Directive leadership styles are always popular with leaders - but divine leadership is a better way.
God is often perceived as directive in His own leadership style and certainly there are many examples of decisive leadership, as when He dealt with Pharaoh of Egypt or led Israel out of captivity through the Red Sea. But it would be wrong to interpret Him as a directive leader, because there is substantially more evidence pointing to an influential style of leadership.
It is a given that God respects our freedom of choice and will not impose His will on us. Yet He gave us His Word and made it very clear that there are consequences for not obeying it. That borders on directive-ness, but stops short of it. He does not actually respond directly to disobedience, rather He created laws of cause and effect that are invoked by our own responses to them. So when we willfully disobey we invoke the embedded consequences or curses of His law.
Actually the entire universe is made that way. God doesn’t sit down with a “weather angel” every day and decide what kind of day we are going to have. Rather He invested a handful of highly deterministic laws that govern the entire weather cycle, without any further intervention. Thus Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wants to”.
Now such principles already allude to a very effective style of leadership. Rather than interfere in daily decision making, which would be disempowering and intrusive, God established the fewest possible laws (minimalism) to achieve the greatest possible level of self-regulation in life. The resulting system is very self-adjusting and able to bounce back from human excesses, although we are currently at risk of pushing our life support system beyond its design limits.
So God gives us principles to guide our lives and then lets us find the fine balance between those principles so that we may be effective. Beyond that He influences our hearts and minds, through His still small voice, but He never says “do that or else”. He makes allowance for our complexity and our competing influences, by patiently influencing our choices until that yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Sometimes our willfulness will drive us into long periods of isolation and frustration, but then He simply meets us in those experiences and shows us His divine ways.
Humans tend to be too willful to adopt a patient, influencing style. Yet a lot of modern thinking around EQ (Emotional intelligence), presupposes an influential, patient approach to the way we interact with people. Many vent their frustration with people and turn to manipulation: anger, politics, underhandedness, malice and all the other negative levers so popularly applied in corporate and, sad to say, church life. That is self-negating, because the resulting impositions provoke a push back from people and that leads to the nasty, unproductive standoffs that characterize politics. Some have paid dearly for that, as did the bourgeoisies of revolutionary France.
So effective leadership does not require an overt, charismatic, loud, assertive, pushy style – ever.
Truly effective and sustainable leadership requires us to shepherd, not herd, God’s heritage. It is a rod and staff thing, requiring us to use the staff to gently nudge and influence, whilst deploying the rod to deal with exceptions, exceptionally. The rod reflects the consequences that are embedded within divine law and reflect God’s bottom line. Good leadership must define boundaries (doctrine, direction and discipline) and defend them, but it should liberate and empower all behavior that functions within those boundaries.
God is often perceived as directive in His own leadership style and certainly there are many examples of decisive leadership, as when He dealt with Pharaoh of Egypt or led Israel out of captivity through the Red Sea. But it would be wrong to interpret Him as a directive leader, because there is substantially more evidence pointing to an influential style of leadership.It is a given that God respects our freedom of choice and will not impose His will on us. Yet He gave us His Word and made it very clear that there are consequences for not obeying it. That borders on directive-ness, but stops short of it. He does not actually respond directly to disobedience, rather He created laws of cause and effect that are invoked by our own responses to them. So when we willfully disobey we invoke the embedded consequences or curses of His law.
Actually the entire universe is made that way. God doesn’t sit down with a “weather angel” every day and decide what kind of day we are going to have. Rather He invested a handful of highly deterministic laws that govern the entire weather cycle, without any further intervention. Thus Jesus said, “The wind blows where it wants to”.
Now such principles already allude to a very effective style of leadership. Rather than interfere in daily decision making, which would be disempowering and intrusive, God established the fewest possible laws (minimalism) to achieve the greatest possible level of self-regulation in life. The resulting system is very self-adjusting and able to bounce back from human excesses, although we are currently at risk of pushing our life support system beyond its design limits.
So God gives us principles to guide our lives and then lets us find the fine balance between those principles so that we may be effective. Beyond that He influences our hearts and minds, through His still small voice, but He never says “do that or else”. He makes allowance for our complexity and our competing influences, by patiently influencing our choices until that yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Sometimes our willfulness will drive us into long periods of isolation and frustration, but then He simply meets us in those experiences and shows us His divine ways.
Humans tend to be too willful to adopt a patient, influencing style. Yet a lot of modern thinking around EQ (Emotional intelligence), presupposes an influential, patient approach to the way we interact with people. Many vent their frustration with people and turn to manipulation: anger, politics, underhandedness, malice and all the other negative levers so popularly applied in corporate and, sad to say, church life. That is self-negating, because the resulting impositions provoke a push back from people and that leads to the nasty, unproductive standoffs that characterize politics. Some have paid dearly for that, as did the bourgeoisies of revolutionary France.
So effective leadership does not require an overt, charismatic, loud, assertive, pushy style – ever.
Truly effective and sustainable leadership requires us to shepherd, not herd, God’s heritage. It is a rod and staff thing, requiring us to use the staff to gently nudge and influence, whilst deploying the rod to deal with exceptions, exceptionally. The rod reflects the consequences that are embedded within divine law and reflect God’s bottom line. Good leadership must define boundaries (doctrine, direction and discipline) and defend them, but it should liberate and empower all behavior that functions within those boundaries.
(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
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