Leadership at the Speed of Joy

Wisdom from the Bible, discoveries from brain science

IF YOU ARE a student of leadership, you know about the importance of engagement and emotional intelligence. You have also read a wide variety of case studies that tell us what successful leaders do. What you probably don't know is that recent developments in brain science now reveal that leadership skills are learned in a different way and in a different area of the brain than management skills and academic studies. We now know how leaders can train this powerful brain system to produce full engagement in their team and develop a high level of emotional intelligence that keeps them plugged into a renewable, high-octane source of motivation.

In this book, we want to help you in two ways: 1) We want you to understand the fast-track brain mechanism that learns and distributes leadership skills, and 2) we want to help you train the leadership system in your brain using four core habits of effective leaders. These four habits will cause your emotional intelligence to soar. As we saw in the introduction, these habits can be remembered with the word RARE. They are:

Remain Relational

Act Like Yourself

Return to Joy

Endure Hardship Well

Many leaders, business people, pastors, team leaders and influences never receive any training in leadership. This contributes to mistaking management for leadership. Management is the efficient accomplishment of tasks. Leadership is producing and maintaining full engagement from our group in what matters. The RARE leaders we wish to emulate inspire us because they do this well. Now, we will show you how it is done.

ORGANIZATIONAL SKILLS VS. PEOPLE SKILLS

Dr. Chris Shaw has over thirty years of experience training leaders and pastors across Latin America. With two devotional books to his credit, his daily devotional is read by over 6,000 website visitors a day. Dr. Shaw edits a leadership magazine for both men and women leaders with a subscription of 185,000 readers.

Chris holds his doctorate in leadership development with a thesis on A Philosophy of Education for Leadership Formation through Theological Studies at Fuller Seminary. His master's degree was in Christian formation and discipleship. He began teaching as full-time staff at the Buenos Aires Bible Institute and this position opened international doors to conferences where Dr. Shaw draws crowds of pastors.

We asked Chris for his observations on leadership. Chris immediately observed the problems caused by mistaking management skills for leadership. He says:

Leadership has become heavily influenced by managerial models, so that the term "lead" has come to mean organizational skills rather than people skills.

What Chris did not learn in his doctorate program (that we now know) is how leadership skills are learned. The brain uses a "fast-track" process for relational leadership skills and a very different "slow-track" process for management skills. The "fast track" operates at speeds above the level of conscious thought and primarily governs relational reality. The "slow track" is what we notice consciously. It monitors results and provides explanations and solutions to problems we face. (These are challenging concepts, we know. We will explain these ideas more fully at the end of this chapter. For now, understand that both learning processes are super-important.)

But the how is less important than the what — the impact on our organizations and on real people. Chris sees the impact on both pastors and churches. He says:

The Kingdom, however, is not about organizations, projects or even ministries. It's about people, and so leadership, in Kingdom terms, would refer to the development of the kind of "people skills" that would help those we have been invited to walk with to achieve their full potential in Christ. This is rare in many church leaders today. Despite the fact that the Church is all about people, I find that many pastors have woefully inadequate people skills, and are often even uncomfortable around others, unless it is within the context of a programmed meeting. Leadership, for many pastors, is exercised from a platform whilst holding onto a microphone.

Dr. Shaw began his journey by becoming an assistant pastor to a church that was actively planting congregations in the slums of Buenos Aires. In this context he began training young leaders — a practice he continues to this day. He began to notice very quickly that lectures, classes, and Bible studies were needed, but that something was missing.

Early on in my pastoral experience I discovered how easy it was to experience painful loneliness whilst being surrounded by a community of believers. The loneliness seemed to point to the fact that many of the congregations that we would describe as communities of faith were really just gatherings of people who happened to meet in the same building at regular times throughout the week. Multiple encounters with Christians who felt used (and sometimes discarded) by their leaders moved me to find another leadership model. There was no real interest in them as individuals, aside from the way they fit into or furthered the leader's personal projects. As a resident chaplain at the Bible Institute, I counseled dozens of disenchanted Christians, and it strengthened my resolve to explore alternative leadership training methods.

I was disappointed as a student (and later as a member of faculty) to notice how uninterested many professors were in the lives of their students. Some couldn't even be bothered to learn the names of their students. All their focus seemed to be on getting through their material. When I began to work as part of the faculty I wanted to be a shepherd to my students, and not just somebody who delivered lectures.

Because I speak at a lot of conferences I guess many people would evaluate my success or failure by the number of people I am able to attract to a given event. Perhaps the most frequent phrase I hear, as I travel around Latin America, is how blessed people feel by what I have shared through a presentation, or in my books. My greatest change has been the crystallizing of a concept that I have worked with for many years: "Leaders influence more through who they are than by what they do." Today I place much greater value on the...