Become a Leader Others Want to Follow

by John C. Maxwell | Uncategorized

gearshiftleaderSo much has changed since I first began teaching about leadership. Once upon a time, leadership wasn’t the buzzword it is today. In fact, when I first started teaching about leadership, everyone else was talking about management.

Management was all about titles, stability, and positional authority. Leadership is different—it’s about influence, adaptability, and moral authority. Managers are given responsibility; leaders earn respect. I want to talk to you today about how leaders earn that respect.

I want to talk about developing moral authority as a leader.

You see, moral authority is a weightiness, a sense of wisdom and experience that encourages other people to put their trust in you. A leader with moral authority is someone who has turned time into an ally—over time, a leader with moral authority has proven to be consistently competent, have consistent character, and shown consistent courage.

There’s a common theme in that sentence—consistency.

I talk a lot about consistency because it’s been the key to my leadership success. In fact, it’s one of the things that surprises me most about leadership. If you do the right things the right way for the right reasons when you’re young, it often goes unnoticed by the world at large.

But do that over decades? You’ll get more credit than you think you deserve.

I’ve been consistent in my personal growth, my teaching, my character, my thinking, my writing—and because of that, I’ve been able to stay in the game for over forty years. I call it layered living. The benefits and gains from year to year work together to produce a life of leadership that others want to learn from.

That’s the funny thing about the leadershift to moral authority—in a fast forward world, where we face daily change and disruption, our people are looking for a leader who can provide stability. It is the task of the leader to be flexible enough to change while being trustworthy enough to provide hope. Flexibility and trust are achieved through consistency.

To go back to my earlier point, there are three areas where leaders must become consistent if they wish to earn moral authority:

  • Competence—this is the ability to lead well. Making smart decisions, knowing your people, understanding your field, and committing to personal growth are all examples of competence. Leaders who demonstrate that they know what they’re doing—and that they learn from their mistakes—establish themselves as a leader worth following.
  • Courage—this is moving forward in the face of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the presence of mind to act when afraid. Every leader needs courage to make hard decisions, needed changes, and cast vision.
  • Character—this is being bigger on the inside than the outside. Leaders of character know that who they are is more than what they achieve. Character is a commitment to continual growth in the areas of integrity, authenticity, humility and love.

When I was in my early thirties, I decided to do five things to make myself a better leader—always put people first; live to make a difference, not to make money; be myself, but be my best self possible; express gratitude—reject entitlement; be willing to be misunderstood and lonely for the right reasons.

I made the commitment to live out those five things, not because I saw them as means to an end, but because I felt they were simply the right things to do. I’ve worked hard to follow those guidelines for the last forty years, and I’ve been blessed to see a great return on that decision.

In the end, you don’t get to grant yourself moral authority. Only others can do that. But you can strive for it—and you should. In a shifting world, leaders with moral authority become a foundation for others to build upon.

Copyright © John Maxwell
All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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John Maxwell grew up in the 1950s in the small Midwestern city of Circleville, Ohio. John's earliest childhood memory is of knowing that he would someday be a pastor. He professed faith in Christ at the age of three, and reaffirmed that commitment when he was 13. At age 17, John began preparing for the ministry. He attended Circleville Bible College, earning his bachelor's degree in 1969. In June of that same year, he married his sweetheart, Margaret, and moved to tiny Hillham, Indiana, where he began his first pastorate.

While serving in his second church, Maxwell began to study the correlation between leadership effectiveness and ministry effectiveness. On July 4, 1976, while preaching at a service commemorating America's bicentennial, John sensed that God was calling him into a ministry to pastors. Within days after that event, pastors began to contact him, asking for his assistance in nurturing their churches. Over the next four years, on an informal basis, John helped scores of fellow pastors. Then, in 1980, he was asked to become Executive Director of Evangelism for the Wesleyan denomination.

Though his time at Wesleyan headquarters was productive, John soon realized that his deeper desire was to help pastors from numerous denominations. He knew that desire would be unfulfilled if he were to stay at denominational headquarters. As a result, in 1981 John accepted the call to return to the pastorate, this time at Skyline Wesleyan Church in the San Diego, California area. But he did so with the church's blessing to pursue his vision. The Skyline congregation allowed him to continue mentoring and assisting pastors even as he led them to new levels.

In 1985, as he continued to equip and encourage other pastors, John took the next crucial step in leadership development. He founded a new company called INJOY and created the INJOY Life Club, featuring a monthly tape for leaders. The fledging operation, established in the corner of a garage, was soon bursting at the seams. The INJOY Life Club tapes were received with great enthusiasm, and the number of subscriptions quickly increased from hundreds to thousands. Simultaneously, the demand for other resources and seminars exploded. Pastors from coast to coast were responding, and their desire for help was even greater than John had anticipated.

As the years passed, INJOY began demanding more and more of John's time. In 1995, he resigned from his position as senior pastor at Skyline following a very fruitful 14-year tenure. The church had tripled in size and its lay ministry involvement had increased ten-fold. Dr. Maxwell is in great demand today as a speaker. Through his bestselling books, audio and video resources, and major conferences, he communicates directly with more than one million people every year. He is frequently asked to speak for organizations such as Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family, but his greatest joy and desire is to help pastors become better leaders.

Because the need for leadership development knows no borders, John established EQUIP, a non-profit organization which trains leaders in urban communities, academic institutions, and within international organizations. EQUIP is also spearheading a movement which has enlisted more than one million pastoral prayer partners who covenant to pray specifically for those who shepherd God's flock.

John continues to seek new opportunities to help churches and church leaders. He knows that one thing is constant: the only hope for the world is salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, who gives life abundantly.

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