by Andy Crouch
Leadership begins the moment you are more concerned about others’ flourishing than you are about your own.
Leadership begins the moment you are more concerned about others’ flourishing than you are about your own.
Leaders like Isabel are preoccupied by much deeper questions than their own flourishing. They are asking questions about the flourishing of the vulnerable and the kinds of communities that contribute to the flourishing of the vulnerable. Leaders, you could say, lose interest in self-help books. They are no longer looking primarily to help themselves but to spend themselves on others. This does not mean they neglect personal growth—quite the opposite. Personal growth becomes more and more important as we realize how easily we get stuck in Suffering, Withdrawing or Exploiting and how little we contribute to Flourishing when we are mired in those corners. But personal growth now serves a different end—not our own satisfaction or fulfillment, but becoming the kind of people who could actually help others flourish. Our goal is to see others act meaningfully and take meaningful risks—to see both authority and vulnerability flourish in communities as small as a family or as large as a nation.
The good news is that we cannot, and do not have to, pull ourselves out of the mire of quadrants II, III and IV. We will not restore the world to its intended flourishing by impressive feats of self-improvement. Instead the restoration of the world flows from the singular life of a singular human being, Jesus, the only human being who could fully bear the burden or offer the gifts of what we so glibly call “leadership.” It is only Jesus, and the Spirit he has sent to empower his people for their redemptive mission in creation, who truly sets us free from the mire of poverty, apathy and tyranny.
And so our liberation from the false quadrants is not the job of anyone other than Jesus. It is a work of sovereign redemption by the One who rescued us when we could not rescue ourselves. Any lasting progress toward the freedom and true power of Flourishing is a result of God’s gracious activity in the world.
True transformation of the world, and ourselves, will only happen as we are conformed to the image of Jesus Christ—as his way becomes our way, his source of power becomes our source, and his patterns of life become our patterns.
But this leads us to two further paradoxical truths about flourishing—truths that flow directly from observing Jesus’ transformative exercise of power in his brief years of public life. There are two places Jesus went where we, too, have to go. If we have truly absorbed the dangers of the false choices that have distorted our lives, communities and relationships, these will be the two places we least would expect to go and would least desire to go.
They are, oddly enough, versions of quadrant IV—authority without vulnerability—and quadrant II—vulnerability without authority. The very places we must choose to go are the very places human beings are not meant to go, the two ends of the axis of false choice—both of which we must visit, embrace and find emptied of their power by a power not our own.
If we want to be agents of transformation in the world, we must be willing to bear the burden of visible authority with hidden vulnerability. This will expose us to the temptation to become idols or tyrants ourselves—and yet without learning to bear hidden vulnerability, we will never truly be able to serve the flourishing of others.
And we also must choose the way of Suffering, exposing ourselves to vulnerability without authority—up to the ultimate experience of risk without the possibility of meaningful action, the land of the dead.
Only if we visit these two quadrants, in the right time and in the right way, will we bear the image of the most transformative human being the world has ever known.
6
Hidden Vulnerability
The most highly classified document in the United States government is called the President’s Daily Brief. Usually delivered to the president in person each morning by the director of national intelligence, the brief summarizes the most critical information that the United States’ vast network of intelligence agencies has learned in the previous twenty-four hours.
Of all the briefs prepared since the practice began in 1961, only two pages have ever been released to the public—an entry called “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US” that was presented to the president on August 6, 2001.
Every morning, the president hears an unvarnished, detailed account of all the threats facing the country. Then comes the rest of the day’s agenda. Ceremonies, meetings, phone calls, the occasional press conference, state dinners—and during them all, the president knows what almost no one else knows to the same degree of detail. And of all that troubling and terrifying knowledge, the president cannot speak a word.
The drama of leadership is hidden vulnerability.
With many kinds of flourishing, we see authority and vulnerability together—that is, we actually can see and perceive them. When we watch a great musician perform or a great athlete compete, we can hear the breathtaking complexity of the music or see the competitor just behind them. Our admiration comes from our keen awareness not just of the performers’ authority but their vulnerability as well.
Sometimes, however, flourishing comes with invisible vulnerability—especially in leadership. Almost by definition, leaders have evident authority—but almost by definition, they also bear vulnerability that no one else can see. They may have access to more complete information than those they lead—as the president does after his morning briefing. They may simply possess deeper insight and intuition of the challenges they and their organizations face. This is what it is to be a leader: to bear the risks that only you can see, while continuing to exercise authority that everyone can see.
David is the founder and CEO of a technology startup company in San Diego. “I’ve learned that there is only one answer to the question, ‘How is your business going?’” he told me recently. “It’s one word long. ‘Great.’ Then, if they ask a follow-up question, you’re allowed to have one more sentence, and that sentence has to be about how great it is—the latest product breakthrough, your last big hire. Then you have to stop.” To say any more could affect how his customers, his investors, his suppliers and his own employees see the company. If they perceive it to be seriously vulnerable, there could be an unintended cascading decline of orders, investments and confidence.
“There is only one answer to the question, ‘How is your business going?’” he told me recently. “It’s one word long. ‘Great.’”
The truth is that for long stretches of the last few years, “great” did not really describe his business’s precarious existence, let alone his own—perpetually a few days’ income away from running out of money, lying awake at night wondering how he is going to meet the next payroll, losing critical employees at the worst times. Even as the firm has inched forward toward viability and profitability, as it has accumulated just enough authority to keep winning clients and closing additional funding rounds, at every point it has been out on a precarious ledge, one bad break away from total failure.
Twenty-nine employees rely on David’s company to pay their mortgages and provide for their families and their futures. And David’s own family and future are at stake, too. San Diego is a small city, where everyone in the business community knows everyone else. “My investors tell me that if this company fails, I’ll never have a job in San Diego again,” David tells me.
No pressure.
And through all of this, through the years of work that have strained his marriage, his health and his faith, he’s had to give one answer when anyone asks how the business is going.
“Great.”
This is not idolatry or injustice—not a case of someone hoarding authority and power and displacing vulnerability onto others. David is creating flourishing at real personal risk and cost. It hasn’t been easy, but David is truly living “up and to the right.” But David has discovered that even for healthy leaders, there is often a gap between public perception and private reality (see figure 6.1).
Figure
6.1. Healthy leadership
David’s private reality is quadrant I—high authority matched with high vulnerability. But his public perception, at least among his employees and the business community, is largely in quadrant IV—authority higher than vulnerability. When the deepest truth of your life is quadrant I, but others assume you are in quadrant IV, you are probably, like it or not, a leader.
This doesn’t just apply to organizational leaders, of course. It applies just as well to my friend Nate, father of two preschool children, who exclaimed to me, “It is amazing how such small creatures can make you so angry!” To his daughters, Nate no doubt appears almost pure authority. They cannot begin to imagine how much vulnerability he bears as their father, including the painful discovery of his own impatience and need for control. Anyone who takes responsibility for others’ flourishing has probably discovered just how invisibly humbling even the most basic acts of care can be.
But the gap between perception and reality can also run the other way. What if leaders are perceived as more vulnerable, more exposed to meaningful risk, than they actually are? This is the essence of manipulation (see figure 6.2).
Figure 6.2. Manipulation
Manipulative leaders have learned to fake vulnerability—to seem exposed to risk and thus committed to flourishing. But in fact they use their ostensible vulnerability to shore up unbalanced authority. These are leaders who can produce tears on command, who share carefully chosen heartfelt anecdotes of personal failure, who seem empathetic and kind—or leaders who call attention to every little threat to their power and constantly warn of the power of their enemies, while secretly consolidating their ability to control.
Such leaders, by being seen as more vulnerable than they are, conceal a powerful commitment to invulnerability. They can win sympathy and even loyalty with their calculated self-disclosures or complaints about their opponents. But leaders who use the appearance of vulnerability as a strategy to gain more authority are far less trustworthy than leaders who bear it truthfully but privately.
You surely have already spotted the danger here. How can a life of leadership that spans quadrant I and quadrant IV be a healthy one? Isn’t quadrant IV the realm of idols and tyrants, the home of the most basic mistake we can make and the most ancient lie we can believe?
Community Vulnerability
As risky as it is, hidden vulnerability is often necessary for true transformation. The most important thing we are called to do is help our communities meet their deepest vulnerability with appropriate authority—to help our communities live in the full authority and full vulnerability of Flourishing. And it turns out that in order to do that, we often must bear vulnerability that no one sees.
There are two kinds of vulnerability that must remain hidden if we are to lead others toward Flourishing. First, the leader’s own personal exposure to risk must often remain unspoken, unseen and indeed unimagined by others. And second, the leader must bear the shared vulnerabilities that the community does not currently have the authority to address. Revealing either of these kinds of vulnerability will at best distract, and at worst paralyze, the community we are responsible for, robbing them of the opportunity for real flourishing. Because the community does not have the authority—the capacity for meaningful action—to deal with these vulnerabilities, asking the community to bear them will only plunge the community more deeply into Suffering.
Consider the two examples at the beginning of this chapter. Every morning the president is briefed on the full range of vulnerabilities that beset the nation. What would happen if this briefing were made public in all its terrifying detail? The truth is that if we all knew, every morning, what the president and his director of intelligence know, life as we know it would come to a halt. In an age of relentless broadcast and social media, even the most minor of dislocating events gets breathless attention. There are thirty thousand commercial plane flights in the United States every day—but should even a single plane crash, all attention is turned to that event. Why? Not just because of the loss of life—more lives are lost every day to automobile crashes, let alone to natural causes—but because airplane accidents are vivid reminders of the vulnerability, however small, of the plane travel that is a part of millions of people’s lives.
As we saw earlier, human beings devote a disproportionate (though quite understandable) amount of their attention and energy to the possibility of loss, even when that comes at the expense of meaningful action. Imagine if every day we were exposed to the credible threats to our security that are dug up daily by the nation’s vast intelligence network. We would, with some reason, have trouble thinking about or doing anything else. The nation would be consumed with fear and worse—prejudice, irrational hostility and frantic preparation. Even if we all had the full information that the president and his briefers know, there would be very little meaningful action most of us could take to avert the threat. (Not to mention the new threats that would arise from such sensitive information being made public.) We would be plunged deeply into Suffering—far more conscious of our vulnerability but equipped with no authority to meet it. Meanwhile, we would be distracted from the places—homes, neighborhoods, communities, businesses and organizations—where we do have an appropriate balance of authority and vulnerability and the real calling and capacity to act.
Think about David’s startup company. What would happen if he began every day by unloading on his team the worries that had kept him up the night before? That disclosure might well make it impossible for any member of the team to focus on their work that day—the work that actually, in the long run, can increase the company’s authority. In any case, much of what keeps David awake are matters that only a few people in the company actually have the capacity and responsibility to address. To disclose those vulnerabilities to the whole team is only to add to their vulnerability without adding anything to their authority. It is to take them deeper into Suffering, not up and to the right into Flourishing.
The Calling to Dignity
This leads to a paradox that is often hard for privileged people to understand. The more a community experiences shared vulnerability without authority—the more that poverty and oppression have shaped a community’s experience—the more likely that transformative leadership from within that community needs to bear hidden vulnerability.
I have had the great gift, at several seasons of my life, of worshiping and working in African American churches. It took me many years, as a young white man, to understand why leaders in the black church so often carry themselves with what initially seemed to me like excessive amounts of visible authority. A pastor wearing an expensive suit, driving a late-model car, and protected by layers of administrative staff and formality, presents very little apparent vulnerability to the world. Such leaders appear, especially to outsiders, as residents of something perilously close to the Exploiting quadrant. In middle-class and professional-class white churches, we expect more casual attire and emotionally transparent demeanor from our leaders.
But I gradually came to understand that black church leaders in fact bear a tremendous amount of vulnerability, even if it is not readily apparent. Their vulnerability can be personal: vanishingly few white Americans who drive late-model, high-end cars have ever been stopped by police simply on suspicion that the vehicle is not theirs—whereas many, many black pastors have experienced this insult to their dignity and accomplishments. But more importantly, as representatives of a historically subjugated community, black pastors live every day bearing the nearly unbearable burdens of a community that has been shaped by oppression and violence, prejudice and ignorance.
The appropriate response to this hidden vulnerability is in fact public dignity.
And the appropriate response to this hidden vulnerability is in fact public dignity—representing the community not just in its vulnerability but in its God-given, image-bearing authority. It may be appropriate for a pastor in a privileged and powerful community to emphasize his vulnerability by
saying, “Just call me Dan.” But it is entirely appropriate for a pastor in a community of vulnerability to model authority and expect to be addressed, especially in public, with his full title and family name.
To be sure, there can be exploitative leaders in the black church just as there are in every social system—very much including the white church, where leaders can use transparency and modesty as a cloak for manipulation. But healthy leadership in a context of oppression often requires levels of visible authority that might seem unhealthy elsewhere. What brings transforming hope in that context of suffering is the presence of leaders who balance the community’s vulnerability with their own representative authority. And when you truly get to know the most faithful and courageous leaders in the black church or any minority community, you come to understand that in contexts of oppression, authority is itself a great risk and a most vulnerable calling.
Misleading Introductions
One of the rituals associated with public speaking is the “introduction,” in which hosts do their best to honor the invited speaker—and perhaps persuade the audience that the coming presentation will be worth their time and attention. As a result, when I step on stage to speak, someone has often gone to great lengths to present me as capable of meaningful action. Very rarely do they mention a single vulnerability. My introductions frequently mention my current employment—no one ever mentions that I lost a job (and a fair amount of investors’ money) fifteen years before. They often mention my wife and family—no one ever mentions my failed romantic relationships in college and early adulthood. They frequently note my published books—without ever noting that my first two books were turned in years late thanks to procrastination, perfectionism, spiritual warfare and personal cowardice.