Understanding Leadership

Surrey

Introduction

What Is Leadership?

A couple of years ago, when passing through Los Angeles, I picked up a newspaper off the airport bookstand. In it was a report on a conference of trustees and managers from more than a thousand of America’s most elite institutions, the group of large philanthropic foundations whose purpose is to give away money. The theme of the three-day conference was Exploring the many dimensions of leadership.

The conclusions the conference attendees came to were startling. There was, they agreed, nothing less than a crisis of leadership in American society. The nation was being guided not by leaders but by managers, and its condition could be described as overmanaged and underled! What is more, said the newspaper report, this prophesying came, not from wild eyed Jeremiahs, but from serious and successful Americans including the owner of a metropolitan newspaper, an eminent scholar and one of the directors of the world’s largest corporation.

The findings of this conference have been chosen as a point of departure for this study, for two good reasons. One is that they point to a current modern malaise, the serious shortage of good leaders in most of the institutions of our society, including the Christian church. The other is that they suggest one of the reasons for that lack—the presence of considerable confusion and uncertainty, both as to what is meant by this business of leadership and how you actually go about doing it. Thus the two questions we will address should be on the mind of every seeker after understanding and knowledge about anything:

What does it actually mean?

How do you do it?

Leadership and management

Most books and seminars on leadership assume that the essence of the subject is already well known and the basis of it generally agreed upon by the readers or seminar participants. Thus they tend to deal largely with the refinements of the craft, or the ways of improving leadership performance by the use of organization theory and management technology. It is no wonder, then, that leaders get the message that to lead effectively you must be a good administrator and learn to use the manager’s techniques or that managers using the tools they are familiar with think that in so doing they are leading.

It is true, of course, that you can have a leader who is also a good manager or a manager who is a leader, but the two functions are quite different and must not be confused. Management is essentially the stewardship of resources, and its concern is making the organization work effectively and efficiently. This involves logistics, information, people, and systems; it builds teams, controls budgets, measures performance, monitors progress, and initiates corrective action where needed. These operating functions are vital to the success of the venture, but they have essentially nothing to do with leadership. You can use every one of them and yet not be leading at all—you are merely reacting to situations as they arise. Conversely, you may lead effectively and yet not be involved in any of these operational or managerial activities. Leadership, in other words, is not management, and it is not administration.

Leadership and ministry

Another mistake, and the one most often made in the Christian church, is to equate leadership with ministry. The leader, whether minister, pastor, or elder, is therefore expected to be the best preacher, the best Bible teacher, the best counselor, the best prophet, and the best organizer in the church. Very often the minister places the same expectations on himself, because that is how he has been trained to think. As a consequence, he feels threatened if gifts arise in the congregation that appear to threaten his supremacy in any area of ministry, particularly the area he favors most. Gifted people in the church are thus either ignored or shut out of opportunities to exercise their gifts until they become frustrated and discontented. Sometimes the more independent ones eventually go off and start out on their own, and they are then accused of being rebellious or divisive.

If, as a church leader, I find among my flock someone who is a better preacher or a better Bible teacher than I am, I should welcome the gift. If someone arises who is a better counselor, a better evangelist, or a better organizer than I am, I should heartily rejoice in his capacities and give him room to grow and flourish. None of the ministry gifts has anything essentially to do with my leadership role or need affect my leadership function in any way. The best and most effective leaders understand this clearly. For example, Count Zinzendorf was the leader of the eighteenth-century Moravian community in Herrenhut, but the most popular preacher, we read, was an old man who worked as a potter. When the potter preached, bigger crowds flocked to hear him than to hear Zinzendorf, but there is no record of the Count being envious of or feeling threatened by the potter’s reputation.

The heart of leadership

What, then, is the essence or the essential heart of this thing we call leadership? In other words, what are the features that distinguish leaders from other people in the organization, and the leadership role from other roles or functions? Are there common factors that apply generally to all expressions of leadership?

Unless we get this fundamental understanding right, we may be building leadership training and skills on faulty foundations, weighing down leaders with methods and procedures that have little or nothing to do with their function, or trying to impose leadership models on people who are not leaders and will never be leaders.

In the section that follows, we will go immediately to the heart of the matter and identify the capacities and characteristics that are critical to the whole leadership function regardless of the organization and the level within the organization structure.

Chapter 1

Foresight—the Leader’s Lead

Goals—Heading toward the Future

The first essential characteristic of leaders is that they are going somewhere. In other words, they are aiming at goals or objectives that lie in the future. Their interest, therefore, is in what is to come rather than in what is past, in the possibilities and opportunities that lie on the horizon rather than the things that have already been accomplished. Leaders, in other words, are always on the way; they are heading toward objectives, aiming at targets, and reaching out for things that are ahead of them.

Thus John writes about the Good Shepherd, He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice (John 10:3–4).

The shepherd is leading because he is out in front. He is going somewhere; therefore, he has gone ahead to show the way. The sheep are simply following the lead of the shepherd.

The first question, therefore, to be asked of all leaders is, What are your goals? If leaders are not aiming at something but are merely responding or reacting to situations as they arise, they have already virtually surrendered leadership. Circumstances or situations are leading the way and effectively determining what is going to be done. The role of the leaders has become a maintenance or operational role, because their attention is focused on the present and the past rather than on the future.

I would go a step further. I want to know whether the leaders have goals for their private and personal lives as well as for their public and institutional lives. The private area was the area the early church always looked at when assessing whether a man had the qualities of leadership. If he could not lead and take care of his own family, they reasoned, how could he be trusted to lead and take care of God’s church? (1 Tim. 3:5).

Foresight—Dealing with the Future

Being future oriented is a necessary requirement for leadership, but it is not the only requirement. In other words, although leaders need to have goals, they need to be much more than merely goal directed. People who are not leaders also need goals; they also need to be going somewhere.

What distinguishes leaders from others is that they not only have an interest in the future, but they also have the capacity to deal with the future. This capacity is sometimes called foresight. As Robert K. Greenleaf puts it, A mark of leaders, an attribute that puts them in a position to show the way for others, is that they are better than most at pointing the direction to go. Foresight is the ‘lead’ that the leader has. Once leaders lose this lead and events start to force their hand, they are leaders in name only.

We need to examine this concept of foresight in more detail because of its unique importance to the whole business of leadership. There are other leadership qualities that are also necessary or desirable, but none is as vital to the leadership function, particularly at the higher levels, as foresight. Its absence will sooner or later derail an otherwise well-qualified and well-equipped incumbent of a leadership position.

What, then, is involved in this ability or capacity to deal effectively with the future, which we call foresight?

Firstly, foresight requires vision in the sense of imaginative insight or seeing with the inner eye. It may be, but is not necessarily, visualization—actually seeing pictures in the mind’s eye. It is more commonly experienced in the form of ideas or concepts or thoughts, but it is still vision. Vision is what enables leaders to see the possible future farther and more clearly than others, to be better than others at identifying opportunities and possibilities, and to know how to respond to forthcoming events or likely situations. Vision is an essential hallmark of all the great leaders. It marks out a Moses or a Joshua, a Samuel or a David or a Nehemiah.

Secondly, foresight consists of a sense for the unknown, an instinctive feel or anticipatory prescience for what is not here yet, an intuitive kind of knowledge or awareness of things prior to their existence or occurrence. It is, therefore, largely a spiritual capacity and one that, from a Christian perspective, carries with it the potential for or the openness to inspiration or revelation (1 Cor. 2:9–13).

If leadership requires an orientation toward the future, a capacity for vision, and an openness to inspiration, then clearly the Christian community should be able to produce more and better leaders than any other sector of human society. To begin with, we are future oriented. We are the people who belong to the future and to whom the future belongs, because we belong to the Lord, who holds the future. It is the gods of this age who are on their way out (1 Cor. 2:6). Furthermore, we are the people upon whom the Holy Spirit has been poured out with the specific promise that our young men would see visions and our old men would dream dreams.

The Christian church, therefore, ought to be turning out, in great numbers, men and women who can become leaders in and give direction to all the major institutions of our societies. The great question today is whether there exists in the Christian church a sufficient reservoir of spiritual strength with the capacity to raise up leaders of the right caliber to meet the challenge of the present leadership vacuum. This is a major question to which we will have to return more than once before we are through with this study.

The Features of Foresight

If foresight is a spiritual capacity, it may be thought to defy rational analysis, but in fact many of its features can be readily described. This is important so that we can recognize how foresight works and can, therefore, identify its presence either in ourselves or in others.

Spiritual Aspects

From a spiritual perspective—that is, at the level of the human spirit—we can isolate the following characteristics:

1. It has certain links and parallels with the prophetic gift. For example, the early Hebrew prophets were called seers. They were, however, not primarily involved with predicting totally unknown future events. They were much more concerned with seeing the future that was latent or potential in the present and its conditions or circumstances.

Thus the prophet comes to a situation in Israel of apparent peace and prosperity, but he perceives the inner departure from God that has taken place in the hearts of the people. Therefore, he sees and calls attention to the impending judgment that will certainly come on the land, even though it may be a generation ahead, unless the nation repents now and returns to its covenant commitment with God.

Or the prophet comes to a situation where disillusionment and despair are everywhere, and yet he discerns the almost imperceptible turning of the people’s hearts back to God, and the graciousness of God’s response. Therefore, in the midst of the present blackness he sees the promise of a glorious future restoration in which the nation can already hope and toward which it must even now begin to reorient itself.

2. The exercise of foresight also involves the use of a wider-than-usual span of awareness—that is, the person is open to perceptions not only at the factual or sensory levels, but also at the level of direct apprehension or intuition. These latter perceptions range from hunches or gut-level feelings to presentiments or shrewd discernments to inputs that are mediated through the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

3. Foresight requires the ability to integrate or synthesize these diverse inputs and perceptions to come up with a better-than-average prediction as to what the future may hold and what the appropriate response to it should be. The way in which this integration takes place may be deliberate and studied, but it is more often very intuitive and almost instinctive and not really totally understood even by the person doing it. Sometimes all they can tell you is that they just know what could happen or where opportunities are going to appear.

This same capacity is possessed by the very small handful of truly outstanding players in any sport—for example, the basketball player or football player who has the uncanny knack of always being in the right place at the right time to take the unexpected pass or the unexpected scoring opportunity. They make it all look so very easy, but they cannot tell you why they knew to position themselves at that particular spot at that particular moment or why they could anticipate that the play would flow in that direction and not another.

We find another and more complex illustration in the way the later prophets in Israel gave the kings advice on the political situation of the day and its implications for the future of the nation. In developing the insight or foresight on which their prophetic word rested, they made use of input and perceptions from at least three distinct sources:

(a)  Their own informed and intelligent analysis of the political scene and the state of the empires and alliances of the nations surrounding Israel

(b)  Their knowledge of the character and ways of God and his way of dealing with Israel as revealed in the prophetic writings

(c)  The immediate oracle or judgment word from God, received as the prophet stood in the council of God and acted as his messenger (Jer. 23:22)

This prophetic model is very important, because leaders will many times find that they also have to function in the roles of analyst, historian, and prophet.

(a)  As analysts, they are often required to break the situation or the problem or the organization down into its component parts to understand all the implications or the way the parts relate together to make up the whole.

(b)  As historians, they have to assess the significance of past precedents and previous experiences and the ways in which they affect the understanding of the present circumstances and decisions about the future.

(c)  As prophets, their task is to see the future that is latent in the present and be open to receive creative inspiration as to how best to act.

The Mind-set of Foresight

Foresight also requires certain specific capacities at the intellectual or rational level, and these need to be consciously applied and developed. We can distinguish the following:

1. It requires developing a constant and habitual orientation of the mind toward the future. If we are not continually looking for things in the future, we will never discover them. To seek and keep on seeking remains the basic condition for finding (Matt. 7:7).

In any area of vocation or ministry, we must give ourselves to the demands of the particular calling. That is to say, everything must henceforth be seen from the perspective of that calling and be at the service of the calling. For example, part of my role for a good number of years has been as a teacher in the body of Christ; therefore, everything that happens to me, and everything in which I am involved, and everything I see or observe has to be examined and appraised and screened to find out the principles that apply or the lessons that have to be learned. Whatever else they are, all these things are also grist to the mill of my calling as a teacher.

If you are a leader, that is your calling. It demands that you develop a certain mind-set. The future, and what may lie in the future and what you may do in the future, is one of the primary perspectives from which you must begin to examine everything that goes on around you.

2. It involves acquiring the habit of examining everything and assessing everything in terms of potential and possibilities, even if there is never going to be any chance of your making use of it. The questions you should always be asking are:

What could be done with this?

How could we capitalize on that?

If I was doing this, how could I do it better than it is being done at present?

What unused or unrealized possibilities or opportunities are going begging here?

Probably only a small percentage of the situations or circumstances you examine will present possibilities, and fewer still will be at all feasible. Nevertheless, if you are not always looking for openings, the golden opportunities can slip past unnoticed or will be seen too late to do anything about them.

3. It also involves not only the active gathering of information, data, impressions, opinions, insights, and hunches, but

(a)  an instinctive sense for what is relevant and what is not,

(b)  the ability to see pattern, order, and relationships between the facts, and

(c)  often the ability to see singular or unusual connections between seemingly unrelated factors or a higher level of unity or integration among dissimilar or disparate data or events.

4. Associated with this is the capacity for creative thinking—that is, the ability to generate possibilities or ideas that make sense of some or all of the information that has been assembled.

Much has been written on ways to tap into the creative levels of the human mind, from brainstorming techniques to lateral thinking, and there are useful pointers to be gleaned from many of the methods suggested, for example:

(a)  The deliberate abandonment of old