Leadership (Part II)

"You cannot be an effective leader until you properly understand the fifth commandment."
David Grant (Part I)

As the comments in the previous post said, there may be multiple ideas to explain in this statement. As easy as it is to explain what's wrong with this statement, the challenge is to explain what's right about it. It's not my quote but I'll give it a shot.

Our character, values and mehods as leaders often has a lot to do with our relationship with our parents. Honour your mother and father, Exodus 20:12. That seems pretty Freudian, of course.

As one example: Perhaps our father was demanding, judgemental and angry. In return, we become judgemental and angry about his judgement and anger, denouncing his actions and perhaps him as a person. Anytime we come across another person that seems judgemental and angry, we immediately recognize these traits and we refuse to take that kind of thing because we've seen it before. If we take on leadership roles, you might just see this attitude kick in as we work with those under our authority.

Yessir, it's the age-old adage: If we curse and say that we will never become like our parents, then guess who we become?

More than that, our parents are key to how we view authority in our lives. The lessons that we learn from their leadership to us are taken and applied as become leaders ourselves. How we encourage others, how we make decisions for a group, how we deal with problems, how we punish when needed, how we apply authority for menial tasks - it all comes into play.

If we refused to obey our parents because of character flaws that they had, regardless of whether the flaws were real or imagined, what will we do when we come under the authority of another flawed person? Since it's guaranteed that our next authority figure will be flawed, since the none of us ain't perfect, we tend to see the patterns repeat. How we reacted to our parents kicks in again as we react to a pastor or a boss at work. Yes, there is less baggage so it's easier to submit and get along but when the crisis point hits, what do we do?

A tough part about being a kid is to obey our parents when they're wrong and to have a good attitude while we do it. Sometimes we learn later that they were smarter than we thought and sometimes we are proven correct. When it comes time to submit to another authority figure, what do we do in that same situation? And when we're the leader, what do we expect others to do?

See, our parents are our model of authority. If one parent had the last word on everything and ran our house like a totalitarian regime, we're hopefully smart enough to see the problems. So when we become leaders, we vow to be better leaders - but we still approach it thinking that one person is solely in charge. We may become kinder and gentler rulers, but we still become rulers. Our parents modeled that for us.

Conversely, if our parents worked together and explained their decisions to us, if they considered our opinions, if they gave us freedom to make decisions then we approach our own leadership roles in a similar fashion. That's not to say that either approach is the ideal one, it's to say that either approach defines our view of authority.

How should a leader act? How should a leader work with others? What should we do under a bad leader or after a bad decision? What defines a person as a leader? How do view authority, even God himself? Our parents are our first and most important authority figures and that plays a large role in shaping us as leaders.