I am often working with high-calibre and high-level leaders from the Canadian church landscape. Reflecting on thousands of conversations I have participated in as a friend, coach, director and consultant, I think the call to \u2018lead out of who one is\u2019 is both quest and struggle. I know firsthand the real battle of reactivity to pressures from external criticism and the real struggle to respond humbly to accolades. I know the internal struggles of cultivating a healthy inner life as a Christ-following leader. And this can lead to problematic responses.<\/p>\n
Simon P. Walker, in his work, \u201cthe Undefended Leader\u201d, argues that leaders must become more self-aware, by recognizing \u2018defended\u2019 behaviour which stems from our ego. Walker presents four aspects of the ego, which begin forming in infancy: the Shaping Ego of Over-confidence, the Defining Ego of Drivenness, the Adapting Ego of Anxiety, and the Defending Ego of Suspicion [1]. His thesis connects these to 3 major problems: front stage \/ back stage duplicity, use of power, and control, but maintains that leaders can learn to become \u2018undefended leaders\u2019, like \u201c<\/span>Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Aung San Suu Kyi\u2014and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus of Nazareth\u201d [2].<\/span><\/p>\n Walker\u2019s goals for undefended leadership and his premise that leadership is more about \u201cwho you are, not what you know or what skills you have\u201d [3] are not universal. They are in contrast to leadership models that include being and doing, or a balance of defended and undefended, such as the motif presented by Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal, which includes being both a warrior and a peacemaker [4]. Since the roots of leadership are in war, as Eve Poole expresses in her work [5], is it any surprise that the conditions of defensiveness are real issues for leaders?<\/p>\n My key take-away from Walker is his metaphor of the front stage and back stage [6]. Here, he connects visible behaviours with where they stem from. He connects who a leader is in both the public spotlight and out of the limelight, with the crowd and with their closest ones.<\/p>\n For me, this as the call to integrity or the pursuit of wholeness. And it helps me process what follows in his recommended undefended leader goals: Embrace struggle, develop and lay down skills, know the kairos moment, and clarify and own vocation<\/span> [7]. It helps me to form an invisible reconnection of being with doing as I seek to incorporate these practices in my own leadership. But the doing comes from a sense of call to not allow my ego to foster defensiveness or bring harm, but to learn from crucibles, inner battles, and to live to fight another day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ______________<\/p>\n [1] Walker, Simon P. <\/span>Leading Out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership<\/span><\/em>.<\/em> Piquant Publishing, 2007, 80. He bases this on the 1991 work of <\/span>two psychologists, Kim Bartholomew and Leonard M Horowitz, who \u201cwrote a paper suggesting that there may be four different \u2018shapes\u2019 of ego that emerge out of different nurturing environments in infancy\u201d, 80.<\/span><\/p>\n [2] Walker, 11.<\/p>\n [3] Walker, 17.<\/p>\n [4] Bolman, Lee G, and Terrence E Deal.\u00a0<\/span>How Great Leaders Think: The Art of Reframing<\/span><\/em>.<\/em> San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand, 2014<\/span>, 94. Chapter 7 fleshes out these concepts, in counterbalance with one another.<\/p>\n [5] Poole, Eve. <\/span>Leadersmithing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership<\/span><\/em>.<\/em> London\u202f; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Business, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, 8.<\/span><\/p>\n [6] Walker, 36-50. He frames this on the work of 1960s psychologist, Erving Goffman, who theorizes about human behaviour using the metaphor of a theatre. <\/span><\/p>\n [7] Walker, 206. See his diagram with the four undefended leader goals.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am often working with high-calibre and high-level leaders from the Canadian church landscape. Reflecting on thousands of conversations I have participated in as a friend, coach, director and consultant, I think the call to \u2018lead out of who one is\u2019 is both quest and struggle. I know firsthand the real battle of reactivity to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"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":[3096],"class_list":["post-36639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp03-walker","cohort-dlgp03"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36639","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\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36639"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36731,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36639\/revisions\/36731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}