The Fire of Leadership: Resigning, Declining, or Refining
“And I will put this third into the fire,
and refine them as one refines silver,
and test them as gold is tested.
They will call upon my name,
and I will answer them.
I will say, ‘They are my people’;
and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’”Zechariah 13:9
“I need your help,” said Erik (not his real name). “My team members just told me that they think we are doing this project because our bosses are telling them to. They don’t see how it fits in the big picture, and I want you to join a call and describe it to them.”
I’m not part of Erik’s reporting chain. I’m his coach, but I also have some experience from working the front lines of our mission and Erik wanted me to connect their work to why it makes a difference for others. My first instinct was to say “yes” immediately, but I went to make some lunch before responding. Fortunately the call of the sandwich was stronger than my impatient desire to be helpful. By the time I returned, my “yes” had turned into a “let’s talk first.”
I wanted to understand why Erik needed me to meet with his team, rather than him being able to lead them. He had been promoted into his first supervisory role in the middle of major project and was inheriting a number of challenges: a lack of vision for the work, skepticism and distrust among the team, high expectations from project stakeholders, and a nice helping of bureaucracy. Erik had answered the call to step into leadership and had been rewarded with what sounds like a failing project. His boss had refered him to me a few weeks ago, and we’d started some coaching. It was time to break the good news to him about his predicament.
“Erik, this may sound odd, but I think you have received the perfect gift; this is exactly what you hoped for, and exactly where you need to be.” Seeing the confused look on his face, I explained: “You wanted to learn to become a leader. You have just been given the fast pass to becoming one. I think you are ready for it. Do you?”
In Leadersmithing, Eve Poole describes leadership as a combination of things a leader needs to do and things a leader needs to be. What I appreciate about Poole’s approach is that it is very practical. There are many leadership books on theory, some of them excellent reading, some of them excellent kindling.
In Poole’s model of things a leader needs to do are competencies for 17 ‘Critical Incidents’ that are needed to feel confident as a leader [1]. Poole’s approach also emphasizes the practice of skills needed to lead, if not through active practice then through simulation, via exercises to strengthen the 52 skills that are the leadership muscles [2].
Erik, like many who have stepped into leadership roles, didn’t have the luxury of simulating practice on his own terms. Of the list of 17 critical incidents, Erik’s situation included 14.
How we respond to the fire of leadership can vary. It can vary by person, but it can also vary for the same person in different circumstances, including timing, environmetn, emotions, or many other factors.
Resigning
In his dead-pan satire *The Peter Principle*, Laurence Peter writes, “My analysis of hundreds of cases of occupational incompetence led me to formulate *The Peter Principle*: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”[3] Some people step into leadership roles but discover it is not for them. Perhaps they have the character, but receive no joy from the practice. They decide to resign from their leadership responsibilities and embrace a different role. This is a great outcome. It takes tremendous courage and character to recognize where the fit isn’t right and prioritize health and wellbeing over ego.
Declining
Unfortunately, what happens more often is that someone steps into a leadership role, ends up being out of their depth either in terms of character or desire or ability to acquire the skills, and stays in the role, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the distance between what their people need of them and what they are able or willing to give. This generally leads to a decline in happiness and wholeness for both the leader and all who work with them. This is not a great outcome and will only resolve when a second leader intervenes to address the dysfunction (either from within the team or without, and in-title or without title).
Refining
Another outcome is that the demands and practice of leadership refines us. Poole writes on the importance of character and virtue in the soul of a leader, borrowing from Sir Edmund Hillary: “it is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”[4] This is the ‘things we need to be’ portion of Poole’s work, and unmistakably the foundation on which the ‘doing’ sits. Camacho describes leading coaching as the process as “mining for gold”–helping bring forth the raw gold that is in others.[5] For those who are willing to pay the costs of leading others by laying themselves down in sacrificial love, the reward is the refining; the promise that God will make the individual all they can be for His glory and for the good of others.
Erik is now in the refining process. He has a brilliant opportunity to practice Poole’s exercises and very quickly–if he has the character for it, and I believe he does. Sometimes we all just need someone to tell us that we do have what it takes, and while I will do so, where Erik, and all of us, truly need to hear it from is the One who knows us best. Getting our source of identity from our Creator is both the right source of approval and the guardrail needed to protect against impostor syndrome and pride.
“Then he [Jesus] said to them, ‘Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.'”
Matthew 22:21
When we know and trust the Refiner, we can trust the refining process.
Notes
[1] Eve Poole, Leadersmithing: An Apprenticeship Approach to Making Great Leaders (New York: Bloomsbury Business, 2017), 10-11.
[2] Poole, Leadersmithing, 75.
[4] Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle, British Edition (London: Souvenir Press, 1992).
[5] Poole, Leadersmithing, 48-49.
[6] Tom Camacho, Mining for Gold: Developing Kingdom Leaders through Coaching, First published (Nottingham: IVP, 2019).
About the Author
Joff Williams
I help communities and people discover their identity and purpose by discovering the identity and intent of their Creator. I am a follower of Jesus, husband, father, son, sibling, music nerd, recovering IT nerd, just an all-around nerd nerd, and mediocre but happy runner. My work involves leading and loving the communities of Mercy Ships, an international hospital ship mission deeply rooted in the love of Jesus.4 responses to “The Fire of Leadership: Resigning, Declining, or Refining”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Your sandwich moment was brilliant. I need a consistent reminder that my chance to solve the problem comes at the cost of someone else gaining that experience.
I echo your premise that sometimes resigning is a healthy outcome for all involved. I was pressed into the people management track against my stated preference. My happiness was dwindling. Upon reflection, the right answer was to identify, train, and promote someone else to the management role and recast mine as a technical leader without reports. My director didn’t understand the decision, focusing solely on a string of ‘exceeds’ performance ratings. I could do the job, but so could someone else. Resigning–or embracing a different role–was the best outcome regardless of appearances.
Thanks, Rich. I hesistated in even using the word “resigning” because of its connotation with failure. I actually think that this is just a different form of leadership, rather than positional. It takes great courage to say “no” to a thing that someone else expects of us when we know that a “no’ is our best answer. I just wanted words that rhymed 🙂 Maybe I should have got a sandwich and thought some more about it before posting!
Joff,
I appreciate the way you brought the Peter Principle into this conversation. While Poole’s template creation process is simple to grasp, I am confronted by it’s limitations. Peter’s concepts of everyone reaching a level of incompetence and Poole’s comment on pg. 181 that “you don’t need to be smart, loving or brave, you just need to feel as though you are” seem to live in contradiction. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on those two.
Good observation, Darren. To me, Poole’s emphasis on the practice of leadership skills, including doing hard things, indicates that she does believe in the importance of actually being resourced to lead, not just feeling like you can. On the emotional component, maybe I can understand where she’s coming from if she’s refering to the imposter syndrome that we all feel at times.
When I take myself out of the seat and think about what I want from my own leaders, I don’t just want them to feel smart, loving and brave. I want them to actually be it.