Video Transcript: What makes the leader?

Welcome back to our consideration of leadership. We've been involved in this now for three sessions. This is the fourth session. And you'll notice the title on this one, What makes a leader? What makes the Leader? What are those things that go into making a leader?

Just for review, you'll be sick of this by the time we're done with this class, I think you'll see this model many, many times, but the leader interacts with the culture, the way things are done there, in order to develop a vision for a preferable future and then guides the actions that need to take place with prayer and planning for that future to become reality. Or these are the words I've been using:

A leader, with all his plusses and minuses, strengths and weaknesses, interacts with a group of people to define the culture (the way things are done here) in order to develop a vision for a preferable future, and then provides the impetus for doing the actions necessary to bring about that future with plans and prayer.

That's the  leadership process. And as I said already in this class, quoting John Maxwell, Everything rises and falls on leadership. And so the leader is very important to that process. You can't have leadership without a leader. And so in this session, we're going to begin looking at ourselves, you looking at you, who you are, what are those things that go into making you the leader that you are today. There are a variety of forces that have been at work at you for many, many years. And we're just going to try and call some of those out and give you some tools in order to better define who you are. Because if you know who you are, you are better able to make decisions, better able to act, hopefully with God and God's power through the Holy Spirit rather than your own strength or weakness. So to begin with, what makes you who you are as a leader, here's a list of some things. 

Birth order. In the last couple of decades, they've done all sorts of research. And they found that birth order makes a difference on who we are. For instance, the firstborn, the label that's often given to the firstborn child is achiever. In other words, this is somebody who likes to follow the rules. It's somebody who likes to dominate, it's somebody who's got a drive to them. And so firstborns tend to be those who achieve in some way, shape or form. For instance, in the United States, 21 of the out of the first 23 astronauts were firstborns. Presidents. Out of our 44 presidents 24 had been  firstborn sons or firstborn children. And they had the sense to achieve and they achieved. So your birth order, second child. If you're a second child, the word that's often associated with a second child is that of just kind of a negotiator, somebody who is able to be between the first and the third child to try to keep peace between them. And so they are peacemakers. Maybe that's another term for them. They tend to be flexible, more flexible than the first child as a rule keeper, they tend to be the child that gives you the most trouble in discipline. They’re somebody who's chosen a different path than the first child. If the first child succeeds in one area, the second child will choose another area. For instance, if the first child is a science whiz, the second child may choose athletics or music. And as such, they accomplish a variety of things, but noting their order in the birth order. Now, one of the words that's ascribed to themselves often is negotiator. These people are very good at negotiation. The third child is sometimes labeled the life of the party. The third child has already had child one and two, and so has to pick a different way to find their identity usually, than academics or athletics or music. They'll choose something that the other two children haven't chosen. But they also tend to be the class clowns, they often tend to be the people who are the ones who become actors. They become salespeople, they're really good with people, they interact with people very well. And interestingly, many of them become teachers or even doctors. They're in this person oriented service kind of mode. And so your birth order, where you come in that birth order will impact how you lead. If you're a second child, you're going to lead one way, if you're a third child, you'll lead another way. And this is just to be aware of it. I've just given you a snapshot of all this can be. You can read a lot about it online, just to learn more about how that impacts you. And this doesn't mean you're stuck in that. It means if you're aware of your birth order, then you can overcome it if need be in certain situations, or be aware of it, to apply it more strongly in others. So birth order is one of those things that affects you.

Education affects your effectiveness as as a leader. And that's one of the reasons you're enrolled in this class and you're enrolled in Christian Leaders Institute. You're somebody who's recognized that you need more knowledge. One of the things they say about us leaders is we need skills, we need knowledge, and we need character. And those three things combine together to provide effective leadership. While here hopefully, you're going to get knowledge and skills. And the more knowledge you gain in your education, the more equipped you are to become a leader, or to be an effective leader. 

Your family of origin has a rather large effect on who you are. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a few moments. 

So let me go on to another one, which is life experience. As you experience life, you'll have some various highs and lows in your life. And those things start coming into who you are. For instance, if you have a bad experience in an early job, it will affect your choices of jobs after that. If you have a bad experience, such as you've been abused as a child, that's going to impact your capacity to lead. And you're going to have to learn to involve yourself in understanding how that affects you so that it doesn't impact your leadership negatively. So those are just some of the baggage things, you could probably name some others. But these are baggage things that come into play when you are leading somewhere. And when you have to start thinking about leadership, you should be thinking about and how they impact you so that you can adjust your life accordingly. 

Second thing that impacts your ability to lead would be your personality. There are a variety of ways to look at your personality, but your personality is created by a bunch of different forces at work on you, your environment, where you grew up, how you grew up, your family. And we'll look at that a little more closely in a few moments, as I said. But those things all affect who you are, as well as just some God given things that create you to be the person you are. Now there are a variety of ways to measure personality. I've listed one of them there, the Myers Briggs test, and I've listed this one because it's available for free. So I'll give it to you online, a website you can go to, but the Myers Briggs measures these things on a scale: introvert extrovert, sensing, intuition, thinking, feeling, judging, perceiving. Just I’ll give you some explanation for that. First of all, the first one, introvert or extrovert, according to this says you prefer to focus on the outer world or your own inner world. This is how you how you interact with the world. Now, sometimes this is  pictured incorrectly. An extrovert is pictured to somebody who can talk to anyone, somebody who is just, he meets people easily. An introvert is somebody who likes to sit at home all the time.  And that's, that's really an inaccurate description of what this scale is of measuring introversion or extroversion. The introvert gets their energy from being alone or with a few trusted people. It's a matter of where you get your energy. The extrovert gets their energy from outside, gets their energy from people being around. Now again, this is a scale. I'm a moderately expressed extrovert. And so I can play the role of extrovert for a long time, and then I'll want to be home. My wife's an introvert. And so we've had to balance how often we are with people and then when we withdraw to regain to restore energy. My daughter, our third daughter is a classical third child. And part of that issues and extreme extrovert. And I remember when she was in college, we were in California, she was going to college quite a ways away. And when she came home, one spring, one summer vacation, she decided to go to  work and got a job at a local nursing home, which I thought was great. It was a senior citizen center, had various level of care. And we thought this is great because she just loved being around people. She's an extrovert. And so she took that job and we picture her talking to elderly people as she cleaned rooms and, and doing that sort of thing. For the first week, she really just loved it. She loved the people she was working with. She loved the situation. And then one day I get a call. I'm at church, which is just a couple of miles away from where she was working. She said, Dad come and get me right now. She's crying. I said what's going  on? And she said, Well, I hate this job. I want you to come I'm quitting right now. I'm thinking What in the world happened? And she said, I'll tell you when you get here. So I drive over there quickly and get there and found out that the horrible thing that had happened to her was that they had put her in a room by herself to paint the room that day. And so she was working all by herself. And that was such a horrible thing. She couldn't stand it. That's the extreme extrovert. Where do you get your energy? Where do you feel alive? The extrovert gets it from being outside with people, the introvert by themselves or with a couple. In other words, the introvert, for instance, likes a few close relationships. The extrovert likes many relationships. The introvert likes to concentrate on something where the extrovert likes to have a lot of interaction with people, the introvert will reflect before making any decision. And the extrovert tends to make decisions very quickly. Those are just a snapshot, you'll get a chance to explore more of that later. 

The next one is a how you make decisions, or how you process the information you get. If the first one you get information through extraversion or introversion. How do you process information? The scale is sensing or intuition. Now, the sensing person likes to take in information through the five senses. That's why it's called sensing. Whereas the the person who's high on the intuition side, processes information through patterns that they've had previously in their life. The person who is a sensing person likes concrete thought, concrete lists, practical, factual stuff, whereas the intuition person sees the big picture, likes to be theoretical, likes to be idealistic and inventive in their decisions. Now, again, it's a scale doesn't mean you're absolutely one or absolutely the other. But how do you take in and focus on the information you take in? Are you a sensor? Or are you an intuitive person, this is a real challenge. I'll tell you when I was premarital counseling  with people, I have them do this test to discover their Myers Briggs Personality profile. And it was fascinating because I found that opposites in the personality were often attracted, especially in this area, extraversion and introversion, certainly, but in this area, they would have often somebody who was a sensing person, wanted to make a list, married to, marrying someone who was an intuitive person. And we began to talk about, I would always talk with people about how that's going to impact their joint decisions. For instance, if you're going to buy a house, the sensing person is going to make a list of all the pros and cons of why they should buy that house or not buy that house. And that would include where it is what it looks like condition it's in, what they're going to have to do to fix it up. da-da-da-da-da. So they'll have their list of costs, of the loan that they'd have to finance etc. And that person could go through all of that process and say, I don't think we should buy this house. But the intuitive person will say, it just feels right. It feels right. I sense that there's just a great thing going on in this house. It's our future. 

Now that one is similar to the second one, when you make a decision, are you a thinking person or a feeling person? The thinking person decides with their head, the feeling with the heart. Judging, the thinking person uses logic, the feeling person based on feelings, driven by thought is the person who is thinking and the empathetic person is the one who does feeling and etc. Now this can affect your ability to make decisions, too. Are you basing something on feelings? Are you basing something on the logic of at all? Not only that, but you've got to be aware as you're dealing with people in the area where you are leading, that you're going to be dealing with various kinds of personalities. And there are some people who just say, show me the facts, show me the facts, and you can have the best idea in the world. But if you don't have the facts to back it up, some people just won't be wanting to go toward that vision. 

One of the great ideas I had was to purchase a retreat center years ago, near the church where I served in California. And I remember, you know, checking it out from this large home that could house up to 25, 30 people. It was in the mountains near where we lived about 35-40 minutes from where we live. And so it was an ideal kind of place because we were trying to encourage groups to go on retreats together. And so I brought this to our leadership team. I said, You know wouldn’t this be a great idea? And I have this wonderful idea of how we would finance it. We've helped some of the people in the church who were wealthy to get catch that vision and hopefully, you know, give a certain amount to it and then they would begin writing that off over 10 years. I thought it was ideal. We had one of these guys in there, who was just a thinker. And so he was writing notes this whole time. And at the end of the conversation of the end of my presentation, he just said, you know, so I figured it out here, you could take every group in this church and stay at a very nice hotel, for as much as you're talking about over the next 10 years. And it was just like, boom, all of a sudden, the air went out of the room, and I had not prepared well, my presentation of facts for them, I was going totally on my feelings. 

Now last one is judging or perceiving. The judging person likes to finish the job before they're done. This is, the judging person likes their world to be structured, and the  perceiving person likes it to be open ended. The judging person likes to get closure. The  perceiving person likes to have all kinds of options open and will often wait to pull the trigger on something. The judging person likes to plan before taking action. The perceiving person, you may have heard it says, you know, Get ready, shoot, aim, they think action is the most important thing. And so they'll they'll take action before all the facts are in. Organized versus disorganized, controlled versus relaxed, etc. Those are some of the dynamics here. 

Now you, you come off with a matrix within that personality somehow. And so I encourage you to take the test. Here is a website where you can go and you can go for free, figure out what your Myers Briggs profile is. It will help you to understand how you face certain situations. It will help you understand some of the people with whom you work and the people who have to come along with you in the leadership process.

Another one that might be helpful is called the DISC  personality profile. That is another option that is available free as well. But this measure is something else. This measures, you'll notice the four things it measures: dominance, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness. In other words, the dominant person is the direct person, sometimes it's called that, there's somebody who's just very direct, and they tend to  take control. The influential person tends to have a focus on inspiring people to grab onto this vision, you can notice that the right side is more people oriented, the left side more task  oriented, the top is more outgoing, and the low is more reserved. The C is the cautious person. This is the person who wants to have everything in line, everything in place before they would make a decision. And then the S is the person who's supportive. This is a person who probably doesn't have too many ideas of their own, but they'll follow you because they trust you. Now, you've got a personality profile that is part of each of these. And that has an influence on who you're going to lead and how you're going to lead. 

Now I am a high I in my DISC profile. In other words, I think I can inspire anybody eventually, if given enough time. But I have to work with all these other personality profiles. And for 20 years, I had a partner who was a high C. In other words, he was cautious. And we had been through so many things over the years, you know, I mean, we'd been through a couple of different building programs. We were involved in a relocation program. And we finally finished the relocation and I remember going into his office and saying, you know, now we've got to develop a vision for the future to go to  whatever the next number was, a couple thousand more than we were at the present time. And he just kind of looked exasperated. He says, Do we have to? Do we have to? I kind of like it where we are. I as a leader have to work with him as well as others like him in order to lead well in that setting. And so you can take this, here's a website where you can take the DISC personality, and you can figure out more about who you are. And it will help you as you make  determinations. Now, that's helped me to realize that you know, as a high I, but with a low C supportive kind of thing. I'm not, I can't be involved in the little nitty gritty details of making things happen, or I will get frustrated very quickly. Those kinds of things are helpful to you. 

Another one that has been helpful to me is called the Kolbe test, Kolbe. That measures how you get things done. Now, I'm putting this on here, but it's a $50 charge to take this  online. So if you can, it's very helpful. It's been helpful to me to look at how I work and how others work. And it measures four things, you know, are you a Fact Finder? In other words, you're somebody who loves to do the research on things, or are you somebody who has a quick start, that you'd like to get things going? Are you good at follow through, you don't necessarily like to see things started, but you want to be the one who follows them through? Or are you an implementer, somebody who will take other’s ideas and put them into reality. The Kolbe test measures all four of those. And again, it's very helpful. I once had our staff team take this test together, and then we just looked at it. And we had about 15-20 people on staff at that point, and found out that we had only one person who was good at follow-through. And so you can imagine that person was inundated with details and responsibility for picking up after the rest of us who are quickstarts. And who are fact finders and, and, yeah, so our personality, I know about myself that I am a quickstart, I love to get  things going. I also know I'm a Fact Finder closely related behind that, I like to look at facts and use them as part of my way to inspire other people to take action, to develop and follow a vision. So those kinds of things in your personality will affect how you lead and just want to encourage you to be aware of them. 

Now, another thing I mentioned earlier, will impact your ability to lead is your life experience. This can be from a variety of places. In your life, you've had a lot of experiences that have made you who you are. They describe in your heart, the essence of who you are. They come from a variety of places. They come from experiences at  school, experiences in your family of origin, experiences when you won great things, when you've done something really terrific and you received a trophy for it, or you received accolades for it, that's a life experience. Or something where you failed, you tried something and you failed, or maybe you failed morally, or you've had those kinds of impactful things happen to you, they're going to affect your capacity to lead. And so to be aware of them is very important. They don't have to control you, we've got a lot of evidence that that's not the truth, they just don't have to control you. But if you are aware of them, you're going to be much more likely to be able to overcome them as you lead or to integrate those life experiences into who you are and who God is leading you to become. And so you'll note the directions there, love to have you write your life story, to look back and focus on events that have had an impact. What are those things? Was it a discipline as a child, was it a time when you first felt a sense of leadership. And as I said, when I introduced myself in session one I said I had no models for leadership. But very early on, I can remember in kindergarten being a leader for the first time. Unfortunately, it was a negative event, because we were having a game and I helped create that game. And it was a game where a friend and I were, I forget, Robin, Batman and Robin or something like that. And the rest were criminals trying to get us. And unfortunately, I let all the kids off the playground. And back then that  resulted in a spanking, but in reflecting on writing my life story and just reflecting on okay,  what are my life experiences? When have I experienced something that was involving that was calling me into leadership, or at least gave us a hint that I might be someday a leader? That's one that came to mind. So spend some time write out your life story. Where did you begin to get a sense of leadership? 

What passions have gone into it, what are those events?  Who are the people who have had an impact on you? The people that have formed who you are? Your parents, certainly, good friends that have had an impact on who you are, people that you modeled your life after. Talking about that in a moment, too. And then  significant circumstances that affected your life direction. You've had to make choices at  various stages. Why did you choose to take that job and not that job? If you're in ministry, why did you choose to be involved in that organization or that choice, or that church rather than that one? These are all things that have impacted your life experience. Ask God to guide your thoughts and then look for the way that God has guided you over the years. 

Now, all of this being said, there's one area that still needs to be addressed and that is spiritual giftedness. The Bible teaches us in those passages mentioned there, I Corinthians 12, Romans 12, I Peter 4:10, and a couple of others, that you, because you're a follower of Jesus Christ, because you've received Him into your life, you through the Holy Spirit, have a special ability to do something well. Leadership is indeed one of those gifts mentioned in Romans 13, where it said, Let him who leads lead diligently. Do it diligently. But there are other spiritual gifts that go into making you who you are. Creative ability. Numbering, those gifts are varied depending on which book you read, some say they're 19, some say they're 21. The point is, what's meaningful to you, there are all sorts of tests online, for free, that you can do to discover your spiritual gift, if you don't know it. Now part of discovering your spiritual gift would be to do a questionnaire, but that only gives you an idea of what your spiritual gift is. A second stage would be to have people identify that spiritual gifts in you, people who know you well, to be able to say, you know, I think I have the gift of teaching, what do you think? And get their response. People you trust and, and are able to speak into your life in that way.  And then to have it confirmed by when you teach, people actually learn. Giving. Look at the gifts because that will impact how you lead. Even if you have the gift, spiritual gift of leadership, your other gifts will tend to moderate that gift of leadership in special ways. It's a challenge. Because sometimes you got working gifts and waiting gifts, you know, gifts that are working. 

My primary gifts are preaching, and leadership and creative ability, especially in the area of music. And for many, many years, I had to put the music one aside, because the other two took most of my time and energy. Teaching, preaching and the leadership took all  the energy and so I had to make choices. Now I'm you know, I'm in a new stage of life. And so  I'm hopeful that I'll be able to pick that gift up and and use that again, in a way that will build  the kingdom. So having said all of that, there you are, you're the leader, and you're entering the culture. Who are you as you enter that culture? Now, there's a question here of who's the ideal leader? There have been some books that are trying to define, you know, what's the ideal leader? What spiritual gifts do they have? What life experiences do they have? Where are all these things in their life? Where are they in the birth order, and if you have all of these things lined up, then you are great leader. 

But you've got to remember that in Scripture, we find that God makes leaders out of very surprising people. And one of my favorite people in Scripture is Gideon, remember his story in the book of Judges, that one day he is up threshing wheat in a wine press. See the Midianites were a marauding people who would show up every harvest time and they'd take all the the harvest from the Israelites, and Gideon is scared of them. And so he's trying to hide in a wine press, so no one will see that he's throwing chaff into the air, and maybe you'll be able to keep some of the wheat and the angels of the Lord  appears to him and says, Hail mighty warrior. Now he was anything but a mighty warrior. But  under the influence of God through His Holy Spirit, he becomes one. Even if you're not  somebody that everybody looks at and says, You're a leader, you can become one. 

Peter in  the New Testament, Jesus sees and meets him and says, You're Peter. And on this rock, I'm going to build my church. Well, Peter was anything but a rock at that point. But he became one. In another class involved with CLI I talked about, I talked about some of the revival periods here in the United States and how God works to bring about revival and one of the things I said there is true yet today, some of the people that God used for revival, were just surprising. They weren't people, you'd say, That's one.

Charles Finney, no one would have picked him as a revival leader. Billy Sunday, not a chance. Even Billy Graham didn't have the kind of background that people would say automatically, Yep, he's going to preach the gospel to millions and have millions respond to the invitation. All of this material that you take has to be subjected to God. 

All this material of your personality, of your birth order, of your life experiences, your family of origin, and what that was like, and how that impacted you. All of that we bring as an offering to God, and we say, Do with it what you will. And for many of us, that means we're going to be involved in leadership, engaging with culture, creating visions for people and for organizations and churches, that will lead into a preferable future that will  bring glory to God and will build the kingdom. And so as you think about leadership, who are  you as a leader and what's made you that as a leader, think about that and it will enrich your leadership.