Jean had the credentials. Solid academic preparation for her ministry role in a large congregation. High IQ. Two years of experience that had polished her technical proficiency. Nevertheless six months after she began, her supervisor concluded no amount of mentoring would remedy the deficiencies in her job performance.
Karen accepted another staff position in the same congregation. She possessed neither formal education nor experience in this ministry role. Her IQ was average. After six months, though, church members were telling her supervisor, “She is the best we’ve ever had. I hope we can keep her forever.”
The four key predictors of vocational success—specialized skill, IQ, academic training, and experience—do not guarantee effectiveness as a leader.
A fifth quality, which some call emotional intelligence, must accompany the first four. This leadership quality is so potent it can to some extent compensate for the absence of the other four.
An explosive increase in leadership research during recent years signals the importance of that fifth quality.
Facets of leadership ability
The studies suggest that leadership is like a necklace with 12 diamonds. A pastor can lack one of the 12 with few people noticing its absence. When six diamonds are missing, job stress increases. If eight are missing, vocational pain replaces job satisfaction. If all 12 are missing, the individual is usually a former church employee.
1. Excellence: high-quality performance and expecting it of others
People who possess leadership quality aspire to higher levels of achievement.
An administrator who dictates dozens of letters each day showed her typist a flawed paragraph that needed changing. The typist responded, “I hoped you wouldn’t catch that.” The typist had many good qualities, including business school training, specialized skill, adequate IQ, and experience, but the absence of a fifth quality—the drive for excellence—will keep her out of leadership roles.
A person’s commitment to excellence determines whether peers view him or her as a leader.
2. Objectivity: ability to assess reality accurately
Leaders never make perfect grades on this test, but they consistently score higher than the people they lead. Some business writers say defining reality is job one of every ceo. Leaders who frequently fail to define reality accurately walk up stairs of sand toward effectiveness.
Vast knowledge does not guarantee objectivity. In the field of science, for example, intelligent Ph.D.s sometimes get so locked into historical ways of thinking about scientific issues that their objectivity blurs. That’s why many scientific breakthroughs come from the fringes of a scientific community rather than its core.
Your location on the thinking-feeling scale influences your objectivity. Extreme “feeling” people tend to base decisions on how people close to them feel. Extreme “thinking” people tend to base decisions on factors such as efficiency, goals, and the cost-benefit ratio.
Effective leaders are sensitive to other’s feelings, but they seldom score at the extreme “feeling” end of the scale. The habit of holding up a wet finger to the winds of opinion is not leadership.
3. Innovation: ability to create effective new ways to get the job done
Innovators never stop learning and growing. They find new solutions to problems, ways to deal with changing circumstances, and ways to accomplish the organization’s ministry. They break through their natural fear of change and take risks to make things better, exercising initiative beyond their stated job responsibilities.
Biographies of innovative leaders sometimes make their lives seem like 40-year parade routes accompanied by public oohs and aahs. A closer look disintegrates that myth. Most innovators move against the tide of majority opinion, which usually resists rather than affirms change, at least in its first stages. Innovators must therefore possess sufficient self-confidence to move ahead despite negative comments.
4. Persistence: tenacity to keep driving toward goals
People who risk making changes not only succeed more often; they also fail more often. Effective leaders are so completely committed to their vision and projects, however, that they see setbacks as opportunities rather than dead ends.
When they fail, they forgive themselves and move on. When they fall down, they pick themselves up, figure out why they fell, and try again (with the added advantage of having learned from a mistake).
5. Communication: ability to express ideas and goals clearly
John Gardner defines leadership as “the process of persuasion and example by which an individual (or leadership team) induces a group to take action that is in accord with the leader’s purposes or the shared purposes of all.” Communication skill is the foundation of a leader’s ability to persuade.
Although few leaders excel at all forms of communication—conversation, speeches, and writing, for example—every leader should be capable of expressing concepts clearly.
Ineffective communication takes three primary forms:
- Overcommunication that lacks focus. Some poor communicators sound like an entire newspaper instead of an article focused on a subject. They say a great deal about everything, but when they finish, people ask, “What was the point?” When leaders communicate, less is often more.
- Unclear communication that creates confusion. Effective communicators do more than focus on one subject; they are clear, accurate, and specific about it.
- Insufficient information that causes paranoia or misunderstanding. When members of congregations are consistently uninformed about major issues, their imaginations invent and distribute information to fill the vacuum. Some of that information is accurate; much of it, manufactured out of their best hopes and worst fears, is highly distorted.
Persuasive leaders know the time they spend informing people of important issues actually saves time. Such communication reduces the grapevine distribution of inaccuracies that will require three times as much energy later on to correct.
6. Inspiration: ability to express vision, ideals, and hope in ways that move others toward new thinking and actions
Great dreams can generate incredible energy, but only when shared in inspiring ways. Effective leaders go beyond clarity; their vision is wrapped in enthusiasm, conviction, and sincerity. They consistently convey an optimism that labels themselves and others as winners despite all odds.
Inspiration is an especially crucial quality in times of organizational stress. An old saying about golf reminds us that the real test is not in keeping out of the rough but in getting out once you are in. Leaders can inspire people who are in the rough to move beyond it. They see and communicate to others extraordinary opportunities in ordinary circumstances.
A person’s commitment to excellence determines whether peers view him or her as a leader.
In the early, difficult days of Federal Express, Fred Smith, the founder of the company, faced a wall of obstacles. Thirty million dollars in debt, indicted for defrauding a bank, sued by his own family, he nearly lost his job as chairman. Yet he inspired such loyalty among his employees that some of the van drivers pawned their watches to buy gasoline so they could get their packages to the airport on time. Effective leaders have inspirational qualities that motivate common people to do uncommon things.
7. Caring: genuine interest in people and concern for their needs
Caring is not just an extroverted personality; it is true compassion.
Caring alone, devoid of the other leadership qualities, does not produce an effective leader. But church leaders who lack a caring attitude will eventually be disliked by so many people that their leadership light will dim.
Many business leaders are respected but not liked. In religious organizations, however, few leaders survive on respect alone. Their followers must also like them, and that begins when leaders like their followers.
One way church leaders communicate caring is by being fully present in conversations with people while enmeshed in numerous responsibilities. Effective religious leaders can do two things at once—care about organizational goals and care about people.
8. Sensitivity: ability to understand people and their patterns of reaction
Effective leaders can see things from another’s perspective. Someone estimated 50 percent of all first-term missionary failures are attributable to some failure in relationships. One pastor wrote in his prayer journal, “Sensitivity to feelings is as important as IQ. Stop trying to succeed and start trying to relate.”
Sensitivity includes recognizing manipulative behavior in others. A pastor described how he made a mistake in accepting a congregational call. During the interview process, the pastor had been moved by a pulpit committee member’s emotional speech expressing his burden for their church’s need of a pastor with this candidate’s ability. The committee member was apparently so overcome with emotion that he broke down and cried and had to leave the room. Later the pastor learned the man was head of the local college’s drama department.
Sensitive leaders can assess people and relationships with a high level of accuracy.
9. Receptive listening: willingness to gather information before making judgments
Effective leaders convey a “why not?” attitude and listen carefully to those who offer ideas. They operate on the assumption that this is a good idea—unless further conversation demonstrates otherwise.
Those who lack this receptive listening trait produce three negative consequences:
- Instead of feeling that the leader likes them and appreciates their suggestions, people feel personally rejected.
- People stop communicating new ideas to the leader, thus cutting off the leader from a major source of grist for the innovation mill.
- The leader becomes disconnected from what people in the congregation think about its ministries.
In conversations, effective leaders do two things: they ask questions, and they listen. This makes people like them, respect them, and want to bring them information. The more the leader listens, the more people feel affirmed. The more questions the leader asks, the more people perceive him or her as genuinely interested.
10. Forthrightness: courage to sensitively communicate concerns to others
Mel Brooks told a story of a man who suffered from a compulsion to tear paper. After several years of psychoanalysis, John was no better. His family was losing hope. So John’s parents took him to a new therapist.
Instead of listening to him for hours, the therapist walked John around the room, talking quietly to him. In one session, John was cured.
Filled with curiosity, John’s mother phoned the therapist and asked what he had said to John in that one life-changing session. The therapist answered, “I told him, ‘Don’t tear paper.'”
Insensitive people fail to distinguish between forthrightness and abrasiveness.
In general, forthright people have earned the right to express a concern because they have a long-term, positive, trusting relationship. A friend is someone who can be honest with you without breaking the relationship.
11. Effective conflict management: ability to help people work through emotionally charged differences of opinion in ways that build team spirit.
In describing Jackie Robinson, the first black major league baseball player, one newscaster said he had the stamina of spirit to deflect the arrows of criticism that came with the role. All effective leaders have some of that stamina.
Leaders take people in directions they would not otherwise go. Some people prefer the security of mediocre but familiar territory. To be a leader is therefore to experience some conflict.
Effective conflict management, however, goes beyond the ability to tolerate personal criticism.
Conflict managers continually assess circumstances, work with the limits of their organizational structure, and stay in communication with people of diverse opinions.
12. Effective time management: ability to select priorities based on a church’s goals and to focus on those priorities
Time management is actually goal management and self-management, with a few efficiency habits thrown in.
Here is a short course on time management:
- Clarify your objectives.
- Establish priorities that match your objectives.
- Break the big jobs into little pieces and work on one of the little pieces immediately.
- Clean up your paperwork daily.
- Learn to say no to important daily requests that do not fit with your objectives.
Can leadership be taught?
Can people acquire these twelve leadership traits? The answer is four-fold.
Yes! If medical schools can teach brain surgery, leadership skills are surely teachable. All great leaders are born without a knowledge of leadership principles. They must learn how to lead. What can be learned can surely be taught.
No! Leadership traits cannot be taught to people who lack the basic psychological predispositions and reflexes that effective leaders possess. Nor can leadership traits be taught to unmotivated people. In that sense, leadership cannot be taught by others; it is self-taught.
Maybe! If early ministry experiences providentially put highly motivated, genetically equipped people into circumstances where they have access to a competent, willing mentor, the right kind of crisis can mold those components into effective leadership traits.
Sometimes! Leadership blossoms in people who have adequate preparation, a motivating environment, encouraging models to watch, caring mentors to advise them, an unending passion to learn, and opportunities in which to practice. Sometimes these factors are all present; sometimes one or more of them is missing. That unpredictable, uncontrollable combination greatly determines whether people develop leadership skills.
Leadership traits cannot guarantee ministry effectiveness—any more than ministry skills devoid of leadership traits can make you effective.
Ministry is a complex art with many separate dynamics. Leadership traits are one important part of that indispensable art.
Herb Miller is president of Net Results, Inc. and editor of Net Results magazine, Lubbock, Texas.
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
