Writing a book on leadership must be scary - yet so many attempt it. How you speak well into that space when scores of others have gone before you (some plunging headlong into wrack-and-ruin) would make it an intimidating task.
It must be almost as intimidating as having to read books on leadership, realising that (yet again) as one who leads you fall inevitably short. So many of the titles appear to doom the reader from the outset: 'The Extraordinary Leader', 'Leading at a Higher Level', 'Leadership 101', 'Mastering Leadership'.
The intentions of these books are noble: the authors long to see people leading more effectively. But so often the high ideals the reader aspires to fails to find any lasting translation in the home, the church, the marketplace, the university, the synagogue or the factory floor.
Perhaps this has something to do with the way we have come to define leaders (or at least what we expect to find in them): their unflappable nature, their ease and composure, their ability to communicate with rocket scientists and small children, their financial savvy, their absolute certainty, their unshakable morality, their model lives.
What we find instead is often much more disturbing: we find anger where we expected calm, uncertainty where we expected resoluteness, questionable motives where we expected others-centredness, doubt where we expected faith, failure where we expected triumph.
In other words, what we find in our leaders is people like ourselves. For all the anecdotes and stories of 'great leaders past', what we actually find when we meet these people who have accepted (willingly or unwillingly) the mantle of 'leader' is something / someone far more fragile, damaged, uncertain, and compromised than we were looking for.
Dan Allender knows this. This is a bold title for a book, and it dares to push into places that few in the 'leadership world' want to go. Allender's subversive subtitle sums up his direction: "Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness." I'm not sure too many leadership gurus would have put the word 'weakness' on the end of that sentence.
Allender's contention is that the best thing any leader can do is admit and work with her many weaknesses and shortcomings. The capacity to lead well won't come through 'saving face' and protecting an image of what leadership 'should' look like. We lead best not through inviolability, but through recognition that whatever our gifts and abilities might be, we are wholly inadequate for the task.
I'm only about 40 pages into this book so far, but loving it. It reads well, and best of all, it actually makes a heck of a lot of sense. It gets real about leadership, and moves away from the hype and the rah-rah to the real, the awkward, the true. We begin to see that leaders are not Rocks-of-Gibraltar.
It surprises me that some of our deficient ways of defining leadership (and defining leaders) have held fast for so long. I can't think how many times in my life I've heard sentences beginning with 'A leader should be [insert list of adjectives and qualifications].' After all the 'shoulding' has finished, the truth is I haven't met a single leader I respect who was not deeply flawed.
And those who weren't deeply flawed were simply experts in maintaining the veneer of the unflappable, all-certain leader; hang around with anyone like that long enough, and you'll see through the cracks (which normally reveal a deeply insecure, very damaged person).
As Mark Strom has carefully documented in his work, Reframing Paul, we owe more to Plato and Aristotle than to anyone else when we elect to place our leaders on pedestals as models of the ideal human life; unaffected, unshaken, secure.
Both Allender and Strom serve to remind us what we've known (but feared) all along: that leaders are flawed people (because, after all, they're actually not a separate classification of human life to the rest of us). Or in Allender's words, "Prepare now to admit to your staff that you are the organization's chief sinner."
If you're interested, there's also an interview here with Dan Allender about 'leading with a limp'.
No comments:
Post a Comment