be everything I could be.
When you thought I wasn’t looking —
I looked …
And wanted to say thanks
For all those things you did
When you thought I wasn’t looking.
Eventually, she died, and he attended the funeral. That’s when he learned it had always been her heart’s desire to be a nun, but she hadn’t joined a religious order because she felt an obligation to help support her family. Instead, she decided to live as a celibate governess and to send nearly all of her small stipend home to her family, living elsewhere in India. Hers had been a life of totally selfless service. That realization overwhelmed him. He also recognized that the gifts she had bought him were purchased with funds she could have sent home to help her needy family. The thought that his happiness mattered so much to her was almost more than he could bear.
In India, a land where religious tolerance has sometimes been a struggle and where Christians are just a tiny minority of the population, a poor and seemingly powerless governess imbued a young Hindu man with an appreciation for Christianity in general and a deep regard for Catholics in particular. He said he wanted to invest in my Catholic enterprise for two reasons: it appeared to be an attractive risk/reward opportunity and it would honor his boyhood governess. He wrote a check for a substantial number of shares and slid it across the table to me.
Who would say that this poor, obscure woman was not a leader? Indeed, her leadership was so powerful that it continued to exert an influence many years after she had gone to her grave. St. Francis of Assisi would have appreciated her sublime leadership contribution because she lived fully Francis’ admonition to preach the Gospel without words. Because of that, the force of her deeds still resonates decades later halfway around the world. In her own humble way, truly she was a leader in the image of Jesus.
This devoted servant’s example reminds us that there are two realms of leadership: life role and organizational.
• Organizational leadership gets more attention in our mass culture. CEOs of big companies are celebrities — either for the billions of dollars they generate and the shareholders they enrich, or for the billions of dollars they squander and the lives they destroy, sometimes by breaking the law. The public is fascinated by these stories of the rich, famous, and powerful.
• But I’m convinced that life-role leadership is the more important of the two. Over the years, I’ve held a number of prominent leadership roles: editor, publisher, vice president of a large business, business owner, and college professor. But all of them pale in importance to my role as a husband and father because no outcomes are more important to me than the lives of my wife and children. More than anything else in the world I want to make a positive contribution to their development and well-being.
All of us are leaders of one sort or another at various times in our lives. But not all of us are effective leaders. Effective leadership involves a few key attributes that the Lead Like Jesus movement wants to share with the whole world, and the S3 Leadership Framework is a fine way to understand what it means to lead like Jesus. When we employ the S3 Leadership Framework to try to lead like Jesus, we open the door to incredible growth and development in ourselves and in all of the persons and organizations with whom we interact.
The journey begins by recognizing that effective long-term leadership begins inside us. It is a matter of character. We cannot give what we do not have. Inevitably, leadership moments come to us in this life. What we do with them is largely a matter of the choices we have made up to that point about the person we want to be and the legacy we want to leave. Ultimately, effective leadership is not about formal power or money. It is about integrity. Leadership begins in the heart. Jesus tells us we need to have the heart of a servant.
Understanding Power
When some people hear the phrase “leading like Jesus,” they are reluctant to listen because they think of Jesus as a “nice guy” and a “softie” who might not be able to cut it in today’s competitive world. Leadership, they believe, is about power. Effective leaders are strong people who are forceful and willing to bully and punish others to get compliance. Jesus’ leadership was nothing like that. But neither was it “soft.” In fact, it was very demanding. Despite Jesus’ gentleness, He was able to attract followers who would eventually die for Him because He had wisdom about the roots of real, lasting power that modern researchers are only beginning to understand.
Let’s take a closer look at the five bases for power, as outlined by John French and Bertram Raven,12 to see why they are not equal. They are:
1. Reward power — the ability to give rewards and grant favors.
2. Coercive power — the ability to threaten and apply punishment.
3. Legitimate (or official) power — the ability to direct others’ behavior by virtue of one’s formal position.
4. Expert power — the ability to influence people because you know more than others or you have access to information that others don’t have.
5. Referent power — also called charisma or role model power, the ability to influence people because they perceive that you somehow deserve to be followed, perhaps because they believe you will achieve group success that others cannot or because they believe you care about them.
Which Powers Are the Most Powerful?
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