Leading from behind
Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana’s Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice is a rigorous resource and research tool for doctoral leadership students. The authors are Harvard Business School professors who distilled the lessons learned from a centennial leadership meeting of scholars from diverse academic, scientific, and business leadership contexts. Exploring “leadership comprehensively and from many directions” this 848-page book provides an inclusive review of the critical challenges facing leaders today.[1] This post will focus on Nohria and Khurana’s theories on contingent and core functions, self-monitoring and emotional intelligence, and some critical capabilities needed for global organizational leadership. I hope the authors leadership practices will help me narrow the scope and focus of my research into the problem of spiritual warfare. Doing good leadership, like doing good theology, is dependent on a myriad of factors.
Leadership, according to the authors, is “contingent” on the situation and variables like culture, type of business, characteristics of the leader, and types of followers.[2] Leadership also depends on the kinds of “core” functions the leader is performing. For example, leaders provide direction, organization, selection, motivation, and implementation.[3] I perform these functions daily; some more than others depending on the need. Reflecting on my leadership practice, pattern, and research I see a blessed history of over 30 years of experience leading large and small groups of people in public safety, military aviation, missionary aviation, marketplace ministry, and business as mission.
I found one reference to servant leadership in the authors book, and it was a good one. They used a metaphor of leading from behind and cited a Nelson Mandela parable of the shepherd who stays behind the flock while subtly leading the sheep forward without their knowledge.[4] At my core, I use servant leadership with a bias towards situational-transformational styles. In other words, the leadership methods I use today, versus yesterday, “depends” on what needs to be done and by whom. Nohria and Khurana say that the latest thoughts on situational leadership are in the constructs of “self-monitoring and emotional intelligence.”[5] Self-monitoring is where the leader perceives the needs of self and group and adapts behavior for effective leadership.[6] Emotional intelligence (EI) leaders are said to be more in tune with appraising the emotions of others.[7] Whether it is effective self-monitoring and EI or a mysterious element that leaders develop over time; I do not know. But what I do know is that these leadership concepts make a positive difference in the effectiveness, efficiency, and discipling power of Christian leaders.
I identified positively with Chatman and Kenney’s three critical capabilities for organizational leadership: “diagnostic abilities, behavioral flexibility, and unambiguous signaling of intentions.”[8] In my synthesis of these abilities I think I have the capacity to read situations, adapt and adjust my leadership styles, balance the needs of the mission and the people, and always strive to present clear expectations to followers. Furthermore, Hackman says that “master leaders” have a good, if not innate, sense of timing and knowing “when to act and when to wait.”[9] Personally I think these are both innate and learned skills, that develop over time, trials, and experiences with success and failure. I believe that the leaders who persist and persevere gain the abilities and successfully add these capabilities to their leadership toolbox. As a Christian leader, when I add the Holy Spirit factor to my leadership praxis, the other secular models fall short in eternal effectiveness by comparison.
I would like to make a bold statement here: Christian leaders are failing in their stewardship duties to train and equip the body of Christ to defend against the problem of spiritual warfare. For example, last Sunday night I witnessed a group of pastoral leaders and elders in a congregational business meeting make some of the worst leadership decisions I have witnessed in quite some time. They portrayed poor timing; did not use diagnostic tools nor survey the audience. They failed to read the situation; did not see where God was working and blessing. They choose not to adapt; did not adjust their leadership to fit the needs of the congregation. What was most disheartening for me was to see them decide to remove a 20-year ministry with AWANA’s and abandon their stewardship responsibility to area churches and their members. I stood up in the audience with microphone, held up an Armor of God coin, and prayerfully challenged the elders and pastors to put on their armor of God and not let Satan’s spiritual warfare schemes of division, disunity, and distrust rule the day. This is only one example, but I have seen this type of disunity repeated in leadership positions in missions, ministry, and churches where the leaders themselves are not prepared or equipped to endure the effects of spiritual warfare.
In conclusion, this post concentrated on a narrow portion of Nohria and Khurana’s vast groupings of leadership concepts, functions, and capabilities. I chose to focus on the leadership styles that work for me and help me connect with my dissertation research project. I will use the book as a leadership resource and hope that their forward looking perspective will continue to contribute to my servant leadership praxis.
[1] Human Capital Matters. “Leadership development.” Leadership 8 (2011) 7.
[2] Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, eds. Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice. Kindle ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2010) Location 262.
[3] Ibid., 288.
[4] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Little, Brown & Company, 1995), 22.
[5] Nohria and Khurana, Handbook of Leadership, 1980.
[6] Stephen J. Zaccaro, Roseanne J. Foti, and David A. Kenny. “Self-monitoring and trait-based variance in leadership: An investigation of leader flexibility across multiple group situations.” Journal of applied psychology 76, no. 2 (1991): 308.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Nohria and Khurana, Handbook of Leadership, 221.
[9] J. Richard Hackman. “What is this thing called leadership.” Handbook of leadership theory and practice (2010) 7.
About the Author
Mike
4 responses to “Leading from behind”
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Mike
I too loved that Mandela quote. What a great imagery of leadership. Empowering people to move forward without the need to be the one everyone sees as a leader. I have been on the deciding side of a church leadership board making the hard decisions. I don’t know all the circumstances but do know as a leader it is easy to feel like what you want is what everyone wants. You are right that if the people of God are not praying together (especially against the schemes of the enemy) there can be not true unity. Good post Mike.
Mike,
Thanks for an excellent and provocative post.
I appreciated your highlighting emotional intelligence as being critical to effective leadership. It caused me to wonder if a high EI quotient can be correlated to a the gift of discernment in spiritual warfare. I think discernment is a gift from God, but those with this gift must necessarily have a high degree of EI. What do you think?
Thank you for your leadership this fall in contributing to our ongoing learning through comments and challenges. My prayer is that you and your family would rest and renew over this Christmas season, and be encouraged as Christ in you continues to bear fruit.
Hi Mike,
With your experiences, I would be fascinated to hear sometime of good leaders you have served with. With your specific training and varied international projects, I hope we can sit down, maybe with Dr. D. and our fellow mentorees over coffee and swap stories.
Keep the Faith my Brother.
Mike, the accountability factor seems to be leaving churches these days, and I agree, it is a sad thing to witness. Fortunately, I dodged a similar situation recently when an elder approached me about the camp program that I oversee every summer. This particular elder has absolutely no involvement whatsoever and yet he came up with out first asking my opinion, suggesting that we stop allowing the high school group to attend camp. He had a thought that they were putting too much of an obligation on the members that were working camp. Rather than allowing him to stop something that I truly see as a wonderful ministry, he allowed me to explain my perspective on the ministry. I have other conversations at other churches that did not fare so well, and ignorance and laziness ended great programs.
I appreciate the fact that you tried to hold them accountable to their own spiritual warfare. Sorry it did not fare positively. In your opinion, how do we encourage leadership to take a more active approach to understanding the value of ministries?