There are two recent articles that looked at leadership today:
The Humble Hound By DAVID BROOKS (NY Times)
Some leaders are boardroom lions. They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic. They call for relentless transformational change...
Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.” Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model.
By Katherine Tyler Scott
The Episcopal Church, like other mainline Protestant denominations, is not immune from the seismic political, sociological and economic shifts happening today. Most of us are experiencing "a time of no longer and a time of not yet"--an era of rapid, complex change; chronic anxiety; and heightened ambiguity. The comfort of the familiar is fading, and the movement toward an unknown future can feel terrifying. In times like these, Christians expect religious leadership to help bridge the gap between the ideal and the real, and to equip followers to live out the Gospel in an environment of extreme polarities, i.e., poverty and wealth, insularity and inclusiveness, hostility and hospitality, homogeneity and diversity.
It is worth reading both articles and it left me thinking about how we lead today...
Leaders cannot sequester congregants in beautiful spaces of worship with glorious music and liturgy without also engaging them in deeper reflection about what it means to live one's faith responsibly in the world. (Tyler)
She tries to construct thinking teams. In one study, groups and individuals were given a complicated card game called the Wason selection task. Seventy-five percent of the groups solved it, but only 14 percent of individuals did...The humble hound is a stagehand who happens to give more public presentations than most. (Brooks)
Leadership today is about humility, working with others, and also engaging the bigger questions in the midst of change when nothing is settled.
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