Sometimes leadership feels like whack-a-mole. You put out one fire only to have another crop up.
It can be incredibly draining and demotivating. Unless.
Unless you understand that’s what you’re there for. That’s a large part of your job description. If we don’t have problems, we don’t need leaders.
Some great insights from Brian McCollister’s talk that he gave on “Leading thru Complexity” at a Crusade Campus Director Conference I attended last week:
Leaders are problem solvers. As leaders we are always managing and working different problems.
- Jesus ended his life on earth with laying a problem at the feet of the 11 disciples: take the gospel to the ends of the earth.
- Half of the New Testament is Paul writing to address problems in churches
And here’s the payoff: effectively dealing with problems is often what leads to success. Matt McComas mentioned in a post that authors Chip and Stan Heath have found that failure and problems are almost always warning signs for success.  Problems are prerequisites for breaking thru to growth.
I was just reading in Acts this week. In chapter 6 the expansion of the gospel hit a bump in the road: intercultural conflict. The fragile, young church easily could have splintered along racial lines. The 12 disciples wisely dealt with the problem.
Aside: Their solution is an interesting study in and of itself. They didn’t deal with the problem themselves, on their own. They empowered their “followers” to deal with it themselves and pick their own leaders. Interestingly, all 7 leaders selected had Greek names (meaning they weren’t from the Jewish majority). The solution involved empowering and handing over authority to the offended minority.
The result? The resolved problem results in verse 7: “And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem”.
photo courtesy of AnimaBandit