My friend Steve Gumaer wrote, “After all these years of leading a multinational and motivated team, I have finally realized that what shapes my leadership style is not primarily context, techniques, or social recognition. It is love and the audacity to push into the world with a transforming idea lovingly and with others.”
You might remember Steve as the guest blogger a few weeks ago when he introduced us to Rose Mu. Well, Steve originally wanted to share his thoughts about my book Salvaged and put the focus on me. I refused. He persisted. I refused. He persisted.
And so I thought, well what the heck? His thoughts are insightful about leadership, and his focus isn’t just my book. Plus he’s such a cool dude, and he wants me to share it, so okay fine. Here goes.
Thirty-year-old leaders buy Salvaged. Now.
Salvaged is a practical and down to earth book on principles of leadership. Actually, it’s more a manual of short chapters on how to be a kind human, a Christ follower, and how people are central to all business, not the business activity itself. It’s about keeping management and leadership techniques out of the drivers seat of organized life and keeping people in it. I can imagine author Roy Goble commenting with a ironic smile, “Yeah, throw those techniques in the trunk for when you get a flat tire.”
Leading my team to help refugees and displaced people has been my passion for 26 years. With a growing team and recognizing the need to grow in competence, I read through Covey, Maxwell, Greenleaf, Arbinger Institute, and many other voices of management and leadership theory I could get my hands on. To me, especially in my 30’s, the subject was all about techniques and those techniques were very much the driving force behind how I led. But as Roy highlighted in Chapter 16, “Leadership techniques and tricks work… until they don’t”
That chapter wasn’t the only one to reveal the expert I was at missing the point and focusing on techniques, every chapter was. The book turned out to be a deeply reflective and practical reminder of what is ultimately important: actions that are grounded in love, that stem from practical thinking, and a clear sense of the values that undergird them. Reading the book I asked myself many times, “have I mastered this yet?” No. I have work to do.
After all these years of leading a multinational and motivated team, I have finally realized that what shapes my leadership style is not primarily context, techniques, or social recognition. It is love and the audacity to push into the world with a transforming idea lovingly and with others.
That is not to advocate mouse-ish weakness, or to say that hard decisions and decisive corrective or constructive action may at times hurt people. Roy states this too when he talks about the occasional need to fire someone (rather than continuing to change their diapers). But the white-hot molten core of a leader is loving action, focused on developing and working with the people who raised their hands and said “pick me” when the idea was pitched.
Many of the techniques I learned in my 30’s were good ones, and I carry them in me to this day. But my 30 year old self lacked wisdom, maturity, and the black eyes required to make those techniques into occasional nuanced tools of community life rather than universal hammers to nail every situation.
Thanks for putting real-life lessons in print Roy. We needed them.