Читать книгу The Catholic Vision for Leading Like Jesus - Owen Phelps Ph.D. - Страница 16

Chapter Three

Who Is a Leader?

Everyone is a leader. It’s a role no one can completely escape. As my colleagues Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges say in Lead Like Jesus: Lessons from the Greatest Role Model of All Time, “Leadership is a process of influence.”¹⁰ Whenever you seek to influence another person, you are taking on the role of a leader.

In fact, sometimes you are leading when you are not even aware of it. A famous athlete once insisted that he was not a role model for children; he was just a basketball player. Commentators scoffed. They told him, “It’s not your call.” When someone observes your behavior and imitates it, you are a leader whether you like it or not. If children decide to imitate someone, that person is serving in a leadership role even if he or she isn’t aware of it. That’s true for athletes, entertainers, and other prominent people. But it’s even truer for parents and other family members, family friends, local community figures, and teachers. If you doubt this, take the quiz featured in the “In the Community” section on the next page.

Children imitate the adults around them — especially their parents — without even thinking about it. If parents try to do their best, their children benefit from their modeling as much as from their nurturing. But if parents don’t care how their behavior influences their children, then the odds decline that their children will benefit from how the parents behave. Of course, parents aren’t the only models we find in life. As we grow, we continue to model the behaviors of other people we admire. In this way, people often have deeper, more profound leadership impacts than they ever know. But certainly all of us are leaders at some times and some places in our lives.

Gratifying and Humbling Lessons in Leadership

The fact that we are all leaders at some points in our lives — sometimes even when we are not aware of it — was brought home to me in a gratifying yet humbling way as I approached my 60th birthday. A note arrived in the mail from a woman who lived in a town we had moved away from more than 30 years before. In that town I worked for a newspaper publishing company that had hired me while I was still in college. It was a small but rapidly growing newspaper publishing company, and we generally thought of ourselves as family. Looking back, I would have sworn I knew the first name of everyone on the payroll. But the note that arrived more than three decades later was from someone whose name I could not remember.

The woman wrote that she had just returned from a long trip and was blessed to have taken many beautiful photos that she would cherish. Whenever she looked at them, they could transport her back to enjoy again her wonderful adventure. She said that for many years she had meant to write, but finally she could no longer put it off. She wanted me to know how grateful she was for having inspired her interest in photography, which had enriched her life in so many ways for so many years. To my chagrin and shame, I could not remember this woman at all. To this day, I have no recollection of the role I played in a life-changing experience for her. Although I am embarrassed by my faulty memory, I am grateful that she wrote — and for reminding me of how our actions can serve a leadership purpose even when we are not remotely aware of it.

IN THE COMMUNITY

Lasting Leadership Quiz: Who Matters Most?

It’s easy for us to see how famous athletes, movie stars, and other celebrities appear to have an impact on people of all ages in our culture. We wear their expensive jerseys and shoes, adopt their expressions and fashions, imitate their grooming, buy their movies and music, and seemingly try to adopt their identities. This is especially true of young people.

So who are the role models who really shape our behavior long term? To find out, try this little quiz on yourself, your friends, and relatives and especially any teenagers in your home.

Part I: Answer the first six questions as well as you can.

1. Name the five richest people in the world.

2. Name the last five Heisman Trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of the Miss America Contest.

4. Name 10 people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize. How about five?

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and best actress.

6. Name the last decade’s World Series winners.

How are you doing? Don’t get discouraged. You may find the next ones easier.

Part II: Answer the next five questions as well as you can.

7. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.

8. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.

9. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.

10. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.

11. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.

A reflection: When it comes to having an impact and lasting influence on people, obviously it’s not about position, money, or fame. Applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Titles slip away. The paparazzi disappear. Lasting influence comes with intimacy: we are most influenced by the people we believe care most about us.

A more dramatic story is one told to me about a poor governess’ global legacy. Some years ago I met a Hindu from India who was beginning to make his mark as a real estate developer in the United States and soon would become a multimillionaire. At the time, I was looking for investors to launch a Catholic publication. One of my brothers worked with this man and told me that he might be interested in my project. I was skeptical that a Hindu would want to invest in a Catholic publication, but I trusted my brother’s judgment and made an appointment to visit the man.

He received me graciously and quickly confirmed his interest. I couldn’t help asking him why he would want to invest in an explicitly Catholic product. He told me the story of a governess who practically raised him as a boy in India. She was a wonderful woman for whom he felt the deepest gratitude. It also happened that she was Catholic and faithfully attended Mass every Sunday. On occasion, she would take him along, and he was intrigued by the ritual. Although she was paid only a relative pittance, she always found a way to buy him birthday and holiday presents, something not expected of servants. In addition to her remarkable care and contributions to his development, he was impressed by her kindness and generosity.

IN THE FAMILY

The Power to Shape Lives

We are all always educators because people are always observing our behavior. What we do influences people much more than what we say. This is especially true in the parent-child relationship, as the following poem makes clear. The author says her reflections were inspired by her mother.

When You Thought I Wasn’t Looking ¹¹

By Mary Rita Schilke Korzan

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You hung my first painting on the refrigerator

And I wanted to paint another.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You fed a stray cat

And I thought it was good to be kind to animals.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You baked a birthday cake just for me

And I knew that little things were special things.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You said a prayer

And I believed there was a God that

I could always talk to.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You kissed me good-night

And I felt loved.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

I saw tears come from your eyes

And I learned that sometimes things hurt —

But that it’s alright to cry.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You smiled

And it made me want to look that pretty too.

When you thought I wasn’t looking

You cared

And I wanted to be everything I could be.

When you thought I wasn’t looking —

I looked …

And wanted to say thanks

For all those things you did

When you thought I wasn’t looking.

Eventually, she died, and he attended the funeral. That’s when he learned it had always been her heart’s desire to be a nun, but she hadn’t joined a religious order because she felt an obligation to help support her family. Instead, she decided to live as a celibate governess and to send nearly all of her small stipend home to her family, living elsewhere in India. Hers had been a life of totally selfless service. That realization overwhelmed him. He also recognized that the gifts she had bought him were purchased with funds she could have sent home to help her needy family. The thought that his happiness mattered so much to her was almost more than he could bear.

In India, a land where religious tolerance has sometimes been a struggle and where Christians are just a tiny minority of the population, a poor and seemingly powerless governess imbued a young Hindu man with an appreciation for Christianity in general and a deep regard for Catholics in particular. He said he wanted to invest in my Catholic enterprise for two reasons: it appeared to be an attractive risk/reward opportunity and it would honor his boyhood governess. He wrote a check for a substantial number of shares and slid it across the table to me.

Who would say that this poor, obscure woman was not a leader? Indeed, her leadership was so powerful that it continued to exert an influence many years after she had gone to her grave. St. Francis of Assisi would have appreciated her sublime leadership contribution because she lived fully Francis’ admonition to preach the Gospel without words. Because of that, the force of her deeds still resonates decades later halfway around the world. In her own humble way, truly she was a leader in the image of Jesus.

This devoted servant’s example reminds us that there are two realms of leadership: life role and organizational.

• Organizational leadership gets more attention in our mass culture. CEOs of big companies are celebrities — either for the billions of dollars they generate and the shareholders they enrich, or for the billions of dollars they squander and the lives they destroy, sometimes by breaking the law. The public is fascinated by these stories of the rich, famous, and powerful.

• But I’m convinced that life-role leadership is the more important of the two. Over the years, I’ve held a number of prominent leadership roles: editor, publisher, vice president of a large business, business owner, and college professor. But all of them pale in importance to my role as a husband and father because no outcomes are more important to me than the lives of my wife and children. More than anything else in the world I want to make a positive contribution to their development and well-being.

All of us are leaders of one sort or another at various times in our lives. But not all of us are effective leaders. Effective leadership involves a few key attributes that the Lead Like Jesus movement wants to share with the whole world, and the S3 Leadership Framework is a fine way to understand what it means to lead like Jesus. When we employ the S3 Leadership Framework to try to lead like Jesus, we open the door to incredible growth and development in ourselves and in all of the persons and organizations with whom we interact.

The journey begins by recognizing that effective long-term leadership begins inside us. It is a matter of character. We cannot give what we do not have. Inevitably, leadership moments come to us in this life. What we do with them is largely a matter of the choices we have made up to that point about the person we want to be and the legacy we want to leave. Ultimately, effective leadership is not about formal power or money. It is about integrity. Leadership begins in the heart. Jesus tells us we need to have the heart of a servant.

Understanding Power

When some people hear the phrase “leading like Jesus,” they are reluctant to listen because they think of Jesus as a “nice guy” and a “softie” who might not be able to cut it in today’s competitive world. Leadership, they believe, is about power. Effective leaders are strong people who are forceful and willing to bully and punish others to get compliance. Jesus’ leadership was nothing like that. But neither was it “soft.” In fact, it was very demanding. Despite Jesus’ gentleness, He was able to attract followers who would eventually die for Him because He had wisdom about the roots of real, lasting power that modern researchers are only beginning to understand.

Let’s take a closer look at the five bases for power, as outlined by John French and Bertram Raven,¹² to see why they are not equal. They are:

1. Reward power — the ability to give rewards and grant favors.

2. Coercive power — the ability to threaten and apply punishment.

3. Legitimate (or official) power — the ability to direct others’ behavior by virtue of one’s formal position.

4. Expert power — the ability to influence people because you know more than others or you have access to information that others don’t have.

5. Referent power — also called charisma or role model power, the ability to influence people because they perceive that you somehow deserve to be followed, perhaps because they believe you will achieve group success that others cannot or because they believe you care about them.

Which Powers Are the Most Powerful?