I am so thankful that the Lord called me to be a minister rather than an administrator.

I know I shouldn’t, but I tend to grudge every minute I have to spend compiling reports, answering email, filing paper, answering email, writing references, and answering email. Did I mention answering email?

I’d far prefer to be preparing sermons and lectures, writing blogs and books, and shepherding believers and unbelievers.

That’s why I am so, so, so grateful for those God has called to be administrators, especially those I work with at Puritan Seminary. I have huge admiration for their gifts and for their servant hearts. I’m stunned at the enthusiasm with which they go about their jobs, the quality of work they produce, and the extra miles they are always willing to run.

What a blessing for any church or institution to have men and women like this. Most of them have no idea how immensely and immeasurably valuable and vital their work is. But for every minute they spend on administration, that’s one more minute for pastors to spend on ministry (Acts 6:4). Every minute they give to paper is one more minute for pastors to give to people.

One of the greatest services you could do for your pastor is to ask him, “Is there any administration that I could take off your desk? Is there any office work that I could remove from your to-do list.” You’ve no idea how much that might help to improve his sermons and increase his counseling availability.

And if you’ve got one of those weird creatures, a minister who actually loves and seeks out administration, you’ve got to take him by the scruff of the neck and force him to hand over the paper, the files, and the paper clips. There are sermons to write and souls to be evangelized.

Administrators need ministers and ministers need administrators. As pastors already have an “Appreciation Day,” I’d be all for organizing an “Administrator’s Appreciation Day,” except of course that would involve me in administration.

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Courageous Leadership

A fearful leader is not a leader. I’m not saying a leader never fears. Of course he does. I wouldn’t follow anyone who never felt afraid. Such a man is not brave but a fool. When I say “a fearful leader is not a leader,” I’m describing someone who is characterized by fear, overwhelmed with fear, never gets past fear, is dominated by fear, and makes decisions based on fear.

A positive leader is someone who fears but doesn’t stop there, paralyzed and useless. Rather, he takes his fear to the Lord, confesses it, seeks courage to overcome it and to act bravely.

Animals can smell fear. But so can humans! People will be able to tell when cowardice is dominating and directing your decisions, words and actions. They will smell the fear behind your favoritism, excuses, and waffle. They will lose respect for you, stop following you, and even start intimidating you. That’s why I said, “A fearful leader is not a leader.” No one is following him, regardless of his title.

If we focus on pastoral ministry, courageous leadership is demonstrated in evangelism, in preaching the whole counsel of God, in dealing with discipline cases without prejudice, in reforming the church, and in taking unpopular stands against sin in the church and in the world.

Compassionate Leadership

This vision of positive leadership may have built up a caricature in your mind of a person who is self-assured, self-confident, and maybe a bit self-centered. However, I want to demolish that by emphasizing lastly that a positive leader is a caring and compassionate person. He is not self-centered but other-centered.

Speaking of pastors in particular, I’ve seen people try to lead congregations through preaching alone; leading from the pulpit. Others have tried to lead through being effective administrators; leading from the computer, you might say. Still others have tried to lead through their growing international reputation; leading a local congregation through non-local accomplishment.  And then of course there are the dictators; leading through tyrannical abuse of power.

However, none of these work long-term. A positive leader is out among his people, present with them, caring for them, and providing for them. And that’s not just when illness, bereavement, or problems arise; that would be reactive leadership. No, positive leadership means getting out in front of the problems and trials, getting to know people in the calm, not just appearing in the storm. It’s building relationships over years so that trust and credibility is present when the real difficulties do arise. The positive leader is not just waiting for trouble, he’s positively investing in lives and families over the long-term.

Previous posts in the Positive Leadership series:

1. Cheerful leadership
2. Climbing Leadership
3. Confident Leadership
4. Clear Leadership
5. Communicative Leadership

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Climbing Leadership

In Scotland, there’s a hobby called “Munro-bagging,” A Munro is a mountain that is over 3000 feet high and “Munro-baggers spend their leisure time “bagging” (climbing) these Munros. They plan, organize, train, buy supplies, enlist friends, rise early, drive many hours, and then they climb…and climb…and climb. After bagging their first Munro, most usually aim for 10, then 100, then 200, until, after many years, all 283 peaks are conquered. And all this while the rest of us are enjoying our Saturday morning sleep-ins.

Positive Christian leaders are Munro-baggers rather than sleep-ins. They are not content with the comfortable status quo nor with managing gradual decline. They are looking out for, planning, or taking on the next Munro.

Helping others climb
I’m not talking here of personal ambition or careerism. No, this Munro-bagger’s passion is to help others climb higher, grow stronger, move onward, upward, outward, etc. in their Christian faith and life.

He doesn’t want to leave people where they were when He found them. He wants to help them “bag some Munros.” He can look back on a congregation’s past achievements and attainments with pleasure, but he doesn’t rest on that. He’s looking for new challenges, new “Munros” to climb with his people.

Moral and spiritual summits
He looks at each individual and family, as well as the whole congregation, and asks how he can help them to progress, grow, and mature. What aspects of a person’s character could be developed? What areas of a family’s life could be improved? What service opportunities can be provided for this person? What unexplored area of Scripture should be studied? What outreach or mission can we attempt? What relationships can be strengthened?

Isn’t that the spirit of Christ’s leadership? And the apostles?

And it’s not just pastors who can do this. Young people and women can do this too to some degree in their own spheres of responsibility.

What spiritual Munros are you planning to bag? For yourself? Your family? Your congregation? Your friends?

Confident Leadership

I once attended a mountain-climbing church camp in the Scottish Highlands where we were trying to bag a number of Munros.

On the second day, we set out on a fairly ambitious trek. About halfway through, the mist and rain enveloped us, separating us into small detached groups going in different directions, and very soon all of us were lost.

At one point, a bedraggled handful of us us decided that the way back to base was over a particular mountain. We started climbing, but when we got about half-way up we could hardly see in front of our noses and decided to re-trace our steps. On the way down, we were relieved to meet our camp leaders on the way up the mountain.

“Oh!” we said, “So we were heading in the right direction after all?”

“I don’t know,” replied the Commandant, “We were just following you. You seemed to know where you were going.”

Lost confidence
Needless to say, we immediately lost any remaining confidence in our leaders, and spent the rest of the week, which was filled with similar disasters, doubting, second-guessing, and double-checking all our leaders’ plans. It was not enjoyable.

A positive leader has to convey a certain degree of confidence. He knows where he’s going, how he’s going to get there, and what he’s going to do when he arrives. Without this, who’s going to be inspired to follow his direction and instruction?

This is not about self-confidence, a confidence in personal abilities, but a confidence founded in the sovereignty of God and the promises of His Word.

Demonstrating confidence
We can build people’s confidence by demonstrating a high degree of consistent competence in our calling (in administration, communication, organization, etc), by living a holy life, and by developing a reliable steady witness. But we especially build confidence by how we react in times of crisis.

When a respected elder falls into immorality and apostatizes, the positive leader doesn’t panic, throw in the towel, and wonder out loud, “Where’s God?” No, while grieving over the sin, and the shame brought upon the church, He expresses confidence in God and His providence. He will say with the apostles, “They went out from us, because they were not of us….There must also be heresies among us so that they who are of God will be approved.” He demonstrates His calm faith in Christ’s promise: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

When a little child dies of cancer, of course he sympathizes and weeps with those who weep, but He also directs the distressed mourners to the sovereign, good, and wise character of God, to the sufferings of Christ, and to the sure hope of eternal life. He doesn’t fall to pieces and misrepresent God as helpless, clueless, and loveless.

Doubting, hesitating, prevaricating leaders will replicate themselves in others. But a confident leader inspires confident people, their confidence not being in the leader, but in the One who leads the leader.

See Part 1 of “Positive Leadership”: Cheerful Leadership

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Recently I was asked to give a conference address on “Positive Leadership.” It got me thinking about how many different kinds of pastoral leadership I’d come across in my ministry. I came up with 10 leadership types:

• Mr Passive
• Mr Crisis
• Mr Dictator
• Mr Inconsistent
• Mr Fearful
• Mr Pessimist
• Mr Boastful
• Mr Academic
• Mr Sociable
• Mr Administrator

If you click on over to my monthly column at Christianity.com, I’ll introduce you to these 10 men.

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In a recent Entreleadership podcast, Dave Ramsey talked about his hiring principles and process. Some of the bullet points:

• The #1 hiring mistake is not taking enough time in the interview/hiring process
• Every year we increase the time we spend in hiring and every year our turnover goes down and productivity goes up
• Some of our people were interviewed 10 times over a period of 6 months.
• Sometimes we hire someone in less than 30 days but that’s very unusual.
• If you don’t spend enough time in hiring someone, you’ll eventually spend much more time in dealing with their short-comings, and hiring their replacements

Ramsey then spoke of the two essential Christian characteristics of every hire:

• Opportunistic motivation: People who are fired up and excited about working really hard for a growing and expanding business.
• Philosophical motivation: People who see this work as a Christian ministry of hope to needy people.

“If people just buy into one of those, we’re in trouble,” warns Ramsey. And what’s the most common missing element? “Most get the philosophical motivation but not the opportunistic.”

Some want to work in Christian ministries but think that means work rate and work standards don’t matter so much as in the private sector. Ramsey tells potential hires: “We work hard, really hard. We view part of our spiritual walk to be excellent in the marketplace. If you can’t cope with Superbowl level of play you aren’t going to be happy here.”

The podcast goes on to a fascinating interview with Clint Smith, CEO of myemma.com, a business that helps 40,000 business around the world with email marketing. His hiring process has 14 steps!

Churches, Christian ministries, Christian employers and business people, we have much to learn!

Listen to the podcast on iTunes here (it’s about #9 on the list).

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A couple of recent articles on the Harvard Business Review Blog caught my attention. In For President, I want the guy who’s failed, Jeff Stibel proposes four unconventional questions to reveal how the Presidential candidates think and solve problems. The whole article is worth reading, but here are the four questions with a selection of quotes:

1. What’s your biggest failure?
“I won’t hire someone for my company who doesn’t acknowledge failure and I would insist on the same from our presidential candidates.”

2. What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken and would you do it again?
“Whether in business or government, the hallmark of a successful leader is often courage. The question is, which risks are worth taking and how are these decisions made?”

3. When have you taken an unpopular decision against special interest groups?
“I want a candidate who can demonstrate that he has taken a position that serves the broader public in the face of adversity.”

4. What’s the most unconventional thing you’ve done?
“It’s undeniable that the success of most entrepreneurs is connected to the fact that they were innovative and often unconventional. I am convinced that this is an important qualification for solving any nation’s problems.”

Read Jeff’s full exposition of these questions here.

Then there’s Julian Birkinshaw’s piece on the Seven Deadly Sins of Management. His point is:

I continue to be a little puzzled about why so many managers do such a poor job. We have known what “good management” looks like for decades, and enormous sums have been spent on programs to help managers manage better. And yet the problem endures: In a recent survey I conducted, less than a quarter of respondents would encourage others to work for their manager.

He proposes that instead of focusing leadership training on platitudes and mottos, we should “focus on the bad behavior we are trying to get rid of.” Again, here’s a list with some summary quotes, but you should really read the whole piece:

1. A greedy boss pursues wealth, status, and growth to get himself noticed.
2. Lust is also about vanity projects — investments or acquisitions that make no rational sense, but play to the manager’s desires.
3. Wrath doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation. “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, Fred “the shred” Goodwin, and “Neutron” Jack Welch were all famous for losing their cool.
4. Gluttony in the business world is where a manager puts too much on his proverbial plate. He needs to get involved in all decisions, he needs to be continuously updated, he never rests.
5. Healthy pride quickly tips over into hubris — an overestimation of your own abilities.
6. Envy manifests itself most clearly when a manager takes credit for the achievements of others….or does not promote a rising star, for fear of showing up his own limitations.
7. Sloth…They are inattentive, they don’t communicate effectively, and they have no interest in their team’s needs. Instead, they focus on their own comforts and quite often, on personal interests outside of the workplace.

Birkinshaw provides a test for evaluating our own leadership sins, and then supplies questions for those who are brave enough to conduct a 360-degree assessment.

Application to ministry
And why am I blogging about this? Well, since my first years of working life were spent in finance, I’ve always had an interest in management and leadership. But I also think that there’s valuable material here for pastors and churches, both in assessing potential candidates for Christian ministry, and in ongoing accountability of Christian leaders.

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Another day. Another multi-billion banking scandal. Another Bank Chairman and Chief Executive do a “Pilate” (or attempt to). Another bunch of junior staff prepare to be sacrificed as scapegoats.

But as financial analysts around the world have observed, although banking executives are now too “clever” to leave a paper trail between themselves and corrupt practices, they know very well how to communicate their instructions by nudges, winks, “pressure from above,” and sales targets that cannot be reached using lawful means.

Corporate Contrast
In stark though pleasant contrast, the Harvard Business Review recently interviewed the global controller of a professional services firm employing 40,000 people. He’d just been assessed by his manager, peers, and direct reports, and reached the elusive 90th percentile mark for honesty and integrity. Given the numerous temptations and possible trade-offs that accompany such a position, HBR asked him his secret:

“It all starts with my boss and his boss,” he replied. “If there is a line for honesty and integrity, they don’t want to be close to it. Instead, they insist there be nothing questionable with any transaction. If there is a liberal interpretation of an accounting principle, they will always take the conservative route. It’s never hard for me to insist on unquestionable honesty, because they set the bar.”

That aligned with HBR’s own statistical “Honesty & Integrity Survey” of 5268 leaders in five different organizations. The graph below shows the highest (red) and lowest-rated (green) organizations, together with the average of all five (blue).

The graph reveals that the honesty and integrity rating decreases at every level as you move down the management chain from Top to Middle to Lower. To put it another way, the top managers in an organization create a ceiling; levels of honesty are set at the top and can only go downhill from there. “Integrity standards really do rise — and fall — from the top.”

Rogue or Representative?
“Rogue Traders” are therefore mythical creatures, generated by “Rogue Management” at “Rogue-infested Companies.” In other words, there’s nothing “rogue” about them; they are representative of company culture from the top down.

But the data also challenges all of us with leadership responsibilities in the home, in the church, in business, or in the civil sphere. Rarely will our children, our congregation, our employees, or our fellow citizens rise above the integrity ceiling that we set.

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Walter Isaacson is frustrated. Reviews of his Steve Jobs biography have focused mainly on what he wrote about Jobs’ weirdness: his faults, flaws, rough edges, idiosyncrasies, extreme emotionalism, etc.

Jobs did not deny his weirdness, and in fact instructed Isaacson to write it into the book. (Maybe he didn’t think Isaacson would take him so literally!)

However, Isaacson wants people to focus on Jobs’ focus; his ability to cut out not only bad things, but even the good things, in order to focus on the great things. Two examples:

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a dozen versions of the Mac and a random array of numerous peripherals:

After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me.

Jobs also took his top 100 people on retreat every year. In front of his beloved Whiteboard, he would ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” When the group came up with their top 10, Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”

Near the end of his life, Jobs met Google CEO Larry Page, and in a rare display of goodwill towards his great rival, he told him to pick five Google products out of Google’s smorgasbord and focus on these alone.

Focus is one of the hardest things to achieve in ministry and in Christian service. Whether we are pastors, elders, deacons, or church members, there is not only so much to do; there is also so much opportunity to do it. There is such huge need around us, and we could (and often do) attempt to supply each and every need to some extent.

We try to do way too much and end up doing nothing really well. We end up like Google instead of Apple.

When Martyn Lloyd Jones heard the much-loved Scottish Pastor Douglas Macmillan preach, he sought him out afterwards and said, “Douglas you are a fine preacher. Keep off the committees!”

As Steve Jobs said, “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

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Want to learn how to empower others rather than how to command them? Here’s a summary of Gary Burnison’s tips on how to Learn the softer side of Leadership. There’s only one of these that I would want to adjust or for pastoral ministry. Which one? Take a guess.

1. Leaders are the mirrors for the entire organization.  If the leader is down, the organization will follow. If leaders reflect optimism and confidence, the organization will rise.
2. Leadership is taking charge to help others execute.  A leader does not tell people what to think or do, but rather guides them in what to think about.
3. Leadership is awareness of what you’re not hearing.  People won’t tell you what you really need to know, only what they think you want to hear. To keep from being isolated, you need to be out there and engaged with customers and employees.
4. Leadership should be humbling.  Humility is the grace that constantly whispers, “It’s not about you.” Humility means that you know who you are, where you’ve been, and what you have accomplished. With that knowledge, you can get out of your own way and focus on others.
5. Leadership has an endpoint–organizations should not.  Leaders must recognize the endpoint of their leadership is not the endpoint for the organization. Just as leaders took over from someone else, so others will follow them as successors.
6. Leadership is all about how you make other people feel.  Your achievement as a leader is measured in the success of others…Leadership conveys and embodies the enduring purpose and deeper reasons for an organization’s existence.

You can read the whole post here.

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Dr Ruth Simmons has been President of Browns University for the past 11 years. She is stepping down at the end of this academic year and will continue as a professor of comparative literature and Africana studies.

Adam Bryant of the New York Times conducted a fascinating interview with Dr Simmons, in which she shares many insights into human nature. Here are the quotables for me:

• Ultimately, I came to understand that I could achieve far more if I worked amiably with people, if I supported others’ goals, if I didn’t try to embarrass people by pointing out their deficiencies in a very public way
• I had some bad experiences, and I don’t think we can say enough in leadership about what bad experiences contribute to our learning.
• It’s very important in a leadership role not to place your ego at the foreground and not to judge everything in relationship to how your ego is fed.
• So my lesson to my students is you have to be open and alert at every turn to the possibility that you’re about to learn the most important lesson of your life.
• As you’re trying to help people, you can give very honest criticism, but if you do it in the context of genuinely wanting to help them, it makes all the difference in the world.
• [In job interviews] I like open-ended questions that give people an opportunity to go in the direction they want to go, because you learn a good deal more when you do that. You learn what’s important to people. So if I say to you, “Tell me about your experience growing up,” you get to choose anything you want to talk about. If you reach down and talk about something that is deeply meaningful to you and not intended to impress me as a future employer, that’s what I care about. That helps me see what your character is, what you’re made of, how you were formed as a human being. You’re trying to get at whether they will be a good member of the team. You’re trying to get at whether they will care about people. You’re trying to get at whether they will have very high standards for their job, or whether they will just be trying to please people.
• I look for people who are supremely self-confident, very secure, but also profoundly interested in other people. And I look for signs of that. How curious are they about other people, and about new things outside their own area of specialization? If I’m hiring for a central role in the administration and I’m interviewing a physicist, I want to know whether the physicist reads poetry. Or perhaps they are interested in opera. I think something outside of their immediate sphere of interest would be very important for me to know.
• You would be surprised at the number of interviews I’ve done where the person never stops talking. If I’m interviewing someone and if they never stop talking, I will never hire them, no matter how qualified they are. If you cannot listen, you can’t be the site of welcoming, nurturing, facilitating new ideas, innovation, creativity, because it really is ultimately only about you. So I look for people who listen well and can respect the ideas of others.
• I look for people who are strong enough to be critical of things that are not very good. And more than being critical of things that are not very good, they have to have the capacity to tell people that. Because many people are critical, but they can’t sit in a room and look someone in the eye and say, “This idea is not very good.” In senior positions, you have to be able to do that.

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Steve Tobak identifies three kinds of managers who should not be running anything:

The Smartest Guy in the Room
This is the guy who has all the answers and can never, ever be wrong. He doesn’t just breathe his own fumes or drink his own Kool-Aid, he makes and mass-markets it, as well. He wants everyone to agree with his grandiose vision of how things should be and makes sure of that by surrounding himself with yes-men and women and ruthlessly beating down dissenting views.

It’s All About Me
Some people never grow up but get stuck in one phase or another of human development. They look just like normal adults, but inside, they’re petulant, narcissistic children with oversized egos. Since their overriding goal is to get attention, to be adulated and worshipped by all, they’re often charismatic and charming, almost chameleon-like in the way they appeal to all sorts of constituents. And their positions and strategies can flip and flop from one day to the next based on one data point, meeting, or conversation.

The Has-Been
Peter was once effective and successful; at least it appeared that way. But the situation had a narrow set of boundaries and variables and now, things have changed and Peter is out of his depth, beyond his level of competency. Perhaps he was promoted, the company grew, the market changed, or he’s now in a new position in a new company. Regardless of the circumstances, Peter is no longer effective and his inability to see or believe it renders him toxic to the organization.

Read the rest here. I’m sure there aren’t pastoral equivalents, are there?

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Is your perfectionism helping you or hindering you?

Jeff Szymanski helps you find out:

Characteristics of healthy perfectionism:

• Striving for high but achievable standards that result in feelings of satisfaction and increased self-esteem
• Matching your time and energy to tasks that match your strengths and interests
• Having a sense of what you value and what your priorities are and devoting the lion’s share of your time and attention to these areas
• Reaping payoffs from your efforts that are greater than your costs

Characteristics of unhealthy perfectionism:

• Repeatedly setting goals for yourself but never achieving them
• Constantly competing to be the best at everything in order to avoid feeling like a failure
• Giving in to the feeling that all mistakes are catastrophic
• Getting stuck in believing that one particular strategy must pay off, instead of trying others

Agree/disagree?

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Last Spring, the students and staff at PRTS were hugely blessed by the visit of Ligonier’s Chris Larson who gave three excellent lectures on leadership. Here’s the first, and I’ll post the other two next week.

As many of you will know, Chris was recently appointed President of Ligonier Ministries, giving great joy to Ligonier’s many supporters and students in the confidence that RC Sproul’s wonderful teaching legacy will be maintained and developed in good and godly hands.

Leadership Gleanings, Part 1 from Puritan Reformed on Vimeo.

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