Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (14 page)

Don’t overreact to conflicts
. You’re going to have conflicts; don’t make them worse by overreacting to them. Don’t drop a bomb when a slingshot will work. If you expect conflicts, you will be better prepared to handle them sensibly.

Don’t become defensive
. You never win in relationships when you’re defensive. A secure leader knows how to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I misunderstood. Please forgive me.” The moment that you defend yourself, the moment that you stand up for your rights, you’re going to start a battle. We never resolve differences by being defensive.

Welcome the conflict
. Make it a learning experience. Most of us will never enjoy the conflicts, but we can be thankful for them if we learn from them. Conflicts will either give you ulcers or understanding: You choose which it will be.

Take a risk
. Many people do not handle conflict in relationships because they are afraid to put their hands out first. If my relationship with you is shaky and you extend your hand toward me in a gesture of friendship, how do you feel if I don’t clasp it? First, you feel ridiculous standing there with your hand in the air. Then you feel rejected. Many people don’t handle their conflicts because they don’t want to be rejected. They’re unwilling to take that risk.

When I realized that I was going to be a leader, I sat down one day and wrote down all the ways a leader can be hurt. After I wrote them down, dozens of them, I categorized them. I decided that leaders will always be hurt. Don’t let anybody sell you on the idea that everybody’s going to love you all the time. If you are out front leading people, you will be hurt. The issue is not will you or won’t you, but in what way will you be hurt. I decided that I would be hurt because I trust people and make myself vulnerable to them. I know people who say, “I won’t get close to people, so they won’t hurt me.” I’ve watched people build themselves into glass cases; they make good mannequins but poor leaders. Because I am willing to be hurt in that area, I find that there are people I have trusted, people I have believed in, who have grown because I risked getting close to them; I risked being rejected by them. Many times more often than not, it’s worth the risk. Allow yourself to be vulnerable.

Fortunately, we don’t always have to handle conflicts. We do have some good relationships. How can we make them better? In John 10, we can find three things to do to cultivate relationships: Know them, grow them, and show them.

Relationships start with knowing, continue with growing, and climax with showing. Know them: Jesus called his sheep by name. Grow them: They heard his voice and came to him. Show them: Jesus walked ahead of his sheep, and they followed him.

Know them
. Let me give you the ABCs of beginning effective relationships. Acknowledge your need for others. For your relationship to be cultivated effectively, you have to admit that you need other people in your life. Paul teaches that “there are many members, but one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’; or again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor. 12:20–21). A complete Christian is filled with God’s Spirit but it is also complemented by different gifted friends. Friends are essential. Acknowledge your need of them. Until you do that, you’ll never cultivate effective relationships.

Believe in the value of others
. Carlisle said, “A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats the little man.” The value you place on people determines whether you are a motivator or a manipulator of men. Motivation is moving together for mutual advantage. It’s all of us moving together because it benefits all of us; manipulation is moving together for my advantage. There’s a difference. With the motivator, everybody wins. With the manipulator, only the “leader” wins.

Concentrate on people, not programs
. The only things that God will ever rescue from this planet are his people. Therefore, if you want a ministry of permanence, you must build into the lives of others. Changing programs won’t establish permanence; changing people will. Some of the most miserable people I know are program changers and builders. On the other hand, the happiest people I know are people builders and changers. Where are you going to put your life? Concentrate on people.

Grow them
. If you want to help people grow, you need to be available to them when they need you. People going through hard times have deeply felt needs that you can reach out to meet. As you do, you will find your relationship with them deepening. Timing is more important than time in a relationship. Walking into the lives of people when they really need you is more important than being with them all the times when they don’t really need you. Timing is essential.

Be a reliable leader
. Relationships grow on consistency; they shrink on moodiness. Be approachable: Have you ever wanted to see somebody who had tremendous mood swings but hesitated because you didn’t know whether that person would love you or bite your head off? As a leader, be reliable so your people can always feel comfortable coming to you.

Be a reassuring leader
. Relationships grow in an atmosphere of affirmation. Most people are insecure; because they need encouragement, you need to be an encourager. Margaret and I recently had a talk with our daughter’s gymnastics instructor. He has had trouble grasping the importance of affirming people: He’s quick to tell the kids in the class when they do something wrong, but he doesn’t know how to say, “That was good. You’re doing well there.” We encouraged him to use some positive reinforcement with Elizabeth. Affirm your people. That’s how they grow.

Be a resourceful leader
. Relationships grow when someone has answers to questions. Become a problem solver. Have something to contribute. We all like to be around people who can stretch us, teach us, and help us grow.

Show them
. People do what they see. In cultivating relationships we have to model for others good people skills. People do not care how much you know, but they know how much you care, and they know how much you care by the way you act, not by what you say.

In studies of the leadership of American businesses, it has been shown that executives spend three-fourths of their working days with
people
. The largest single cost in most businesses is
people
. The most valuable asset of any company is its people. All executive plans are carried out, or fail to be carried out, by people. Our relationships with people will determine the success of our leadership. We can either work with people or war against them. We can be plows or bulldozers: The plow turns over the earth, stirring it up, cultivating it, making it a good place for seed to grow; the bulldozer scrapes the earth, pushing obstacles aside. Both plows and bulldozers are useful instruments, but one wrecks while the other cultivates. The plow type of leader sees in people riches waiting to be uncovered and cultivated; the bulldozer type of leader sees in people obstacles to be destroyed. Be a cultivator!

chapter 8

SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS, BUT SAVE OUR PIGS

W
HEN
I
CONDUCT CHURCH LEADERS
’ clinics, I ask the pastors to tell me all the ways they can think of to grow a church. We take about fifteen or twenty minutes, and I fill up a blackboard with ways to get a church growing. We have on that board every essential ingredient for building a church. After reviewing the list, I point out to them that we all know how to build a church. We already have fifty church-growth books on our shelves. We already have all those answers. The issue is not whether we know how to build a church; it’s whether we’re willing to pay the price to make it happen.

One time when Jesus went over to the Gadarene country, a couple of demon-possessed men met him. He cast the demons out of them and sent the demons into a herd of pigs. The pigs rushed into the sea and drowned (see Matt. 8:28–34). Until Jesus came, there had been a real problem in that community. Every time people went near the graveyard, the demon-possessed men came out, wild and naked, and attacked them. But the people weren’t happy when their pigs drowned, even though the demons were disposed of too. They wanted to get rid of the demon-possessed men, but they didn’t want to lose their pigs.

They remind me of people who want God to solve their problems without it costing them anything. They want all the solutions, but they want them for nothing.

There are some observations about this incident that begin to float to the surface. The people themselves were unwilling to pay the price to see the problem solved. I think that’s the most obvious lesson. They wanted to get rid of the demon-possessed men, but they also wanted to save their pigs. It is also interesting to me that the demons didn’t want to leave the Gadarene country. They wanted to stay right there. They obviously knew a good thing when they saw it; they found the people in that area easy prey.

We don’t want to be confronted with changes or problems. Even when God himself brings them into our lives, we want to escape them. We want deliverance without disturbance. We want the benefits without the bills. We want success without sacrifice. But it just doesn’t happen that way. We cannot afford to drift into a lifestyle that places repose above results. We must welcome the changes that God’s Spirit brings and accept them on his conditions and not ours. And it’s up to us to set the pace for those who are following us, whatever the cost.

Let’s talk about the costs of leadership. What do we really have to pay in order to have credibility, power, and authority in our leadership?

If you are going to be a successful leader, you are going to experience a great amount of discomfort.

In
Success
magazine in October 1985, there was an excerpt from
Doing It Now
by Edwin C. Bliss (Scribners) that really grabbed me.

We live in a culture that worships comfort. During this century we have seen the greatest assault on discomfort in the history of the human race. We have learned to control our environment with central heating and air conditioning. We have reduced drudgery with machines and computers. And we have learned to control pain, depression, and stress. We even provide electronic antidotes to boredom with television sets and video games. Most of this is to the good, but unfortunately it has created an impression that the purpose of life is to attain a blissful state of nirvana, a total absence of struggle or strain. The emphasis is on consuming not producing; on short-term hedonism rather than long-term satisfaction. We seek immediate gratification of our desires, with no penalties.

Life just doesn’t work that way, at least not for many and not for long. One of Benjamin Franklin’s favorite sayings was, “There is no gain without pain.” The great goal of becoming what one is capable of becoming can be achieved only by those who are willing to pay the price, and the price always involves sacrifice, discomfort, unpleasantness, and even pain.

What are some of the signs in today’s society of the pursuit of immediate gratification? How about fast-food restaurants? Credit cards? Abortion clinics? An abundance of divorce lawyers? The list could go on and on. We want to play; we don’t want to have responsibility. We want the position and the paycheck, but we don’t want to do the work.

Consider
the life of the apostle Paul, one of the greatest leaders in the first century. He understood perhaps better than any of his peers that we have to pay the price to solve our problems. In 2 Corinthians 11:23–29, Paul describes the price he paid for his apostleship, the cost of his success in leadership. There are three things I want to draw out of this chapter as we look at the relationship between leadership and discomfort.