What does a good leader look like?

Anna is a good leader of her Kids Club team. She loves planning games and activities, loves teaching the bible and  helping her team to do it  well alongside her. Her boundless energy inspires them.

Lucas is a good leader of a youth bible study. He prepares thought-provoking and interesting questions that help his group dig deep into a bible passage. He guides the group as they navigate the ups and downs of life prayerfully and constantly pointing them to Jesus. He is trusted and respected.

Phillipa is a good leader of an SRE team. She organises classes, allocates teachers and orders the books. She negotiates with the schools, which is mostly fine but sometimes a little stressful. Phillipa loves the members of her team. She even invites all her teachers around to her place at the end of every year for a Christmas dinner. People stay in the team  year after year because each one knows Phillipa has their back and cares for them.

What does a good leader look like? We know them when we see them, but they come in such different shapes and sizes,  it is almost impossible to define good leadership with anything more than generalisations.

All three of these leaders above are different, yet they’re all great leaders: Anna is inspiring. Lucas is diligent. Phillipa serves and loves her team.

There is a vast sea of books and articles on the topic of good leadership. It’s an area where Christians have sometimes struggled to know how to engage with the secular literature and be faithful to God’s Word. The Bible has plenty to say about leadership, but it’s not a leadership manual with dot points and examples. But it is possible to reflect on the insights of others, evaluating their perspective in the light of Scripture, asking God to guide us as we seek to live for him wisely.

In my recent reading on what makes a great leader, I’ve found three aspects that characterise effective leadership. They are helpful because they articulate what we might feel or experience when we see good leaders in action and allow us to consider the topic of leadership in fresh ways.

Good leaders empower their people.

Empowerment is one of those words that gets thrown around so much that it can lose all meaning. But in the context of leadership, an empowering leader provides their team members with support to enable them to grow.

Think of it this way: your kindergarten teacher empowered you by teaching you to read. Reading was the skill you needed in order to go on to other areas of learning. Effective leaders empower others by equipping them with skills, resources, authority, knowledge or confidence.

Notice what is implied in all this too; if a good leader empowers others, then the leader must be working with others and not doing everything him/herself. Their source of satisfaction turns from personal accomplishments to the growth of others. This requires intentional time and effort from the part of the leader as they think about what success looks like, what each team member needs to succeed and how to equip them with the necessary resources or skills.

I think this is what Paul is talking about when he writes in Ephesians 4:11-12,

‘So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service…’

Anna, Lucas and Phillipa all empower those they lead, but in different ways. Anna communicates a plan for Kid’s Club, develops training in how to prepare a talk or run a small group and provides encouragement as her team gives things a go. Lucas is equipping the youth to be able to read and understand the Bible well and how to be part of a Christian community that shares and prays together. Phillipa provides the resources and organisation necessary for her SRE teachers to be able to walk into the school each week and teach the Bible. These leaders are equipping fellow believers for works of service, so that the people of God can be built up.

Good leadership is situational.

Daniel Goleman popularised the concept of emotionally intelligent leadership in his books Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ (1995) and Primal Leadership (2001). One of his major contributions to leadership theory is that good leaders use specific styles to lead well in different situations.

A leader using a pacesetting style will typically set high standards and expectations and continually keep his team accountable. It can be useful in a context where a team needs to achieve results and there is high motivation and ability. A leader who uses a coaching style gets alongside each of his team and tailors targets and expectations according to the strengths and weaknesses of the person. Goleman also identifies four other styles: coercive, authoritative, affiliative and democratic.[1]

The interesting part is that a good leader doesn’t use just one of these styles but adapts according to the situation. Phillipa is an effective leader because she can take a coaching approach with a new SRE recruit or when pastorally caring for her team but then take on a different style when negotiating with the school Deputy about changing the time of SRE classes. Being a good leader involves seeing what the situation requires, what the people in front of you need, and adapting how you respond.

This can be a challenge as we all naturally fall into the habit of doing things the way we have done them before. We lead our team training or meetings the same way we always have because it’s worked for the last five years. But it can be helpful to reflect on how the situation has changed since last year, or last week, and how you as a leader might need to adapt to respond and lead more effectively.

This kind of flexibility might be relatively new in leadership literature but many centuries ago the apostle Paul spoke about how he became ‘all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some’ (1 Corinthians 9:22). In faithful Christian leadership, as demonstrated by Paul and others throughout Acts, there has always been two seemingly contradictory elements: an unchanging Gospel message and a flexibility with how it is shared. In all kinds of leadership in our churches we now follow the same pattern, holding out an unchanged Gospel of salvation in Christ through our church services, SRE classes, kid’s clubs, bible study groups and more. Yet leading each other to do these things with different styles of godly leadership.

Good leadership is servant hearted.

Jesus was very clear with his disciples that to lead is to serve, and we should follow his example in serving each other (Luke 22:26-27, John 13:12-17).

Serving often means doing the hard stuff. It means doing the preparation, getting there early, staying back late, listening when you’re tired, going to the funeral/meeting/training, making that call, laying down your life for others like Jesus did.

There is humility required in serving. But sadly, humility is often seen as incompatible with strong leadership (despite Jesus’ example!). C. S. Lewis’ wrote that a humble person

‘will not be thinking about humility; he will not be thinking about himself at all.’ (Mere Christianity).

In another place he describes how a truly humble person will be able to celebrate their own achievements with   the same delight as if someone else had accomplished them.[2] Or vice versa. The focus is not on the leader. A great leader is looking at Jesus and pointing others to him.

This echoes the idea of empowering others in one sense, because it is about helping others succeed, achieve and grow. It’s not about glory, personal ambition or earning praise. Further, a humble person can admit when he or she gets it wrong. A willingness to confess and repent are necessary components of the Christian life, so it is concerning when leaders do not demonstrate this.

Paul Tripp explores the necessity of humility and confession in leadership in his excellent and timely book Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church. He argues for the importance of a leadership community that supports leaders as they serve. One part of this is having safe people to whom a leader can humbly confess struggles and sin. Humility, he says, ‘means knowing that as long as sin still lives inside you, you will need to be rescued from you.’ Further,

‘A gospel-shaped leadership community will be a confessional community, where leader honesty is not only a constant protection but encourages a deeper and deeper dependency on God.  … Leaders who confess tend to be tender and kind when people they are called to lead mess up and need to confess.’

It’s an area of gospel application that stands in stark contrast to the leadership theories of our culture. Knowing the joy of forgiveness through Jesus is what allows us to continue in leadership just as it motivates the desire to lead in the first place.

After careful thought and prayer, Lucas shared his struggle with a particular sin with his bible study group. He felt vulnerable and weak, but it was part of modelling confession and repentance. It took humility and a firm conviction that God can be trusted when he promises forgiveness. The members of his group will likely never forget it.

What about you? Are you inspirational like Anna, steady and respected like Lucas or an allrounder like Phillipa? In what areas can you be growing as a leader? Which of these aspects of leadership do you need to think and pray about?

Footnotes:

 [1] Find out more if you are interested in the HBR article by Goleman ‘Leadership that gets results’. Coercive leadership is a ‘do what I say’ style, authoritative is a ‘come with me’ style where the leader sets the goals, high standard style, affiliative is the ‘people first’ style and democratic is a flexible style that gives workers a voice.

[2] Screwtape Letters