Rooted Leadership: Relationships

Strong, godly leadership is rooted in authenticity, meaning what a leader does and gets aligns with who the leader is.  For this reason, a leader’s first (and consistent) question is “Who am I?”

Some Christian leaders hear me talk about leadership that is rooted in their own identity and immediately react that this approach is “too individualistic” or “me-driven.”  I’ll chalk up this over-reaction to Christian leaders’ tendency to be self-appointed theology police and the truth that our society is very individual-oriented, with self at the center of most everything — from burgers cooked “my way” to the line of i-products that keep many of us humming along.

But rooting your leadership in your own identity does not place you at the center of things.  Doing so locates the source of your leadership in your person – not your preferences or performance or position.

The answer to the “Who am I?” question is not simple or simple to get.  However, I have worked with hundreds of leaders who gain much clarity on this question by taking notice of four life/leadership roots: relationships, values, passions and heroes.  Let’s take time to look at each of these, allowing each investigation to get you clearer about who you are.

Let’s start with relationships.

Since the Enlightenment a false rumor has spread throughout Western culture that a person can choose to be whomever they want.  This is why when we were kids our parents said nice things to us like, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up” and “You can do anything you set your mind to.”  Nice intent, but not true.

To get a clearer sense of who you are, consider your family, your friends, and your faith – a trinity of relationships that greatly influences who you are, who you are becoming, and who you are as a leader. How you understand yourself is based on your interactions with others throughout your days.  You can choose your way beyond you’re the circumstances, but even your choosing is a function of those circumstances.

Family and Friends

You did not choose your family.  Family is like a hand of cards dealt to you that you play with varying degrees of success.  The way you see things is deeply influenced by your family of origin.  Some of us reflect the values and mindset of our immediate family, while others of us exhibit a reaction/rebellion toward the values and mindset of our family.  Whether you chose to accept or reject certain family traits, your family is still a deep source for who you are.

When it comes to your friends, you exercised some choice (more so than with family), but friends are still heavy tools in the shaping of who you are.  I’m surprised how few leaders realize the influence their childhood and current friends have on them.  We choose friends who can tolerate and support us as we live out (and extend beyond) our family traits.

Friends and family form the tribe out of which we come.  They establish norms for behavior and dictate what we should expect from life (and what life should expect from us).

Let me share two examples of leaders with whom I’ve worked.  Each was deeply marked by family.

Fiona is an account manager who is Type A all the way.  She works long hours and has little time for her young family.  She is competitive – probably too competitive for her own good or for the good of her company.  Her hyper-aggressive nature stems in large part from her upbringing in Honk Kong with a father who stressed the dog-eat-dog nature of the real world.  She has a difficult time partnering with others on a team or with peers.  While she has the talent and the drive to be a dynamic leader, she is saddled with a win-lose vision of how life works.  She is driven to win and to create loss among those around her.

Nick is a church planter in a large city.  He leads a growing, vibrant and dynamic congregation that is driven to make a difference in the city and beyond.  Nick’s church is driven because Nick is driven.  But why (and from what) is Nick driven?  Nick is driven because, when he was a kid, his family sent the not-so-subtle message that achievement was what made a person loved.  When Nick was in junior high his parents divorced and Nick felt a deep pain.  He came to the conclusion that the world was full of broken relationships and broken people who needed to find healing and hope.  Nick is driven not by greed or personal gain, but out of a sense to make the world a safer and more hope-filled place.  He is mature enough to see the link his family background has to his approach to life and leadership.

Neither Nick nor Fiona can escape the rootedness of their familial relationships. While there is no escaping the roots of relationship, every leader has choices about how to express their relationship-shaped identity.  Fiona and Nick make choices daily about how their family-shaped identity will flow into their leadership style, vision for life, and engagement with others.

Identity in Christ

While friends and family mark us as people and as leaders, no relationship has the power to influence a leader more than the relationship with Christ.  One’s identity as a valued, adored, and redeemed member of God’s family can nurture a bountiful and beautiful leadership legacy.

Many leaders exercise leadership in order to prove themselves, feel good about themselves, fill up a hole, or numb a pain.  But when a leader’s true identity is in Christ and the leader exercises leadership from this identity, his leadership will reach a higher, more fruitful, and more stable level.

Some Christian leaders still operate out of an inauthentic identity.  This occurs when a leader is unwilling to admit to himself how terribly dependent he is on Christ and/or how he is struggling in faith.  The pressure to “fake it till you make it” is strong with Christian leaders.  Admitting weakness can seem like a liability.  But in Christ vulnerability is not a liability.  In fact, the opposite is true.

A solid Christian leader does the deep work necessary to understand who she is by exploring and admitting whose she is.  Only when the leader is honest with herself can she lead from her authentic self.  If her rootedness in Christ is shallow, recognizing this fact can prompt her to deepen the relationship, allowing herself to grow in Christ.

What about you?  How do your roots of relationship effect you as a leader?

read more

Rooted Leadership: Integrity

Where does leadership start?  From what source does it grow?  It’s easy to see the fruit of leadership, but the roots often remain unseen, hidden from our gaze and drawing very little attention.  Though these roots are less noticed by observers, authentic leaders invest a lot of time and attention tending the roots of their leadership.

In the coming weeks, I wish to take a look at the roots of leadership – the various sources from which a godly person nurtures the most crucial factor for leading: identity.

read more

Transformational Change (part 4)

The theme of this series has been varying levels of change that can be experienced (and initiated) by individuals and organizations.  Previously I discussed incremental change (change of actions) and transitional change (change of strategies).  Now let’s look at the deepest, most significant type of change: transformational change (change of paradigm).

A simple metaphor to help understand the difference between these three types of change is to consider changes to a house:

• A simple DIY project such as changing a light fixture or painting a wall is incremental change – this kind of change is considered to be an improvement upon the current reality, but requires little disruption and is fairly quickly implemented.
• The TV show This Old House demonstrates transitional change – there is a severe disruption in the living conditions, as the homeowners enter a neutral zone when the old is gone and the new is not yet.  With transitional change, there are many incremental changes that flow out of the transition (lots of new fixtures and paint), but the change is more than just the sum of these small changes.
• The TV show Extreme Home Makeover demonstrates transformational change.  In fact, the term “makeover” is a total misnomer with this show because the home is not made over; rather, the old home is demolished and a new home is put in its place.  This is the kind of change demonstrated when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

Organizations and people who experience transformational change encounter the world differently than they did before.  They have a new paradigm for seeing the world.  This is the kind of change that turns Saul from a murderous Pharisee into a church-planting Jesus follower.  Transformational change does not have to be religious, but it often has such an element of conviction that it takes on religious tones.

Others describe this deep level of transformational change “seismic” change – meaning the earth has shifted beneath you.  That’s a good term because transformational change is rarely self-initiated.  This is a kind of change that happens to you, not necessarily the kind of change that you welcome or seek.

A few years ago I coached a church leader who experienced a transformational change.  As the founder of a large and ever-growing church, he had ministered for over a decade out of a paradigm that went something like this: “the goal of the church is to win the lost, which is evidenced by increased church attendance.”  All of his strategies and actions flowed from this paradigm, and the church experienced marvelous results.  Then, after a season of great fruitfulness, he led a mission trip to Kenya that was followed by a 3-month sabbatical.  During these experiences, his eyes were opened to an alternate reality: the people and planet that God created and loves were perishing in ways that resembled hell.  The pastor was never the same.  He looked back on the 3,000-seat worship center the church built several years earlier with shame and regret.  He looked at the rather opulent furnishings of his office with disgust.  He considered most of the programs and ministries of his church (programs and ministries that he’d helped initiate) as pretty much a waste of time.  His new way of seeing the world could not support the former strategies, actions, or results.  He was faced with either changing the congregation or leaving.

Transformational change has this kind of radical effect on those who experience it.  Nothing is the same afterward.

In the previous two posts, we considered a hypothetical church with the following framework:

Paradigm = we see things the way they really are and those who see things differently are wrong.

Strategy = we use argument and debate with non-Christians in order to prove our rightness and their wrongness.

Actions = we will use the church sign to share messages like “Turn or burn” or “Stop, drop & roll will not work in hell” or “God’s church, not Presbyterian.”

Results = our church members feel smugly superior and very few members of the community visit our church or convert to Christianity.

This church could easily choose to change their collective actions.  After much struggle, they could even choose to shift their strategies.  But I doubt they could readily change their paradigm.  The reason is that choosing to change a paradigm can feel like heresy (theological, or just logical) because alternate paradigms are simply not how (we believe) the world works.

But notice that the hypothetical church’s paradigm is not intrinsically gospel-centered.  They might experience such an overwhelming transformation that they come out the other side with a paradigm that sounds something like this: “We are blind beggars helping other blind beggars find food.” (Thanks to Steve Brown for the phrase!)

Here’s the punch line of this whole series on change: too many Christians have the gospel as a strategy and not as a paradigm.  Why?  Because, for fallen people, the gospel is not a natural way of seeing the world and fallen people are incapable of changing their paradigm from a human-centered to a godly way of seeing the world.  Transformational change that generates a gospel-centered church or person is always God-initiated. This is why we must continually pray for revival and renewal.

 

read more

Transitional Change (Change, part 3)

This is the third in a four-part series on change.  In the first, we covered a model for understanding the path from Paradigm to Strategies to Actions to Results.  Last week we looked at the simplest kind of change: incremental change, which involves a change of actions (only).  Today we look at a higher order of change: transition.

When incremental change is not enough, organizations and/or individuals need to consider transitional change.  This second-level of change involves shifting our strategies in order to open up the possibility of new actions, which can then lead to better results.  When we change our strategies, we change how we approach things.

read more

Incremental Change (Change, part 2)

In a previous post, I shared a framework that helps us consider change.  Here’s a summary: our paradigms (how we see things) shape our strategies (how we approach things), which in turn shape the actions we take (what we do), and it is our actions that determine our results and/or errors (what we get).

This simple model is helpful for considering change because it allows us to identify three kinds of change.  In this post, I will explore the most basic kind of change: changing our actions.

read more