
My Top Ten Lessons of Leadership

Posted October 15th, 2009 by Pete Scazzero

If you ask 10 different leaders what they had learned over a long period of time, you will receive 10 different lists. It is determined by your unique journey and your strengths and weaknesses. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of what a leader needs to learn. Rather it is what I wish a mentor had helped me understand from the beginning.
I wish some kind mentor might have said the following words to me:

1.Â Be Yourself
Pete, calmly differentiate your â€œtrue selfâ€ from the demands and voices around you. Discern the desires, vision, pace, and mission the Father has give you as you lead. Take off Saulâ€™s armor. Be clear about yourself. Learn to control your reactivity. And remember, â€œto live unfaithfully to yourself is to cause others great damage.â€ Rumi

2.Â Â Your First Work is to be a Contemplative before God. (i.e. to be with Him)
You are not a CEO or even a leader/preacher first. You are called to be a contemplative first (Ps. 27:4).Â Above all else, cultivate a pure heart before God, loving Him. Build the rhythm of the Daily Office into your life from day one, pausing 3-4 times a day to remember God.Â You cannot bring people where you have not gone in God.

Â â€œUntie my hands and deliver me from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not demanded of me and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded in order to escape sacrificeâ€Â (Merton Seeds of Contemplation p. 45)

3.Â Practice SabbathÂ Â
Large spiritual issues are at stake, especially with regard to trusting God to be in control. In many ways this is an issue of life and death for your long term future.

4. Embrace the Gift of Your Limits
Remember that â€œa man can receive only what is given him from heaven (John 3:27).
Â
5.Â Â Wait on the LordÂ Â Â Â
This is your life. You will finish the end of your days waiting on the Lord.Â This is the most important work there is if you are to allow your soul to grow up and be what God wants you to be.

6.Â Â Your First Most Important Ministry is to Yourself
Â Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers (1 Tim.4:16).
Investing in your development is your first ministry. This includes monthly, quarterly retreats, utilizing the gift of therapy along the way, finding a good spiritual director and seeking mentors at different stages of the journey. It is the most loving gift you can give your church.Â

7.Â Lead out of Your Vow of Marriage
Scripture is clear about the vision of marriage between one male and one female as a pointer and a taste of Christâ€™s free love for His bride, the church. And central to this vision is the sexual relationship. It is essential, not peripheral, to your spiritual formation and discipleship as a Christ-follower.

8.Â Live What You PreachÂ
Enduring the agony and birthing process of preparing sermons.Â Good sermons take a lot of time to gestate. If the sermons arenâ€™t changing you, they will not transform anyone else. This is both a joy and an agony if fresh revelation from Scripture is going to come through the unique prism of your life. This never changes, whether you have only been preaching for 6 months of 30 years.

9.Â All the Work of Pastoring/Leadership is Holy and SacredÂ
This took me 19 years to learn this hard lesson and I am still learning it. Preparing budgets, job descriptions, hiring, firing, planning a good meeting, handing in reports, confronting conflicts, etc. is every part as holy as prayer and Bible study. Be sure to fight against the sacred/secular split first in your own life and then in the life of the church. Recover a Biblical Theology of Work and Spirituality

10.Â Things are Not as they Appear
So often what looks great or a blessing is not. What looks terrible in the short run is, very often, a rich gift. When you think you are going forward, you may be actually going backwards. What appears as success, often times, ends up being a failure and setback. Failures will teach you much more than success every time.

ChuckÂ Swindoll recently shared his top 10 lessonsÂ at CatalystÂ 2009.Â They are excellent and worth reading.Â IÂ gave a talk on these 1o top lessons of mine noted aboveÂ at Denver Seminary this past September. It can be found on their website: http://www.denverseminary.edu/sermon/top-10-hard-lessons-learned-after-30-years-of-leadership/

What might you add? Thoughts? Comments?

3 Comments

Thanks, Pete. These are helpful thoughts. I would add–Work Hard at Resolving Conflict (Matt 5:23-24). I recently saw how a conflict I failed to resolve with a church member seven or eight years ago has created major problems over the past year. On the other hand, I can also think of another situation where I made the effort to resolve a conflict. At the time it didn’t seem to go well, but in recent years the person has become a relatively close friend and an encourager in ministry.

Posted by: Bryan // October 16th, 2009 at 12:52 pm

Thank you very much for sharing this lessons learned over 30 years of life and ministry. I am enriched by them.

A couple questions.

You stated that, “This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of what a leader needs to learn.” Elsewhere you stated one would get as many Lessons Learned lists as the number of leaders one asks.

1) Do you maintain that number 2 is normative for all leaders and therefore rightfully should be in all leaders’ lists? If so, why? What might a leader forfeit if it is NOT on her list?

2) If it is true leaders will be waiting on the Lord until the day they die, how do you distinguish between waiting on the Lord and faithfully discharging one’s leadership duties and completing tasks, and simply waiting and being slothful? Is it possible to be slothful while one waits on God. Why or why not?

3) In light of the many, many sexual sins committed by Biblical leaders and leaders throughout church history — their eventual punishments not withstanding — and these leaders’ nonetheless perceived anointing and mission accomplishments, what, if anything, do you believe they forfeited that they would not have had they not committed sexual sins or committed instead sins of a non-sexual nature? In short, what punishments or withholding of blessings, if any, does God reserve for sexual sins that He does not for other types of sins?

4) Is it always the case that things are not as they appear? Is it never the case that something that appears initially as a blessing turns out indeed to be a blessing? What about decisions that leaders make that they believe in confidence are sound and wise before God? Can they not be considered sound and wise indefinitely, even if the results turn out differently than hoped for?

5) I greatly appreciate Bryan’s comment about conflict resolution (Matt 5:23 – 24). I heartily echo his emphasis and wonder at the apparent disregard many church’s hold this teaching in. Is it normative or optional, to be obeyed as a commandment or only engaged in if both parties “feel like doing so?”

Thanks again.

Posted by: William J. Green // October 18th, 2009 at 6:47 pm

[...] the continuing absence of my full-strength blogging energy, I invite you to check out this Leadership Top Ten list from Pete Scazzero, a man who really gets leadership on a deep level – mostly from the pains of not getting it [...]

Posted by: HopeForYourFamily » Scazzero on Leadership // November 22nd, 2009 at 3:07 am