{"id":16843,"date":"2018-03-01T23:49:33","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T07:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=16843"},"modified":"2018-03-01T23:49:33","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T07:49:33","slug":"to-have-or-to-be-that-is-the-leadership-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/to-have-or-to-be-that-is-the-leadership-question\/","title":{"rendered":"To Have or to Be……That is the Leadership Question"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week we read\u00a0Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership: How to Become an Effective Leader by Confronting Potential Failures\u00a0<\/em>by Gary McIntosh and Samuel Rima.\u00a0 While it wouldn’t be honest to say that I have enjoyed reading all of the books we have been assigned in this doctoral program, I have appreciated all of them and, certainly, I have been able to learn something from each of them.\u00a0 Having said that I have a developed a little personal rating system for how much I enjoyed a book or how many practical insights I pulled out of it.<\/p>\n

The system is very simple, as most of the books are on kindle, you can export and download any notes you take and everything you highlight.\u00a0 As you do that, the app lets you know what percentage of the book you are downloading.\u00a0 So, for my scale, the higher the percentage, the more interesting or engaging the book.<\/p>\n

For\u00a0The Dark Side of Leadership<\/em> I ended up with a higher percentage than I can remember achieving with any other book that I can remember.\u00a0 Simply put, there was something of note and\/or value on just about every page.\u00a0 The quality of the content was accentuated by the structure of the book, with a review of main points and questions to respond to at the end of each chapter, the salient points were clearly communicated, reinforced and hard to miss.<\/p>\n

Almost every aspect of this book had me examining some aspect of my own life and leadership, or recollecting a brush with a leader that was ‘under the influence’ of the dark side of leadership.\u00a0 As I read through the book, and the many insights, I kept coming back to something that Rima discussed in the introduction to the revised edition:<\/p>\n

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At the core of the problem is personal ambition and the insidious desire to have or possess something that is not able to be possessed \u2014 namely, success. We live in a culture obsessed with both having and success. And this desire has infiltrated the ranks of Christian leaders as it has every other strata of American culture.\u00a0 The problem arises from the fact that success is not something one can have or possess.\u00a0 True success is a state of being not having.\u00a0(McIntosh and Rima, Kindle location 219)<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is both an astute and succinct of the problem, not just for those of us that are leaders, but for all of us that are trying to live a faithful and healthy life in this time and place.\u00a0 \u00a0We are, indeed, a culture that is obsessed with success and that almost always defines that success in terms of what or how much we have.\u00a0 You see this in almost every area of our culture and interaction with each other.\u00a0 Social media, for example, which is ostensibly about connecting people to each other, can often devolve into a quest to demonstrate a perfect, ‘successful’ life – and to have the life affirmed by having or collecting as many ‘likes’, etc. as possible.\u00a0 There is a particular insidiousness when this obsession with success as defined by\u00a0 having and having more, infects Christians and especially Christian leaders.\u00a0 The authors continue:<\/div>\n
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Unfortunately, many Christian leaders are driven manically to have success.\u00a0 In the church, having success is measured by how many people you have attending your service, the size of the facility you have, the number of staff members you have, how many user – friendly programs you have, and the size of the budget you have.\u00a0 As a result, leaders who need to have success to validate themselves are driven to acquire these things and are willing to pay virtually any price to do so. (McIntosh and Rima, Kindle location 223)<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Several years ago I was attending a conference (Catalyst<\/a>) and Rob Bell was one of the speakers, and this was at the height of Bell’s popularity and celebrity.\u00a0 Before he went into the talk he had prepared for the event, he shared an interaction he had with another pastor attending the conference that morning in their hotel.\u00a0 He said, that the pastor came up to him, shared some appreciative words about Bell’s writing.\u00a0 Bell responded (graciously, I thought)<\/em> by taking the time to ask the other pastor about his church, ministry context ext.\u00a0 Bell said that the pastor started to tell about his situation, but only got about two or three sentences in before he stopped and looked at Bell and said, ‘It’s a good church, but it’s nothing compared to what you are doing.’<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
And I will never forget what Bell said next, as it has served as an almost constant reminder to me, especially when I might have been spending more time than I should thinking or dwelling on the ‘dark side’ of leadership and focussing on the wrong kind of success.\u00a0 At that point, Bell looked at the other pastor and said, ‘Don’t do that.\u00a0 Don’t you dare belittle the place and the people that God has called you to.\u00a0 If you are where God has called you to be, there isn’t a better place in the world.’\u00a0 Bell shared that story as a way of both challenging and encouraging all of us that were there that day [One unintended side-effect of a good conference is often a little bit of\u00a0 church or pastor envy, as you hear about the amazing things that are happening in some churches and with some pastors].<\/div>\n
\nOne of the most encouraging aspects of this book for me was just how practical it was in terms of equipping us as leaders to resist this and other similar ‘temptations’ of the dark side.\u00a0 \u00a0This is so critical if we hope to be healthy leaders capable of sustaining ministries for any extended period of time.\u00a0 When we lose sight of what success really looks like – and for the Christian, I think it could be as simple as faithfulness to God’s call on our lives, as we seek to become more and more like Christ – no matter how much we have we will still not find satisfaction and fulfillment – which as the authors note often leads us further down the path of trouble towards the dark side:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
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I have become convinced that the desire to have these things is not compatible with biblical concepts of church or even Christianity.\u00a0 As a result, even when these leaders succeed in creating a large congregation, a large facility, and all the other markers that measure success in the twenty – first – century church, they are no closer to actually having or possessing the inner feelings of success that they have been seeking through their manic activity.\u00a0 It is at this point that leaders often begin looking elsewhere in an effort to assuage their needs for personal validation and worth \u2014 needs they thought would be met by having a measure of success.\u00a0(McIntosh and Rima, Kindle location 226)<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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This week we read\u00a0Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership: How to Become an Effective Leader by Confronting Potential Failures\u00a0by Gary McIntosh and Samuel Rima.\u00a0 While it wouldn’t be honest to say that I have enjoyed reading all of the books we have been assigned in this doctoral program, I have appreciated all of them and, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1170],"class_list":["post-16843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-mcintosh-and-rima","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16863,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16843\/revisions\/16863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}