Thursday, October 05, 2006
Leadership Decides
I think leadership is increasingly a lost art in our world. We no longer take people places, we figure out where they are going and organize it a bit and call that leadership. That's a whole lot easier, maybe even more egalitarian, but I am not sure it rises to the level of true leadership.
In a world where sin prevails, is not our job as the community of faith to battle and overcome that sin? Does that not mean that we need to take people where they may not go naturally? And does not that mean that we may need to do more than figure out what they want and give it to them?
The scientifc method has made us a very data dependent people. Seems like we can never decide what to do without "knowing all the facts." But so often, all the facts are not knowable. This is very apparent in all the writing I have been doing about creation matters lately. The picture simply is not in focus on so much "environmental," and won't be for a great long time.
We also see the problem in business management. As part of my work I do emergency planning for facilities. This means I have to create an organizational chart for emergency management. It is always a very vertical org chart. Most business today has a very horizontally oriented org chart and when they see the one I have cooked up there are always objections. "Don't we need everybody's opinion before we decide?" It seems like I always have to explain that when there is a fire burning down the hall there is no time for a meeting to reach consensus - someone has to decide and others have to abide by that decision. It can be difficult in some of these businesses to find a real leader - someone willing to risk making a decision without all the data.
I could not help but think about this as I have been thinking so much about wisdom lately (part of leading a Bible Study for high school seniors). It seems to me that wisdom is often the method by which decisions can be made even when the data is not all available. Therefore, it seems to me that one criteria for genuine leadership is wisdom, not organizational skill, not oratory, not having a lot of knowledge, but genuine wisdom.
This is likely why genuine leadership is so rare these days. The qualifications are hard to come by. Wisdom, as we have discussed before, is a function not of my accomplishment, but of my submission to the Lord. Genuine leadership can make a decision in th absence of all the data because genuine wisdom relies on more than data, it relies on the will of the Creator.
Oh how I long for such leadership.
Related Tags: leadership, wisdom, decisions, data, Christians
In a world where sin prevails, is not our job as the community of faith to battle and overcome that sin? Does that not mean that we need to take people where they may not go naturally? And does not that mean that we may need to do more than figure out what they want and give it to them?
The scientifc method has made us a very data dependent people. Seems like we can never decide what to do without "knowing all the facts." But so often, all the facts are not knowable. This is very apparent in all the writing I have been doing about creation matters lately. The picture simply is not in focus on so much "environmental," and won't be for a great long time.
We also see the problem in business management. As part of my work I do emergency planning for facilities. This means I have to create an organizational chart for emergency management. It is always a very vertical org chart. Most business today has a very horizontally oriented org chart and when they see the one I have cooked up there are always objections. "Don't we need everybody's opinion before we decide?" It seems like I always have to explain that when there is a fire burning down the hall there is no time for a meeting to reach consensus - someone has to decide and others have to abide by that decision. It can be difficult in some of these businesses to find a real leader - someone willing to risk making a decision without all the data.
I could not help but think about this as I have been thinking so much about wisdom lately (part of leading a Bible Study for high school seniors). It seems to me that wisdom is often the method by which decisions can be made even when the data is not all available. Therefore, it seems to me that one criteria for genuine leadership is wisdom, not organizational skill, not oratory, not having a lot of knowledge, but genuine wisdom.
This is likely why genuine leadership is so rare these days. The qualifications are hard to come by. Wisdom, as we have discussed before, is a function not of my accomplishment, but of my submission to the Lord. Genuine leadership can make a decision in th absence of all the data because genuine wisdom relies on more than data, it relies on the will of the Creator.
Oh how I long for such leadership.
Related Tags: leadership, wisdom, decisions, data, Christians
