Editorial: Bosses, leaders, and human hearts

Written by Willmore D. Eva

(Excerpts:  http://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2005/july-august/bosses-leaders-and-human-hearts.html)

Most people would agree that good leadership is something like a brass ensemble gathered on the stage of life, playing beautiful music. Each instrument represents a feature or quality of leadership that stands out at one moment, and blends in with other instruments at another. Together they create a captivating harmony that moves the audience into a constructive common experience.

Or perhaps quality leadership is more like a recipe in which there is an assortment of carefully chosen ingredients, mixed in fine proportion, simmering on the family stove, ready to be served up with just the right flourish, so the gathered family will be satisfied and nourished.

The core of the difference between a boss and a leader lies in the fact that the leader has caught the vision of how critical it is to actually lead by enlisting the hearts of those who work with him or her. He knows the unsurpassable value of consistently leading from that perspective. While a leader may not be able to do this purely and consistently in every situation, it is nevertheless always the essential underpinning of a healthy leadership orientation. It helps to make more boss-like actions more palatable and effective when at crunch times the leader is forced to be more "bossish."

The boss simply hasn't caught this vision. The more he senses that he does not have the hearts of those he super vises (a common frustration for him), the more insecure he tends to become and the more he tends to operate as "the boss." And the more he or she bosses, the more his/her approach alienates. Thus again the natural tendency is to remedy the fallout by turning yet again to still more bossing. This escalates until this way of administrating or merely managing not really leading becomes his/her predominant, default style.

Jesus was, of course the consummate leader. His was the way of discipleship and that's an infrastructure I word when it comes to the sort of leadership we're advocating here and He gave His whole life to modeling this approach (Read again Mark 10:32-45.)