**Guest article by Demian Farnworth, keynote blogger at FallenandFlawed.com**
Leadership boils down to this: Doing the right thing at the right time. Let me show you what I mean with a short, but dramatic anecdote.
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Imagine your a young woman lying on your bed staring at the ceiling. You just woke up. It’s 2 AM. And you smell smoke.
An instant later the smoke alarms are shrieking.
You bolt for the door and run into your oldest child. He says, “I think the garage is on fire.”
“Max,” you shout. “Go get Samantha! I’ll get Elizabeth and Scott. Meet me across the street!”
Max lowers his head and runs off. You head down the hall, run into the nursery and scoop up Elizabeth out of the crib and grab Scott by his tiny pajama collar.
“We got to go, son. The house is on fire!”
You drag Scott out of the room and down the stairs.
“Hurry up, Max!” you say as you open the front door.
But before you go through Max yells, “Samantha won’t wake up! And she’s too heavy to carry!”
You look down at Scott then back up at Max.
“Max! Get down here. Take the children across the street.”
He comes down, you hand Elizabeth to him and he and Scott run out the door. You fly up the stairs, heft Samantha over your shoulder and rush down the steps and out the front door.
In this little illustration, we clearly see that leadership is “doing the right thing at the right time.” But we also learn three very specific things: Leadership amounts to establishing direction, making decisions and delegating efficiently.
Let’s unpack those three concepts real quick.
Direction: In that compact little story the objective was clear: Get everyone out of the burning house and on the opposite side of the street.
Decision-Making: A young woman with four children in a burning house poses a lot of problems. Problems that need to be solved. Quickly. Ignoring them costs lives. And she didn’t leave the decision-making to the children. She decided. And then acted.
Delegation: Immediately that young woman noticed that she needed help if she were to survive. She also knew who could help her. But as you saw, she was wrong. So she adapted and delegated again.
Even though the above story was fabricated, it’s illustrative of what a great leader must do–in any circumstance.
See, it doesn’t matter whether you work in a C-level suite, a quaint chapel in a mid-sized town or the kitchen of your three-room flat with a two-year old playing at your feet–leaders need to craft vision, decide on actions and then delegate.
Granted, most of our directions, delegation and decisions aren’t going to occur in such acute crisis like a burning house.
But it doesn’t make them any less real or valuable.
In fact, I’ll argue it’s easy to rise to the leadership challenge when there’s a crisis at hand. What takes courage is a dedication to leadership over the long haul.
It takes courage to make decisions day in and day out. It takes courage to map out a profitable goal–and then keep everyone glued to that vision. And finally, it takes courage to hand over responsibility and control to other people.
That last point is important: Bottlenecks occur when leaders don’t delegate. More importantly, when leaders hold onto control, trust isn’t extended. And when trust isn’t extended, speed plummets.
That’s not a place you want to be.
Listen: Leadership is fundamental to mankind. Especially if we want to accomplish anything great. But leadership just doesn’t happen–it comes when we master the art of direction-giving, decision-making and delegation.
And the quickest path to mastering these three elements is to simply start doing them. So what are you waiting for? Go get ‘em, tiger.
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I’m so glad you added delegation in that list. We as leaders fail when we try to be lone rangers. Deligation is certainly a big one, but not very effective without the other two!
Thanks for the post!
I think it was Andy Grove from Intel who said that things didn’t take off for him until he learned to release control.
We can learn from that. Thank you for hosting this post.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa…uh, who rearranged the furniture?!
This strikes a nerve with me, because I’m watching bad leadership in my church right now. In the void that was left behind by the loss of half our deacon body and several chairpersons of various ministries, one single deacon and his wife and daughter are “selflessly” stepping in to fill the gaps. This is particularly distressing. He radiates charisma and self-confidence, he is persuasive, and on the surface he seems very deeply spiritual and godly. Scratch the surface, however, and the veneer peels back to reveal a venomous pride and self-sufficiency that has been fueled by name-it-claim-it heresies. He is an adder with legs; his words are honeyed and he is all arms-around-your shoulders while he convinces you that he (or his wife, or his daughter) has the most experience and qualifications for the task at hand.
Because of this, he has become the most trusted deacon in the building. He chairs the food and clothes pantry, is heading a project to plant a church in a small town in Mexico, and is campaigning to put his pet favorite pastor…who just so happens to be one of the food pantry’s main financial backers. His wife has begun to teach the women’s Bible studies on Sunday evenings, is co-chair of the food pantry, and chairperson of the kitchen ministry. Their daughter is chairperson of the children’s ministries and just became chairperson of the church’s community garden project.
None of these were put to a vote at the business meetings.
They now control at least 75 percent of the church. Almost every business decision comes through them, and even if it’s out of their control they are made aware of it. They are the bottleneck, and the neck is getting narrower every month.
Wow, Denita, you are in quite the situation there are your church (rather, the church you go to).
What are you going to do?
Truth be told, God hasn’t told us to leave yet. In fact, He chose to put me right in the throat of it. I volunteer for one of the ministries that the daughter has taken over since the shake-up. Her parents are frequent visitors, especially since one of their food pantry distributions falls on the same day. It puts me in a precarious position, because they know I also volunteer in the ministry of one of their “rival” chairpersons. But I refuse to be partial and I’ve made that very clear to all parties involved. All I can do is lift up the banner of Zion and stand fast. As one of our brothers said once upon a time, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”