I was sitting across the table from a genuine and ambitious student leader who was having a hard week in the community that she leads. And both of us were in agreement that this is a season when leadership feels like it’s 32 kinds of hard.
And not just for this young woman and I. In the ministry that I lead, I work with 9 other grown-up staff, as well as close to 100 student leaders, many of whom are currently sharing my beleaguered sentiment that leadership is 32 kinds of hard right now.
There’s a lot to do. There’s pressure involved. There’s administrative details to sort out, things to plan and lead, problems to solve and decisions to make, internal anxieties to overcome, teams to work on, and communities to work with. Leadership is a hard gig.
But more than all of those difficulties in leadership, there seems to be one that is most difficult of all:
Human beings. (Myself included.)
The other day, I proclaimed, “I think I would be really good at leading if there weren’t people involved!”
I think that if I was in charge of leading an army of LEGO pieces, I’d be a really effective leader. I think that I could see what would need to happen, make an effective plan, and execute it beautifully. I could probably care for all of the LEGO pieces during the whole situation, even! And, even better would be if I myself was a LEGO piece, devoid of emotion, excluded from the possibility of making a mistake, and completely incapable of those pesky human things like misjudgment.
It turns out, though, that I don’t know of any leaders who are made out of LEGOs or who lead LEGO nations. Instead, I know leaders of families. I know leaders of schools. I know leaders of ministries and student organizations and Bible studies and churches and businesses. I know leader of friend groups, of community organizations, of neighborhoods, of high school athletic teams…I know leaders of people. And leaders who are people themselves.
And because that is the reality – that leaders are people and leaders are people, the idea that leadership is 32 kinds of hard seems like a rather mild statement. It might be more accurate to say that leadership is 3,232 kinds of hard.
Because people are 3,232 kinds of hard. People are unpredictable, immature, sinful, hurting, struggling, and battling more things that we can ever anticipate. Leading people just like this is hard! But even more hard is being a person just like this…and then attempting to lead broken people just like you.
It has been that reality that makes leadership particularly hard. Leading people isn’t a direct “input, output” relationship, where the amount of effort/wisdom/leadership that I put into something directly correlates in the result…partially because of my own humanity. It’s not like my English papers where a certain amount of work could produce an A, or like throwing the shot put where a certain amount of time in the weight room and working on technique could get me first place. Leadership is not at all like that.
Rather than leadership functioning as a coherent path of forward momentum, lately, it’s felt more like slogging through a bog of molasses, my steps moving slowing and laboriously, often shrouded in a cloudiness of my humanness and the humanness of people around me.
So while I and countless others around me are slogging through the molasses bog of leadership, I have a question for us to ask: Why in the world do we lead people, and lead as people, at all? It all just seems like it creates a rather sticky mess of sin, mistakes, brokenness, and everything in between.
(Disclaimer: I don’t actually know the answer. Would some leader over the age of 25 be interested in letting me know sometime soon? Thanks bye.)
In the meantime, I don’t suspect that my bumbling 25-year-old leader self will be done leading anytime soon, so I’m going to take a stab at why in the world we’re called to this messy act of leadership.
1. Leading people reminds us that we are not first leaders, but we are first flawed human beings. These past two weeks, I have had to acknowledge and admit a whole lot of mistakes in my leadership. It’s stung, but it reminds me that just like the bumbling folks that I lead, I, too, am a mere human being.
2. Leading people provides us with constant opportunities to continue to be made whole. Each time I admit a leadership mistake or a sin in my own life, and I receive the forgiveness or the understanding of those I lead, I can genuinely feel a softening in my heart of knowing that I am becoming more genuinely whole and less falsely “put together.” And each time leadership forces me to look to the interests of others above myself, my prideful self has to die once again as I am made more whole.
3. Leading people reveals the powerful beauty of healthy and intentional leadership. Have you ever followed a leader that cares for you in a way that almost startles you? One that wakes up parts of you that you didn’t even know existed as she challenges and calls you toward a new way of living? That is powerful stuff, and it’s one of the most affirming and transformative experiences of our lives. So even though I am a wholly imperfect leader, my leadership has the potential to be a remarkable gift to those that I lead.
4. Leading people gives us the gift of knowing we cannot do anything alone. For those of us who don’t follow Jesus, we can still agree with this statement. We for real can’t lead a family, a team, or a business of our own accord. And for those of us who do follow Jesus, my goodness. We’re so far up a crick without Him.
I’m so young. I’m 25 and have an amount of responsibility in leadership that sometimes startles me. In fact, I know that I still don’t understand my leadership style, the depth of my influence, and my role in leadership. And I make so many mistakes every day. But in the midst of the bumbling molasses, in the midst of the 32 kinds of hard that leadership as I work with human beings and lead as a human being, I am convinced that leadership is one of God’s greatest gifts not only to the people around us, but even more so to us as leaders.
For nothing else reminds me of the broken depth of my humanity while simultaneously showing me the powerful beauty of healthy leadership. Leadership is one of the messiest things around. But it can also be one of the most beautiful.
I think many of us are tired this week. But in the midst of that, may we lead as bumbling, messy human beings…humbly, yet with the beautiful power from our Leader himself.