization, then the most important thing they might need to think about is whether they are the right leaders at all.