What makes someone a leader? Are leaders born or made? Does it really all fall or rise on account of leadership? Do we spend too much time talking about leadership in the church or not enough?
Earlier this week, I got to take part in the “taste” of the Global Leadership Summit and hear Mark Miller, Vice President of High Performance Leadership for Chick-fil-A, Inc. This was a preview to the Global Leadership Summit held on August 10-11, 2017. Winebrenner Theological Seminary (www.winebrenner.edu) and Chambersburg First Church of God (http://cfcog.cc/) are both hosts for the Global Leadership Summit. You can find more information about the Summit here: https://www.willowcreek.com/events/leadership/. If you’ve never been to a Global Leadership Summit, I would encourage you to grab a couple of friends and make the time to attend.
Miller spoke around the idea of building a leadership culture. He likened leadership to an iceberg: while the portion of the iceberg above the water may impressively large (what you see), it pales in comparison to the iceberg below the water (what you cannot see). In leadership, skills represent the 10% of the iceberg you see above the waterline while character makes up the 90% of the iceberg that is below the waterline, out of sight. We tend to focus a lot of our efforts in leadership development on the skills of the leader as opposed to the character of the leader. The take away here is to spend more time on character than skill.
Miller suggested several questions that every organization should wrestle with as they assess their ability to develop leaders. I’m not going to go step-by-step through all five questions, but his first one has had me thinking a lot this week.
Miller says that the first question one must ask in order to build a leadership culture is simply: “do you have agreement on your definition of leadership?” How does your organization define leadership? It’s not as easy as you might think. There are over 6,000 definitions of leadership. If you have twenty people in a room, you’re probably going to have twenty different definitions of leadership.
We’ve put a lot of effort into developing leaders in the CGGC over the years. We’re planning to do more in the years to come. I’ve been blessed as a result of great leadership and I’ve suffered from poor leadership. I’ve blessed others with good leadership and caused suffering with poor leadership. Miller’s challenge has had me thinking about leadership in the CGGC and how we can develop a leadership culture. How many definitions of leadership do we have out there? It’s very humbling to realize that in all our leadership development efforts, we’ve never defined what we mean by leadership.
Miller offered the following as the fundamentals of leadership:
- Leaders see the future - vision
- Leaders engage and develop others
- Leaders reinvent continuously
- Leaders value results and relationships
- Leaders embody the values of the organization
Miller closed his time around the first question with the following statement: “to create a leadership culture, you must have clarity, you must define leadership.”
This has me thinking a lot about leadership and how we define leadership. Perhaps some of our efforts, as good as they may be, fall short simply because we’ve failed to develop a common definition of what it means to be a leader. I’ve got more questions than answers right now.
How do you define leadership?
In the CGGC, how do we define leadership? What’s your perception of the definition of leadership in the CGGC?
What resonates with you in Miller’s list above?
What’s missing from his list as you think about your definition of leadership?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave your comments below. Take a moment and share your thoughts.
Christ’s Peace,
Lance