Kenneth O. Gangel, STM, PhD, is distinguished professor emeritus of Christian education at Dallas Seminary and scholar-in-residence at Toccoa Falls College in Georgia. He is the author/editor of over 50 books on Christian education, leadership, biblical studies, and the family.
The famous Rubbermaid Corporation, once one of Fortune’s top companies, dropped so rapidly into obscurity that it was taken over by Newell. The company’s success in the 1980s was linked with CEO Stanley C. Gault, about whom Harvard Business Review claims, “Across the 312 articles collected by our research team about Rubbermaid, Gault comes through as a hard-driving, egocentric executive. In one article, he responds to the accusation of being a tyrant with the statement, ‘Yes, but I am a sincere tyrant.’ In another, drawn directly from his own comments on leading change, the word I appears 44 times, while the word we appears 16 times” (Collins 2001).
The history of this company shows that Gault was both its construction manager and its destruction manager. He picked his own successor (who lasted a year on the job), and the next leader of the company “faced a management team so shallow that he had to temporarily shoulder four jobs while scrambling to identify a new number-two executive.… Gault’s successors struggled not only with a management void but also with strategic voids that would eventually bring the company to its knees” (Collins 2001).
Sadly, this pattern exists in Christian schools. Brilliant, charismatic leaders direct schools for a period of time, only to leave a state of academic anemia or financial frustration in their wake. For a time, flamboyance looks like leadership—but it contains no authenticity. This word simply means the quality of being trustworthy and dependable. Something that is authentic is genuine, real, and credible.
Something that lacks authenticity, therefore, is a counterfeit or fake—someone who looks like a leader but by legitimate standards is not. Titles, visibility, speech making, and even election or appointment do not a leader make. Leadership centers in being and doing.
This article identifies five characteristics of the authentic leader, not declaring them the only five and not arranging them in any particular order. The selection involved three criteria—biblical descriptions, research affirmation, and my own experience over nearly half a century.
Authentic Leaders Focus
Numerous rules govern leadership focus, but here I pare them down to two: know the key issues that can make or break your school and make sure you focus on them. That doesn’t mean we let everything else slide or that we somehow target a single objective. Instead, the mission so completely absorbs us that we recognize instantly whether tasks and issues either advance or hinder it. Sam T. Manoogian, a consultant who specializes in leadership, says, “Think of it this way, if you have 50 problems on your list and devote on average 2 percent of your resources to each, the net result will probably be chronic fatigue, minimal progress, and lost ground. In contrast, if you can devote 20 to 30 percent of your time toward truly resolving three or four problems, and these are the right problems, you will make some significant headway.” (2002).
Authentic Leaders Facilitate
Facilitation means making possible the work of others. The reason for the existence of administration is the sustenance and advancement of the work of faculty. If faculty members serve administration rather than the other way around, we have created a counterfeit school. Authentic leadership requires sensitivity to human need all around us, particularly on the faculty and staff. It also demands meeting that need through the systems and structures we arrange in order to advance biblical education.
Unlike Rubbermaid, the New Testament church did not collapse at the departure of its Founder. Surely one of the reasons was His ability to mentor and advance the leadership of the disciples, to whom He said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12).
One of the resources for this article is a brilliant piece by Jim Collins in the Harvard Business Review. After extensive research he concludes that good-to-great transformation happens only with level-five leaders. According to Collins, a level-five leader is “an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will. According to our five-year research study, executives who possess this paradoxical combination of traits are catalysts for the statistically rare event of transforming a good company into a great one.” (2001).
Authentic Leaders Flex
One could argue that leadership styles run from the extremes of commander to coach. I have attempted to describe coaching style leadership in my most recent leadership book (2000). On the extreme right wing is the commanding leader who insists that people do what she wants because she is the boss. Too often we see this scenario in Christian schools housed in local churches where the senior pastor serves as commander and where the school principal holds the rank of something like second lieutenant. Such an arrangement creates a prescription for disaster condemned by Jesus when He told His disciples, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that” (Luke 22:25–26).
Authentic leaders change their leadership styles to meet specific needs in various situations, knowing what leadership is and understanding their own dominant leadership styles. Goleman describes a study by the Hay Group: “They found that if the head of the school had displayed a critical mass of these styles, that predicted that the students would have the best academic performance. And in the black box, of course, is how the teachers feel about teaching there” (2002).
Authentic Leaders Forget
Leaders who use guilt motivation, like nagging parents, love to dwell on past problems and use them as a whip. But this strategy militates against everything we know about leadership from both research and the patterns of the New Testament. In Acts 6, for example, somebody had mishandled welfare distributions. Yet the church attempted to solve the problem without blaming. Paul’s words also seem applicable to leadership: “Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13).
What kinds of things do authentic leaders forget in the trenches? A brief but cutting remark by a board member. A foolish decision by a teacher. Disagreements over the curriculum that took place at a meeting. Failure by parents to acknowledge the hard work administration requires. The list is endless.
James Kouzes and Barry Posner (1999) are among the most respected names in secular leadership research. In working for the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), they attempted to determine “the factor that distinguished highest-performing managers from lowest-performing. The popular assumption about managers is that they have a high need to express control. So you might think that’s the factor that distinguishes highest- from lowest-performing managers. But that’s not what CCL found. Rather, the single factor that differentiated the top from the bottom was higher scores on affection—both expressed and wanted. Contrary to the myth of the cold-hearted boss who cares very little about people’s feelings, the highest-performing managers show more warmth and fondness toward others than do the bottom 25 percent. They get closer to people, and they’re significantly more open in sharing thoughts and feelings than their lower-performing counterparts.” Authentic leaders know how and when to forget.
Authentic Leaders Finish
Throughout decades of ministry, I have seen many more starters than finishers—leaders enthusiastic at the beginning of a ministry, only to pack and run at the first problem. In short, they were counterfeit leaders, people willing to hold office or bark orders but not willing to rely on God’s faithfulness through the difficult times that come to all authentic leaders. Very early in my leadership, God impressed upon me the significance of John 17:4: “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.”
In the 1992 Olympics, Derrick Redman was favored in the 400-meter race. During the final time trial, he pulled a hamstring and fell to the track. He rose, hopped on one leg, and pushed away those who tried to help him. Seconds later a middle-aged man jumped out of the crowd wearing a Nike cap with the caption Just Do It. Redman’s father helped him hop to the finish line, saying, “We started this thing together: we’ll finish this thing together” (Gangel 2000). Whether quitters never win, I do not know. But in educational leadership, winners never quit.
On January 6, 1996, I was glued to the television for the Green Bay/San Francisco game. One of the cameras zoomed in on the Green Bay bench area, shooting over the shoulders of the players who would not be taking the field at the start of the game. Their captain, Reggie White, screamed over the noise at his teammates: “Keep focused on the game. Don’t you think about nothin’ else. Be ready to play. Be ready to come in when we need you.”
Reggie’s comments remain true: team sports are won by team play. As we can clearly see in the New Testament, God expects this pattern in leadership. Yet for thousands of pastors, associate staff members, school principals, teachers, missionaries, and parachurch personnel, authentic leadership and biblical management also represent exercising spiritual gifts. Paul’s words on the qualities of elders exemplify the many New Testament teachings on leadership. When we analyze these passages in the light of New Testament models, we can practice a theology of authenticity that for Christian leaders should be more important than managerial skills.
Reference List:
Collins, Jim. 2001. Level Five Leadership. Harvard Business Review (January): 68–74.
Gangel, Kenneth O. 2000. Coaching Ministry Teams. Nashville: Word Publishing.
Goleman, Daniel. 2002. Leading Resonant Teams. Leader to Leader, no. 25 (January): 30.
Kouzes, James M., and Barry Z. Posner. 1999. Encouraging the Heart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Manoogian, Sam T. 2002. Maintaining Your Focus. Leader to Leader, no. 25 (summer): 7.
The Authentic Leader: A Case for School Leadership 6.2