Asociația din care facem parte, North American Baptist, ne trimite câte o carte în rezumat. În felul acesta ne ajută pe cei care n-vem prea mult timp să selectăm cărți prin librării. Dacă ne place rezumatul, vom cumpăra eventual cartea. Iată una care ne-a atins la inimă. I-o recomand mai ales lui Marius Cruceru, care a fost printre noi un om care trăiește acest subiect pe dinăuntru și ar fi putut fi autorul acestei cărți sau ar putea scrie una mai bună.
Leading With A Limp
Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness
THE NUTSHELL
There are two key assumptions that guide what you are about to read. The first is a hard truth: if you’re a leader, you’re in the battle of your life. Nothing comes easily, and if you’ve already tried the “easy” solutions, you have found they come up empty. Leadership will stretch you and bring you to the end of yourself. Only facing this truth will give you the ability to lead with inner confidence.
The second assumption is this: to the degree you face and name and deal with your failures as a leader, to that same extent you will create an environment conducive
to growing and retaining productive and committed colleagues. The leader’s character is what makes the difference in an organization. Confession doesn’t lead to disrespect; it actually transforms the leader’s character and earns her greater respect and power. It’s a strange paradox—to the degree that you attempt to hide your weaknesses, the more you will need to control those you lead, the more insecure you will become, and the more rigidity you will impose—which will lead to the departure of your best people.
Every leader must count the cost of leadership, and that cost includes six realities: crisis, complexity, betrayal, loneliness, weariness, and glory. No one escapes these.
Crisis. Crisis is the eruption of chaos, and serves to remind us that we are fundamentally not in control.
Complexity. All leaders must deal
with competing values, demands, and perspectives, and make decisions in the middle of them.
Betrayal. If you lead, you will eventually serve with Judas. Betrayal always brings a distortion of the truth. The betrayer twists the truth to gain power or influence, and part of the helplessness experienced by the victim is the inability to set the record straight.
Loneliness. Leadership makes having friends perilous. Few friendships can endure one person having more power than the other.
Weariness. Few leaders, no matter what margins they build into their lives, can glide through their labor unaffected. The physical body suffers in leadership.
Glory. One of the greatest struggles for leaders is what to do with glory.
A leader who limps has a different focus than those who define leadership as running an organization. It’s not that a limping leader doesn’t do those things, like hiring, firing, delegating, etc. But the leader’s focus is not the growth of the
organization; it’s the maturing of character.
Limping leaders are called to lead with character and grow the characters of those they serve. In so doing, the leader is called to go further than anyone else. If a leader wants to lead others into maturity rather than just productivity, he must go first. But that creates a conundrum: I must go first toward maturity, and I will inevitably fail. The standard secular response is “No one is perfect…just do your best.” That’s hollow encouragement, because my best isn’t good enough. I need to confess that I am prone to wander, be self-serving, etc. The more honest I am about what is true about myself, the less I need to hide and defend and pretend. And the freer I am to accept help from any source.
If a leader publicly discloses his failures,
he has to brace himself for trouble. Both sinners and saints will struggle with that disclosure. The leader who admits personal failure often loses people’s respect, risks being marginalized, and could even lose
his job. It’s foolish to not be honest about the risks involved. Admitting your failures invites people to put you in a box and gives them information they could use against you at a later date.
So why would a leader choose honesty, knowing it could be used against him or her? First, if a leader already knows they are their organization’s chief sinner, they aren’t afraid to make that known. Frankly, people don’t need your admissions to help them put you in a box—they have been doing that since day one anyway. But the more you openly name your struggles, the less people can use your silence as a back door to blackmail you, sabotage your leadership, or undermine your relationships.
Also, openly acknowledging our weaknesses allows other people to join us on the healing path. It enables them to look at their own needs for courage or forgiveness. And it removes the dividing wall of hierarchy and false assumptions about people in power.
How do you embrace honesty? Three ways: give up what is already painfully obvious, tell the truth without telling the whole truth, and embrace the gospel in your failure to live the gospel.
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About the Author
Dan Allender, PhD, is a founder of Mars Hill Graduate School, where he serves as president. He is a professor of counseling, a therapist in private practice, a popular speaker, and author of several books.
Categories: Articole de interes general
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