Andy Stanley is a bestselling author, communicator, and founder of North Point Ministries. In his latest book, What Great Leaders Do: 7 Essentials for Enduring Impact, he distills decades of leadership experience into seven essential practices that create strong leaders, healthy organizations, and lasting influence.
Andy Stanley on the leadership tensions that quietly derail churches—and the habits that make leaders worth following.
Church Executive: You open the book with a sobering idea: leadership is not just a gift, but a “wonderful, dangerous gift.” For pastors and executive leaders who carry influence every day, what makes leadership so dangerous?
Andy Stanley: Leaders always garner a following. They can’t help it. It just happens. Resources follow leaders as well. People and resources result in influence. Influence equates to power. People, resources, influence, power — historically, a recipe that creates monsters and messiahs.
That’s why leadership carries such potential for both good and harm. If leadership is in fact a gift, it is the most wonderful, dangerous gift.
If you have a leadership gear, you’re dangerous. People will trust you whether you’re trustworthy or not. People will follow you whether you’re worth following or not.
The issue, then, isn’t the gift itself but what a leader does with it. Said another way, the gift is never the problem. The problems stem from how the gift is wielded.
Church Executive: That leads naturally to one of the book’s most memorable lines: “Your greatest leadership challenge confronts you every morning in the mirror.” Why begin with self-leadership?
Andy Stanley: Because nothing says more about you to the people around you than how you lead yourself. Self-leadership determines the person everybody eventually sees and experiences.
Another reason: leaders last when they lead themselves first. When a leader burns out, flames out, or gets taken out, it’s rarely due to a lack of talent, education, ambition, or opportunity. It’s almost always related to poor self-management, self-regulation, and self-discipline. Poor self-leadership.
Giftedness, talent, family connection, or education may get you there. Clear-eyed, disciplined self-leadership will keep you there and pave the way for your next there.
Church Executive: Many church leaders feel pressure to be available for everything and competent at everything. But you argue that great leaders learn to focus on what only they can do. How did that become so important in your own leadership?
Andy Stanley: In my late twenties, I wanted to be a well-rounded leader. That was a mistake. Instead of getting better at what I was bad at, I got worse at what I was naturally good at. I loaded up my calendar with tasks and responsibilities that sapped my energy and creativity.
I was probably seven or eight years into that first leadership role before it dawned on me that I had this all backward. That my greatest value to our organization lay within the context of my giftedness, not the number of hours I worked or tasks I committed to.
I learned that the less you do, the more you empower others to do. Consequently, more gets done. It gets done better. It gets done by people who are better at it.
If somebody else can do it better—or almost as well—let them.
Your fully exploited strengths will always add more value to your organization than your marginally improved weaknesses.
Church Executive: You also devote a lot of attention to the role of questions in healthy leadership cultures. Why are questions so important?
Andy Stanley: Even if you’re the smartest person you’ve ever met, there’s no win for you or your organization if you isolate yourself from the ideas and insights rattling around in the minds of the people you’ve chosen to surround yourself with. There’s gold in those minds.
Inviting questions is how you excavate it.
Great leaders surround themselves with people who ask great questions. Annoying questions. Questions with no easy answers. Or no answers at all.
Because as a leader, your response to challenging, controversial, paradigm-wrecking, model-rattling, founder-threatening, sacred-cow-sacrificing, assumption-busting, industry-undermining questions will determine your organization’s posture toward the future. A question that is off-limits is a limit. A boundary. A constraint. A frontier that can’t be explored.
Frontiers exist to be explored.
Church Executive: What do you hope this book helps church leaders accomplish?
Andy Stanley: Leadership is challenging. We all want to get it right. I want to help. Specifically, I want to help them become leaders worth following. Leaders who go the distance. Leaders who have the discipline to say no to self so they can say yes to their potential.
To read a free excerpt or order a copy of Andy Stanley’s What Great Leaders Do, visit whatgreatleadersdo.com.
