Leadership Thought: A Leader Must Breed Leaders
One of the challenges of leadership is to find and develop people on your team who refuse to buy into a role of passivity. I have seen this play out on teams all the time. The senior leader is deferred to because "he is the leader."
A little bit of deference is not a problem. But what begins to happen is that instead of making decisions, bringing developed vision and moving forward aggressively as a peer, people on the team abdicate these roles to the leader. So it becomes the senior leader's sole responsibility to make decisions that are not necessary for her to make and, further, she begins to play into this role. A healthy team is composed of leaders that bring all they have to the table. If there is disagreement, so be it (and usually all the more for the better). The senior leader recognizes that her role does not mean that she is the smartest person in the room but is rather the person tasked with making the final decision. There must be a decision maker or else very little gets done effectively (this is why leadership by committee is such dismal failure in so many cases).
A truly effective leadership team is made up of a group of co-equals with a variety of strengths and abilities. These giftings and strengths must be individually recognized and respected. The team must not be allowed to fall into the quagmire that is paternalism, dictatorship, authoritarianism or whatever you want to call it. The senior leader must refuse this role. The team must recognize that to push this role onto the leader is to cop-out of their responsibility and to ultimately damage the team's effectiveness. To play into these unhealthy roles creates a form of top-down leadership that breeds discontent among team members. There might be effectiveness in decision making, but because there is withholding going on around the table, team members become disenfranchised and frustrated. If left undealt with, then the teams effectiveness is severely compromised and its longevity limited.
To avoid this, some have adopted an alternative leadership model that involves consensus among the team. I believe this is not an effective response and is actually a failure to see the true nature of the problem. Consensus leadership seeks to take the pressure off of the senior leader by widening the decision making responsibility to include more team members. This method does succeed at lessening the psychological pressure on the senior leader, and it does avoid the dictatorship scenario, but it also results in a team that will never reach its true potential.
It is not that consensus forming is not important in a team, for it is vital. But to suggest that it is the goal is to miss the point. The goal is to create a team environment where everyone around the table is actively engaged and carrying the load apropos to each specific skill set, gifting and level of authority. Therefore a leader must constantly fight against the innate tendency of her team to "deify" the leader. This god-making tendency is within all humanity. It is a conflicted and ultimately destructive process. Humans know that no fellow human is perfect enough to hold a position of absolute leadership for very long before self-destructing in some way. And yet we enshrine our leaders and treat them as if their decrees are absolute (all the while knowing they are not).
We play this game until there is such a disconnect between the senior leader's decrees and the reality of the situation that we either determine to break association with the leader or dethrone her. This is what the Greeks did with their military heroes after they became to powerful (of course the power was freely given by the populace).
What we need are leaders who recognize that everyone sitting around the table is called by God and has a vital and important role to play. Further, we need leaders who see themselves in this light. Leaders like these are not threatened by the giftings and anointing of their fellow leaders. Leaders like these are also not content with sitting idly by waiting for the "one anointed senior leader" to give them a directive.
A little bit of deference is not a problem. But what begins to happen is that instead of making decisions, bringing developed vision and moving forward aggressively as a peer, people on the team abdicate these roles to the leader. So it becomes the senior leader's sole responsibility to make decisions that are not necessary for her to make and, further, she begins to play into this role. A healthy team is composed of leaders that bring all they have to the table. If there is disagreement, so be it (and usually all the more for the better). The senior leader recognizes that her role does not mean that she is the smartest person in the room but is rather the person tasked with making the final decision. There must be a decision maker or else very little gets done effectively (this is why leadership by committee is such dismal failure in so many cases).
A truly effective leadership team is made up of a group of co-equals with a variety of strengths and abilities. These giftings and strengths must be individually recognized and respected. The team must not be allowed to fall into the quagmire that is paternalism, dictatorship, authoritarianism or whatever you want to call it. The senior leader must refuse this role. The team must recognize that to push this role onto the leader is to cop-out of their responsibility and to ultimately damage the team's effectiveness. To play into these unhealthy roles creates a form of top-down leadership that breeds discontent among team members. There might be effectiveness in decision making, but because there is withholding going on around the table, team members become disenfranchised and frustrated. If left undealt with, then the teams effectiveness is severely compromised and its longevity limited.
To avoid this, some have adopted an alternative leadership model that involves consensus among the team. I believe this is not an effective response and is actually a failure to see the true nature of the problem. Consensus leadership seeks to take the pressure off of the senior leader by widening the decision making responsibility to include more team members. This method does succeed at lessening the psychological pressure on the senior leader, and it does avoid the dictatorship scenario, but it also results in a team that will never reach its true potential.
It is not that consensus forming is not important in a team, for it is vital. But to suggest that it is the goal is to miss the point. The goal is to create a team environment where everyone around the table is actively engaged and carrying the load apropos to each specific skill set, gifting and level of authority. Therefore a leader must constantly fight against the innate tendency of her team to "deify" the leader. This god-making tendency is within all humanity. It is a conflicted and ultimately destructive process. Humans know that no fellow human is perfect enough to hold a position of absolute leadership for very long before self-destructing in some way. And yet we enshrine our leaders and treat them as if their decrees are absolute (all the while knowing they are not).
We play this game until there is such a disconnect between the senior leader's decrees and the reality of the situation that we either determine to break association with the leader or dethrone her. This is what the Greeks did with their military heroes after they became to powerful (of course the power was freely given by the populace).
What we need are leaders who recognize that everyone sitting around the table is called by God and has a vital and important role to play. Further, we need leaders who see themselves in this light. Leaders like these are not threatened by the giftings and anointing of their fellow leaders. Leaders like these are also not content with sitting idly by waiting for the "one anointed senior leader" to give them a directive.
Labels: leadership
posted by Andrew Cromwell at
7:14 PM
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