How to Lead When You're Not in Charge

by Clay Scroggins

  Fear thrives in the absence of love. Fear will dominate your identity until you begin to stand under the unending, never-failing, ever-gracious waterfall of love that your Creator has for you. He holds your future. He loves you perfectly. He accepts you unconditionally. Lead like you believe this to be true.

  CAPTIVE THOUGHTS

  For many years before my current role working with Andy and leading our largest church campus, I worked with teenagers. One of the great frustrations of working with teenagers is that they are constantly ruled by their feelings. There was a high school student in our church who looked like Tim Tebow meets Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka from 1980s WWF. He was a big kid, very smart, with a fun personality. I was listening to him share how depressed he’d been feeling. And he knew the source of his depression. He shared with me how awful social media was making him feel. I could sense the pain that his thoughts and feelings were causing him and I wanted to help. So I gave him the best advice I knew to give.

  “Stop it.

  “Just stop looking at social media. Delete the apps. Stop having those thoughts. Stop feeling those feelings. Just stop. It’s that simple. Stop.”

  (I’ve been told I have the gift of mercy, but I’ve actually never taken the spiritual gifts test so I’m holding out until I do before I make any judgments.)

  Like this student, many of us tend to be passive with our thoughts and feelings. We treat them like they rule us, like they are in charge of us, and not the other way around. We forget that our thoughts and feelings are our thoughts and feelings. We own them. They do not own us. At least they shouldn’t, and that’s where we may need to exercise a little ownership over them. You don’t have to allow thoughts of fear, inadequacy, and insecurity to take up residence in your mind. If you do, they will slowly erode your identity and render you ineffective as a leader. But it’s not just me telling you to do something about this. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have been instructed to exert your ownership and take those thoughts captive. “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

  Too many people deal with their thoughts and feelings like a maître d’ at a restaurant. Welcome, sir. Mr. Inadequacy, how many in your party? Is it just you or are you expecting more? We’re pretty full tonight, but we will do our best to find you a table since you’ve gone to the trouble of showing up. We don’t have to do that. If we believe these thoughts damage our identity, we will be more aggressive in responding. Instead of a maître d’, we need to treat our thoughts and feelings of fear, inadequacy, and insecurity like we’re Liam Neeson in Taken.

  I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have is a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.2

  Our thoughts and feelings are liars. They’re trying to tell us something that is not true. Elevating the voice of God above the volume of these lies is essential to allowing God to form a healthy sense of identity in you.

  DARKROOM DEVELOPMENT

  Here’s the good news. If you don’t have a clear picture of your future and you are feeling stuck or frustrated, I want to encourage you to not lose sight of the ways you’re developing right now. What you’re doing now as a leader, even if you’re not in charge, is incredibly important. You’re developing.

  The old-school photographers develop their pictures, and that development happens in darkrooms. If you feel you’re in a darkroom of your life, don’t lose sight of the development that is happening. Just because you can’t see the tangible results from what’s happening right now, you need to trust that your identity is taking shape. And there are things you can choose to do—how you respond to your boss, to your coworkers, to your circumstances, to your thoughts and emotions, and to God—that will shape and determine your future as a leader.

  One of the areas you may still need to address, however, is the question of ambition. Do you have a desire to lead? A hunger to see things change? Some young leaders fear that hunger and avoid it until they are in the position to do something about it. Other leaders give in to the hunger, but they do it in an unhealthy way that is selfish and self-centered. In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at how to approach our ambition in a healthy way.

  CHAPTER 3

  RECLAIM KIBOSH

  By my estimation, you’ll spend half of your waking hours at work. That makes your working world pretty significant. Thanks, Captain Obvious. Hopefully, that’s one of the reasons this type of book was attractive to you. Though the title of this book begins with “How to,” I’m keenly aware there is so much more to what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis as a leader than a bunch of “how to’s.” So, before we dive into the how of leading when you’re not in charge, we need to spend some time on the why.

  The why of leadership is the engine that drives your leadership train. You are motivated by something inside of you, and you need to know what that is. When that engine goes awry, you should stop, give up your seat, get off at the nearest station, and find a super contemplative coffee shop to do some serious thinking. A distortion in motivation will limit your leadership and cause a host of issues that will follow you wherever your professional life takes you.

  The distortion I see for many young leaders revolves around one word: ambition. I call it a distortion for a reason. I believe God has placed desires inside of us: a desire for more, a desire to see things change, a desire to make things better, and a desire to lead. But those desires can easily get twisted. And when the ambition inside us is distorted, it affects every aspect of our leadership.

  AMBITION DEFINED

  Handling the hunger of ambition is tricky for any young leader. Knowing how to handle ambition as Jesus followers is even trickier. The presence of ambition in a young Christian leader is complicated by oft-distorted understandings of what it means to pursue ambition as a Christ follower. Faith leaders are all over the map on this subject, and it produces all kinds of flawed leadership paradigms. I’ve heard some leaders say it’s wrong to follow your ambitions, while others have said we need to be more ambitious. I’ve seen ambition destroy leaders, and I’ve seen it motivate leaders to do the seemingly impossible. This diversity of views on this topic complicates what we think when we feel the drive of ambition in our hearts.

  Here’s what I know to be true: we all have ambition inside us. Don’t try to deny it. What you do with that ambition will make all the difference in your ability to lead when you’re not in charge. How you currently think about the ambition inside you is the product of your personal wiring and your past mentors. But what you do with that ambition going forward is on you.

  When I talk to young leaders on the topic of ambition, I get lots of questions.

  “Is it even okay to have ambition?”

  “Is God okay with ambition?”

  “Would he prefer I have less ambition?”

  “Or does he want me to be more ambitious?”

  So let’s start with a simple definition. What is ambition? I define ambition as that strong desire we have to make something or to achieve something, even when it takes great effort, focus, and determination. It’s worth paying attention to that hunger you have because it’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s a key part of the drive that moves you to cultivate influence. The desire of ambition can take many forms. It can be the desire in you to:

  Create beautiful art.

  Help others reach their potential.

  Build space for kids to get off the streets.

  Establish a platform to give a voice to the voiceless.

  Produce a large event for those who
have written off Jesus.

  In its purest form, there’s nothing wrong with ambition. It’s one of the hallmarks of leadership. Do you feel it? Drink it in, because it’s good. Ambition is what drives us to want more opportunities, to have more influence, and to contribute to the overall mission of life with greater impact. The problem for many leaders is that they do not know what to do with that drive. Letting it run wild can be disastrous, but putting it on mute doesn’t work either. I’ve tried both. I’ll bet you have too.

  Ambition doesn’t magically begin when you are placed in charge.

  Even though leaders need this drive to lead, ambition doesn’t wait for authority to show up. Ambition doesn’t magically begin when you are placed in charge. Believing that you need a position of authority to exercise your ambition is a lie, and as soon as that lie takes root in you, you will find yourself losing the influence you desire to cultivate and develop. Worse, failing to direct your ambition in good and healthy ways can twist it, and something meant for good can be co-opted by a selfish motive or a narrow focus that is of no benefit to anyone but you.

  The distortions of our ambition can be simplified into two extremes. Like a swinging pendulum, these two manifestations are equally dangerous. In my own life, I’ve gone to both extremes at different times when the ambition inside me has grown distorted. Each of us will naturally lean toward one way or the other, and many leaders will swing back and forth between these two extremes.

  KILL AMBITION

  The first response of many leaders, especially Christian leaders, is to look for ways to kill their ambition. If you’ve been taught to view ambition as a danger to spiritual growth, an impediment to being a follower of Jesus, the spiritual thing to do is to kill it. Because our hearts are naturally deceitful (see Jeremiah 17:9), we cannot trust our desires. Unconstrained ambition may just be a selfish desire. I know many church leaders who struggle with their ambition because they see it as an expression of selfishness or a desire for promotion that might come at the expense of others.

  If that’s true, what is the easiest and most common way for you to avoid that kind of ambition? You get rid of it! Because we follow the one who said, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out” (Matt. 5:29), some leaders take this approach with their ambition—drowning their dreams, abandoning their hopes, and ceasing to pursue more. Why? Because they aren’t sure how to channel that desire to lead and bring change into something good and positive. Others may look at that desire and look at their current role and decide that since they haven’t been put in charge, they aren’t the right one to do anything about it. They’ve believed the lie we first saw in chapter one: to have influence, you need to be in charge. Since they aren’t in a leadership role, they assume the desire is wrong or sinful, a sign of rebellion perhaps.

  This is where I was just a few years ago. When I became a campus pastor, I had a lot of ambition for our campus, for our teams, and for myself. I had grand ideas around how we would interact with new guests, what our music culture would feel like, how to bring synergy to the student and children’s ministries, and how to create more energy in our adult services. Right or wrong, I felt hamstrung by the structures of authority above me. Without realizing it, the ambition and vision for change I had inside me had grown distorted. So I put it all on mute. I shut it down, thinking that the time wasn’t right. It wasn’t until that crucial moment in Andy’s office that it dawned on me that I wasn’t acting wisely or responsibly with my ambition. I was killing it. And killing it is not the answer.

  Looking back, I can see where my ambition started moving off course from how we’re designed. I was raised in a church where the desire to do something with my life was too easily confused with the desire to make something of my life. Ambition was outlawed in the name of piety and humility. The people were well-meaning, but the message was clear: kill the ambition before it kills you. When it came to ambition, I thought the rapper Ice Cube said it best: “You better check yo’ self before you wreck yo’ self.”

  My senior year of high school, I remember an itinerant preacher rolling through our church, selling a different take on ambition. He told our youth group that we needed to have a “holy ambition.” At the time, I thought it was just another weird Christian phrase and a terrible name for a mid-90s Christian boy band. I could imagine the announcement over the PA system at youth group: “Forget Backstreet, ‘N Sync, and 98 Degrees! You don’t have to go for that, because tonight, we have the latest band to hit the Christian music scene . . . Holy Ambition!” Cue the track. Hit the stage. Crowd goes wild. At least that’s how it went in my mind.

  I think that preacher was on to something. And while I’m not going to try to sell you on a band called Holy Ambition, the term is useful, especially for a church crowd where any ambition is often too closely associated with the sinful tendency to seek prominence, grab power, and grow in pride at the expense of others. In the church, it’s automatically assumed that these three P’s are dangerous roommates with ambition, living together in a four-room college suite with an efficiency kitchen. And that association creates confusion for many young leaders. Because there is truth here as well. When our good, God-given ambition is distorted, it can manifest itself in a selfish need to be in charge, to seek recognition, or to exert control over others. Clearly, these distortions of ambition are problematic and flat-out destructive. And that’s why so many young leaders, especially those raised in a Christian environment, are too quick to kill their ambition.

  To be clear, the New Testament has plain warnings against these distortions of ambition, and they should strike fear in anyone’s heart and mind. The New Testament speaks against cultivating ambitions—desires—motivated by selfishness in the pursuit of prominence, pride, and power: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit” (Phil. 2:3, emphasis mine) and “For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice” (James 3:16, emphasis mine).

  But these distortions of ambition are just that—distortions. They are rooted in a self-centered desire that masquerades as God-given ambition. Sadly, in the name of holiness and humility, we sometimes take our healthy drive for leadership out back and shoot it, not realizing that drive is actually a gift from God. Without realizing it, we kill the thing that is the very fingerprint of God within us. I’ll say more about this later.

  So I understand why someone would try to rid him or herself of ambition, but I want to argue that taking the kill shot on your ambition is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s a step too far—a nuclear option that ends up muting any leadership gifts God has given you. Eradicating, abdicating, renouncing, ignoring, or killing the ambition within you is not the answer.

  AMBITION RUN WILD

  On the flipside, instead of killing their ambitions, some leaders let them run wild. They uncritically embrace them. And we’ve all seen ambition run wild—it’s what those who kill their ambition were trying to avoid. It’s the leader who only thinks about himself. The leader who thumbs her nose at the processes and structures and tramples over others without a care for the damage left behind. Some leaders won’t go that far, of course. But instead of channeling their ambition in healthy ways, they allow frustration to take control, thinking, I’ve got to be in charge and I’ll get there by any means necessary. Or, I’ve got to be able to call the shots, or I can’t work here. The extreme of killing ambition focuses on an internal solution to the problem, while the extreme of letting our ambition run wild tends to focus on an external solution. We look to blame others for our lack of authority, we contract a critical spirit toward those who are in charge, and we end up sabotaging the very thing we’re seeking. To quote Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for ya?”

  If you’re feeling constrained by those in authority over you right now, you may have picked up this book as a last resort, a solution to your current situation. You may be hoping this book will equip you with the tools you need to work a
round your boss or to manipulate your boss into doing what you want him or her to do. Maybe this is even a last-ditch effort before you go out and find another job with more opportunity. Or it is the final straw before you go start your own thing, so you can finally lead like you want to lead. If so, I get that. I’ve felt that way as well. I’m just glad we’re talking.

  But I also want to say if that’s the way you are thinking right now, I need to be clear on this point: leading when you’re not in charge does not mean you learn skills to get ahead by circumventing the authority above you. Just as the response of killing ambition mutes something God has placed within you, the response of letting your ambition run wild fails by allowing your ambition—instead of God—to take the driver’s seat. There is something good in your ambition, to be sure. A leader wants to accomplish something, because that’s what is inside of him or her. But then that lie takes root: “I need to be in charge if I want to get anything done.” Instead of identifying and removing that lie, we begin to entertain it. Soon we’re looking for ways to move our boss out of the way, or trying to work around him or her in an effort to promote our own agenda.

  Friends and family can unintentionally fuel this distortion with questions like:

  “So when are you going to go out and lead your own thing?”

  “When are you going to find a place that appreciates your skills and gives you a bigger position?”

  “Your brother is doing such great things in his job. Maybe someday you will as well.”

  When you hear questions like that, you tend to find affirmation for the hunger you feel to let your ambition run wild—thinking that until you get out from under authority, you can’t really do what you’re called and gifted to do. You think, God wants me to lead. I have a mandate to do this. So I need to get the corner office, the reserved parking spot, and the title of senior leader to make that happen. This kind of ambition just reaffirms the lie that we can’t really lead until we’re in charge.