Leadership is essential to achieving your goals. In most cases, you can’t achieve them by yourself. You are going to need help. But you are the one who sees the vision the clearest and tastes it the strongest, so you’ve got to help the people around you—people who in my case God put there—see the same vision you see. You’ve got to lead them.

True leadership is in short supply. There are many people in corner offices with big titles, but far fewer who are truly incarnational leaders—the type who embody the vision.

I’ve reflected a lot on leadership recently trying to understand why it was in such short supply. I’ve concluded that leadership deficiencies stem from mistrust. The average person believes people in leadership are in it for themselves, and many are. Those who are positions of leadership often assume others have the same self-interests they do, and so in order to protect their position and the benefits it gives them they refuse to make way for more capable younger or newer leaders. Those self interests can be financial, but more often they are about power (which is way over-rated); simply lording it over others. I’ve seen this happen in church, in organizations, and in companies with which I’ve been involved. Invariably it goes back to small people so insecure in themselves and so unconfident in who they are that they hold a tight grip on their own church, or company, or organization and strangle the life from it by holding on.

It happens over, and over again in the same cycle. Children see it in their parents and then exhibit it in their own adult lives; planting the same seeds of distrust, watering them with incapability, and eventually reaping a harvest of un-success, all because they don’t understand what leadership is.

——————–

Coming up next: Leadership Means Making Progress for Others