My lesson in true leadership

For boys growing into men, leadership can look like authority blended with strength. The ability to walk into a room and suddenly everybody remembers how to behave. The man who always has the answer, even when you are not entirely sure what the question was.

But life has a funny way of changing the definition for the boy who wants to be in charge and become 'the man'.

That is where leadership stops being a position and becomes responsibility.

I learned something similar about leadership when I was a teenager in church.

A group of boys that I was part of had served faithfully for years and, one day, our pastor announced that the time had finally come for us to “graduate”.

You must understand, we had been waiting for this moment.

In our young minds, graduation meant leadership and leadership meant elevation. Elevation meant that, surely, at least one of us would eventually be standing at the front with a microphone, looking important while people nodded at the things we said.

We were ready, or so we thought.

So, one Saturday morning, we arrived early in our Sunday best. We looked magnificent.

Like young men who had been informed that something important was happening and had decided that the Kingdom of God should be deeply impressed.

Shirts ironed, shoes shining and hair behaving itself.

Then our pastor finally arrived.

Hat turned backwards.

Shorts on.

Completely unbothered by the occasion we had been mentally preparing for all week.

He looked at us, slapped his hands together with the satisfaction of a man whose master plan was unfolding perfectly and said: “Right, boys!”

We stepped forward.

And then came the mops, the brooms and cleaning materials … rendering us utterly bewildered. 

There are moments in a young man's life when his dreams and reality meet.

Mine happened somewhere between a bucket of water and a dirty church chair.

Our pastor told us that we had a service the next day and our job was to clean the church from top to bottom, including every chair.

“Every chair represents a soul,” he told us.

At the time, I am not sure we were thinking deeply about souls. We were thinking about how quickly one can go from being promoted, to becoming part of a church cleaning committee, but there we were.

We had come dressed for leadership and were now carrying brooms. There was no microphone nor any title, let alone the dramatic laying on of hands, just a group of young men standing at the beginning of a life-changing experience.

Years later, I understood what he was teaching us.

Before leadership puts you in front of people, it should teach you how to serve them.

Perhaps that is one of the biggest differences between the leader's eyes and the boy's eyes.

The boy sees the position while the leader sees the responsibility. The boy asks, “Who is going to listen to me?”

The leader asks, “Who needs me to listen to them?” …big difference.