Healthy Leaders | Issue 24
Are leaders born or made?
Welcome to Issue 24 of Healthy Leaders. In this issue, we end the debate over whether leaders are born or made, once and for all.
Hello friends,
Welcome back to our ongoing conversation1 on healthy Christian leadership and leader development.
A common debate in leader development is whether leaders are born or made. The four main schools of thought are:
The “born-leader” school
The “early childhood” school
The “gifted-leader” school
The “life experiences” school
Which one do you ascribe to?
Here’s Malcolm with more:
Take a moment to consider this teaching from a personal perspective.
Review your life and think about a leadership success that you have enjoyed. Think about one time in high school or college, at work, at home, in your neighborhood or community, on a sports team, or in a church group, when you made something good happen through other people that would never have occurred without your leadership. Think about a time when you helped someone move to a better place. This should represent a kind of “personal best” on your part.
It did not have to involve a time when you were the formal or official leader, although it may have. You may have simply emerged informally in some context as a leader.
It can be in any setting — but it must involve other people.
It can have happened at any time in your life.
Once you have a clear picture in your mind of a time of leadership success in your life, reflect on what made the leadership successful, and then generate a list of the characteristics of effective leadership built on your experiences.
As you describe the important qualities of leadership, you will realize that you know what effective leadership is all about. You may also realize you haven’t exercised it for many years.
Thus, even if you feel like you’re not a leader, you have the capacity to be a leader nevertheless. Leadership is not some mysterious and elusive quality accessible only to a few.
You’ve done it once, so you can do it again!
Knowing this, you should:
Be open to your own leadership potential.
Be challenged to improve in your leadership.
Be motivated to develop other leaders.
It’s easy for us as leaders (and humans!) to look at the problems within our lives and despair of ever being effective, or useful to God. You might be thinking now that those times you’ve succeeded in leadership won’t make up for the failures you’ve experienced or are experiencing even now.
They won’t. But Jesus does. His blood covers all of your sins and failures, and His resurrection makes you new.
In fact, His power is made perfect in weakness.
For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31)
Pastor Umoru from Nigeria has encountered this first hand, and he has words for all of us failures:
“God brought me here to expose the way I run my life and ministry. It has always been my way, and it has always been full of failures and frustrations. Now I know dependency on the only Source and Owner of my life and the ministry is the only way out for me. I have failed on the issues of alignment to the vision God has committed to me. Lord have mercy. Hope is arising. It is now His way or never!” (Pastor Umoru)
What about you?
We’d love to hear your stories of leadership success in the comments. Alternatively, you could share a failure, and what you learned from it.
Until next time, we’re with you!
— Chris
Recommended Resources
Video Teaching: Our Brokenness Is His Opportunity
Leadership, by Malcolm Webber
For more resources, visit our new website.
Thanks to our friends at Fifty-Four Collective for putting together a comprehensive set of video courses for growing healthy organizations, starting with this series of courses on leadership by Malcolm. We’ll be using some of their videos and some of our own. Be sure to check out what they’re doing!