Leadership As Influence
April 24, 2008 by Jonathan Brink
Kenneth Blanchard once said, “The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” We don’t like that do we? But organically it makes sense.
Authority is about control and forcing people to do what we want. It’s about getting our way often at the expense of other people. It’s about head down, butt up, drive through to then end for the sake of something that we assume will feed us. Authority is not defined by relationship but instead performance.
Influence requires listening and hearing the story that is going on in the person we are speaking and potentially leading. It’s about connecting at a deeper level of humanity and take up our part to end suffering. Influence requires patience and long-suffering, traits of a God that will stop at nothing to restore His creation. Influence requires thinking outside of the petty self and instead for the sake of the whole.
People followed Jesus because they fundamentally understood that He was restorative. They followed because He had more power than they did. He was love. And this love was intoxicatingly influential. It drew them in.
This is what always strikes me as powerful about Missio Dei. It’s deeply influential because it’s a win-win situation. By engaging God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation, I am called to my own restoration and the restoration of those around me. And this is only possible in love and influence.
Jonathan, well you know where I come from on all of this, don’t you?
What is wonderful to me is not just words like you’ve written, above, but the fact that you actually live out and model this type of leadership. I’ve read so much from leaders on not exercising control, but then when the real life interaction begins the reality is often quite different from their words. Not so with you, I am so happy to say!
I often think if leaders could hear the chains dropping off of people when they release control, they’d be far more likely to continue to do so in the future. And maybe the opposite is true as well: If leaders could hear the chains going onto people when they exercise control, perhaps they would be far less likely to continue to walk in that place.
Clink, clink, clink….I’ll leave a few more chains right here.
“If leaders could hear the chains going onto people when they exercise control, perhaps they would be far less likely to continue to walk in that place.”
That is awesome. Reminds me of the original Christmas Carol.