In answer to the question, what did Jesus teach about leadership, of course, the answer is a lot! Last year, Jimmy Smith at Mormon Mission Prep created a new blog “geared toward future missionaries and is designed to help them prepare physically and spiritually.” Recently, he started a series of posts on leadership starting with a post on Leadership: Jesus as the Perfect Leader.
In the article, he quoted Spencer W. Kimball who discussed seven skills and qualities for effective leadership as exemplified by the Savior during his mortal ministry. These include:
- Fixed Principles – He operated from a base of fixed principles.
- Understanding Others – He was a listening leader and loved others without being condescending.
- Selflessness – He made his own needs secondary to the needs of others.
- Shared Responsibility – He was not afraid to make demands of those He led.
- Eternal Potential – He believed in His followers and what they could become.
- Accountability – He was accountable to the Father and those who He leads.
- Wise Use of Time – He taught us how to make effective use of our time.
While there are many books on leadership available, there are perhaps no better patterns to follow than those contained in the scriptures. In fact, a number of years ago Hugh W. Nibley pointed out the growing rise of management at the expense of leadership in his now classic article on the state of leadership in Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift:
Leaders are movers and shakers, original, inventive, unpredictable, imaginative, full of surprises that discomfit the enemy in war and the main office in peace. For the managers are safe, conservative, predictable, conforming organization men and team players, dedicated to the establishment.
The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and being first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader.1
For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and even counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?
“If you love me,” said the greatest of all leaders, “you will keep my commandments. “If you know what is good for you,” says the manager, “you will keep my commandments and not make waves.” That is why the rise of management always marks the decline, alas, of culture. If the management does not go for Bach, very well, there will be no Bach in the meeting. If the management favors vile sentimental doggerel verse extolling the qualities that make for success, young people everywhere will be spouting long trade-journal jingles from the stand. If the management’s taste in art is what will sell—trite, insipid, folksy kitsch—that is what we will get. If management finds maudlin, saccharine commercials appealing, that is what the public will get. If management must reflect the corporate image in tasteless, trendy new buildings, down come the fine old pioneer monuments.
While there should be some “manager in every leader . . . and some of the leader in every manager”,
The Lord insisted that both states of mind are necessary, and that is important: “These ought ye to have done [speaking of the bookkeeping], and not to leave the other undone.” But it is the blind leading the blind, he continues, who reverse priorities, who “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” (Matthew 23:23—24). So vast is the discrepancy between management and leadership that only a blind man would get them backwards. Yet that is what we do. In that same chapter of Matthew, the Lord tells the same men that they do not really take the temple seriously, while the business contracts registered in the temple they do take very seriously indeed (Matthew 23:16—18). I am told of a meeting of very big businessmen in a distant place, who happened also to be the heads of stakes, where they addressed the problem of “How to stay awake in the temple.” For them what is done in the house of the Lord is a mere quota-filling until they can get back to the real work of the world.
As evidence of the point that leadership is definitely not management, after describing the supreme “managerial skill” of Amalickiah he said,
- Archilocus, frag. 58.↩
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